WASHINGTON — International migration has more than tripled worldwide since 1960, with many countries previously unaccustomed to large-scale immigration now hosting sizeable foreign-born populations. As societies respond to social and demographic changes, narratives about immigration, meaning the collective stories that are told about migration and immigrants, are key to understanding public opinion and how policy choices are formed. Yet little is known about how narratives, positive and negative alike, become more powerful in certain contexts and lie dormant in others.
A new study by the Migration Policy Institute, Metropolitan Group, the RAND Corporation and the National Immigration Forum, How We Talk about Migration: The Link between Migration Narratives, Policy and Power, examines how narratives take hold and are spread, especially in times of crisis. The report draws from case studies of five countries with differing political and cultural contexts—Colombia, Lebanon, Morocco, Sweden and the United States—all of which have seen an increase in migration and have experienced significant public debate over immigration policy in recent years.
The report’s authors, Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan, Haim Malka and Shelly Culbertson, find several commonalities across the countries examined. For example, they note that both positive and negative narratives tend to rely on moral frameworks as a justification—for instance, calling for generosity or compassion toward refugees because of humanitarian values, or arguing for penalties for irregular migrants because of a commitment to law and order. Yet negative narratives tend to be particularly sticky, they find, even when they are not rooted in evidence.
Among other trends identified:
“Looking ahead, these findings reveal a need to conduct in-depth fieldwork to further understand the most salient narratives, and what values are driving them, in order to contribute to policy discussions about the significant migration-related shifts occurring in these countries and globally,” the authors conclude.
You can read the report here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/migration-narratives-policy-power.
And for MPI’s research on social cohesion and identity, visit: www.migrationpolicy.org/topics/social-cohesion-identity.
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The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit think tank in Washington, D.C. dedicated to analysis of the movement of people worldwide. MPI provides analysis, development and evaluation of migration and refugee policies at the local, national and international levels. For more on MPI, please visit www.migrationpolicy.org.