EU citizens and undocumented migrants in the news: quantitative patterns of representation in Swedish news media 2006-2016

Abstract

Undocumented migrants and poor EU citizens have been frequent topics for Swedish political debate and media reports in recent years. However, there is a lack of representative, large-scale studies on media representation of these groups. This study aims to compare and analyse (1) the broad patterns of representation of EU citizens and undocumented migrants in Swedish national press and (2) how these patterns relate to relevant regulative events over the period 2006–2016. Theoretically, it draws on critical discourse analysis and social problems theory. The sample includes 10 022 referrals in 5411 news articles and the methodological strategy is inspired by corpus-driven discourse studies. Words that tend to occur in the near vicinity of the migrant categories (collocates) are a primary focus for the analysis. The study finds that media referred to EU citizens by employing poverty related discourses during the period 2013–2016 and that the governmental term ‘vulnerable’ EU citizens was adopted in media when a national coordinator was appointed. In contrast, undocumented migrants were associated with discourses on social rights over a time period (2008–2013) when rights to health care and education were debated and subsequently introduced.