Description
There has been significant scholarly attention to the ‘migration crisis’ in 2010s, which has mostly been studied as an exogeneous shock in the migration literature. In this paper, we challenge this premise and study the evolution of the migration debate in Europe from a long term and relational perspective. Instead of treating the ‘crisis’ as an exogeneous shock, we conceptualise it as a socially constructed opportunity structure, which was partly endogenous to the existing patterns of the migration debate. With the support of Discourse Network Analysis (DNA), an application of social network analysis (SNA) to policy debates, as well as 16 in-depth interviews with the EU, IO and NGO officials, we map actor coalitions and their proposed policies in the debate on migration to Europe between 2000 and 2020 (12,000 coded statements). Studying how interactions among migration frames influence which actors use which frames, in what ways and when, we ask: When is migration an issue of border/crime control, human rights, sovereignty, or solidarity? How do these meanings evolve and diffuse across time? Specifically, how do frames on migration interact with one another? When do actors prioritise certain frames over others? How does the so-called crisis relate to these patterns? We argue that the ‘crisis’ emerged from existing frame interactions, but at the same time, it opened up a new discursive space (frame emergence) and triggered new power dynamics between established actors (frame dominance, frame drain) in long-standing debates, leading to a new status quo after it subsided.
