Migration crisis in the local news: Evidence from the French–Italian border

Abstract

This paper examines how undocumented migrant displacements affect local news markets and the political economy of EU internal borders. I focus on a policy that took place in June 2015, in which French authorities introduced militarized controls at their borders with Italy, to return waves of irregular border-crossing migrants transiting from Italy to Italian lands. Natives’ exposure to resettled migrants varied across Italian municipalities, depending on their proximity to push-back areas. I exploit this quasi-experimental setting in a diff-in-diff framework and compile novel text and count data from local news in Liguria, Italy. Results show that migration coverage declined with distance from the border after the push-backs. In contrast, anti-immigrant discourse intensified away from the events and weakened at the border. Exploring further this framing dimension, I observe readers’ demand to be closely associated with local news discourse and voting preferences to broadly follow anti-immigrant slant in the news.