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We have seen that there are many different ways of defining migrant
and migration. These have important consequences for how we
understand the facts that are presented by government and media.
This report, ‘Who counts as a migrant?’, provides a good summary of
these definitions and their impact.

It is also clear that different definitions and understandings of migrant are

not compatible with each other. For example, in the UK Queen Elizabeth’s
husband Prince Philip is ‘foreign born’ – i.e. would count as a migrant in
some datasets – but he is not imagined as a migrant in public opinion nor
the media.

This poses a real challenge for evidence-based policy. The levers for
controlling immigration are usually believed to be immigration law and
policy, but immigration law and policy is often not applicable to many of
those whom the public thinks of as migrants. It also poses a problem for
public debate, where migrant is rarely a neutral term but rather associated
with poor and negatively racialised people – in contrast to terms such as
‘expat’, which are associated with the white and the wealthy. It is due to
these inconsistencies that Al Jazeera announced it would no longer use the
phrase ‘Mediterranean “migrants”’.

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Research and researchers contribute to promoting certain

ideas about migration and during this second week we will
look at this in more detail.

When you are reading the materials in this section remember what
you learned in Week One. This will help you think about the ways in
which research and researchers contribute to promoting certain
ideas about what migration is and who counts as a migrant.

No single way of looking at human movement can ever capture all

its reasons and consequences nor the part it plays in human
histories, presents and futures. So far we have looked at the
challenges of who counts as a migrant in policy and practice. But
what about who counts as a migrant in academic research? How
do researchers deal with and respond to these problems?

People who study migration come out of many different traditions

and disciplines. They also use different research methods and
generate different kinds of material. Some disciplines, such as
Economics, use and generate principally quantitative, i.e.
numerical, data. Other disciplines, such as Anthropology,
principally use and generate qualitative, i.e. textual, data. This is a
generalisation, however, and there are also disciplines such as
Sociology that use both types of data – ‘mixed methods’.

If you are interested in knowing more about the

qualitative/quantitative distinction you can access a short article by
clicking on this link.

Migration is a huge research area spanning multiple disciplines and

topics. What follows will give you a taste of how different
disciplines contribute to answering some of the big migration
questions. It is only a taste. All disciplines have engaged with all of
these questions. Research on migration is often conducted by
social scientists but at the University of Bristol we emphasise that
the Arts and Humanities are crucial to an analytical approach to
human movement – they should not be regarded as an ‘add on’.
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For example, historians remind us that people have always moved

even if they have only relatively recently been labelled migrants - in
the Middle Ages, for example, thousands of foreigners poured into
England. Philosophers can help us think about how categories like
migrant are made by experts, governments and the people
themselves such as in this article in the London Review of Books by
philosopher Ian Hacking.

Take a look at the Migration Mobilities Bristol website as an

example of the kinds of research projects on migration that are
hosted by universities. You will see that there is research in
disciplines ranging from Music, Geography and Archaeology to
Modern Languages, Sociology, Law and Politics.

This week of our course uses more academic research. It includes

suggestions of articles that might be of interest. If you are not used
to reading this kind of material don’t worry. Each paper has a short
summary – an ‘abstract’ – and reading this will give you enough of
an idea of what the research is about.
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WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT WHEN WE TALK

ABOUT MIGRANTS?
October 10, 2014 · by Louisa Taylor · in Culture & Integration, Politics & Policy, Public Discourse · 1 Comment
As a journalist I’ve long been fascinated by the interplay between public opinion, politics and
migration policy, and you can’t unpack the complexities of public opinion without talking about how
migrants are portrayed in the media, as Amy Clarke noted here last month. What we read or hear
feeds our world view, but the exact mechanics of that relationship are multi-directional, multi-faceted
and under-studied.

One of the most interesting projects putting media handling of migration under the microscope is the
University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, part of the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society
(COMPAS). For some of the background on their work, I spoke to researcher Will Allen. He
investigates the language used in the UK national press to talk about migration, as well as how civil
society organizations use data and evidence about migration to communicate their messages.

The Migration Observatory has spent a lot of time looking specifically at how newspapers cover the
migration story. Why?

The Observatory’s interest in newspaper coverage of migration came partly out of one of the most
popular reports on our website that focused on public opinion. Former director Dr Scott Blinder did a
survey in 2011 that asked people in the UK “Who do you normally think of when you think of
immigrants coming to and living in Britain?” Almost 2/3 think of asylum seekers and less than a third
think of students, even though students by the actual numbers are much more common. That leads
naturally to wondering where people get their perceptions about who immigrants are. One possible
answer is through media.

To explore this, we needed to describe what the media actually said. In the UK, newspapers play a
bigger role in public debate than for example in the United States. When we scoped out previous
work done on this, we found small studies over specific time periods. However, there were few
systematic overviews of a large part of the UK press over a long period, with exception of a key
linguistic study done at Lancaster University. So our ‘Migration in the Media’ project grew out of a
desire to provide a large evidence base on what the UK press had actually said, rather than rely on
assertion.

How did you do it?

We downloaded data in monthly batches from Nexis UK, looking at all national newspapers in the UK
for three years, starting in January 2011. Replicating the model used by researchers at Lancaster, we
adopted a wide search string including all references to immigrants, migrants, asylum seekers and
refugees, across 20 national papers including tabloids and broadsheets.

We included all sections of the papers: sports, arts, letters to editor, politics. Our argument is that
people get their information about migrants from many different areas – for example, a review of a
play that interviews a refugee, or a sports story about an athlete who comes from another country,
as is the case with the British Olympic gold medallist Mo Farah. Then we used linguistic software to
look for patterns of words. For example, to find out what words tend to be associated with
immigrants, we searched for all the words that modified the word “immigrant.”
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Will Allen. Photo credit: The Migration Observatory

What did you find?

What we found is that the most common way of describing the word immigrant is “” It was the most
frequent phrase across all publication types. The mid-markets – those that lie between tabloids and
broadsheets – used it more than the others. In some ways the study confirms a common assumption,
that characterizing immigrants as illegal is fairly common. But it challenges the assumption that this
only happens in the tabloids and mid-markets, because we found that it is shared among all the
publications, including the broadsheets.

We also found that the quantity of coverage of different groups tends to match public opinion. For
example, Scott’s survey shows people don’t tend to think of students, and the press generally doesn’t
mention students in relation to immigration unless it is the context of illegality.

Since the 2013 report we’ve more than doubled the dataset. We’ve also started using a more advanced
software called The Sketch Engine that allows us to be much more nuanced and to cut the data more
finely.

What do you do with that data?

We now have a comprehensive, systematic data set of tens of millions of words, which is a pretty large
evidence base to work from. However, I don’t want to oversell the quantitative approach to texts. It’s
not just about letting the computer run with statistical approaches to text: the team at the Migration
Observatory, as well as COMPAS where we are based, also bring a lot of knowledge about the debate
and the nature of the press in the UK.

What analyses have come out of this?

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We just released a new report last month on media portrayals of Romanians and Bulgarians in the
year leading up to the removal of labour controls in those countries. We found that language related to
Romanians and Romania was strongly associated with criminality, homelessness, and poverty. We
didn’t find those associations with Bulgarians. We also found a range of numbers used in association
with these groups that appeared to show different estimates of the anticipated number of migrants
that would come to the UK once controls were removed, which showed a lack of clarity and
consistency.

Who’s your audience for this data, and how do you reach them?

All of the work we do at the Migration Observatory is intended to inform debate about international
migration to the UK. That debate happens in lots of different spheres – policy, Parliament, non-
governmental organisations, media, and public attitudes and perceptions. Our outreach aims to work
with different stakeholder groups – civil society, politicians and policymakers, other academics,
journalists, bloggers and people who write about immigration issues in their professional work. The
data is useful for academics and policy makers and also for civil society organizations in their
advocacy work. They can point to solid research that documents what is said in an empirical way. We
post everything to our web site, and our team is frequently doing interviews and news spots, as well as
presenting work at gatherings like the EU Commission.

You’re also doing research on visualizing data. Tell me more about that.

We’re always looking for new ways of communicating our work. We try to make sure all of our
briefings have a chart or table and certainly a link to the original dataset so people can access it. We
try to write in an accessible way and visualize the data in a way that’s shareable, understandable and
visually appealing. For example, we have produced a set of maps from the 2011 UK Census that show
the distribution of non-UK born people across local authorities in England and Wales.You’re also
doing research on visualizing data. Tell me more about that.

What we’ve found, however, is that while charts and tables are an important part of how we operate,
there’s a lot of scope to use other kinds of visualization to communicate our research into migration.
One of the projects I’m involved with right now, called ‘Seeing Data’ looks at, among other aspects, the
emotional impact of visualization. What feelings do people have when they look at certain charts?
Why do some types work better than others? These are questions we’ve thought about, but we haven’t
had solid research to back up why a certain visualization might be better than others.

But what ‘better’ looks like depends on what someone is trying to accomplish. Visualizations can be
used for different purposes. One could be a call to action – for example, a visualization of gun crimes
in the US might be a way of making people aware of the issue. In the case of the Observatory, we
might define a good visualization by how easily people can drill down and use the data themselves. We
want people to be able to use our reports. That influences how we view effectiveness. Can we do it
better? Probably. That’s why we’re doing this research.
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Visualizing migration in the news. Image credit: The Migration Observatory

Are people talking more about how we discuss migration?

From an academic point of view, it has definitely grown. With new ways of collecting data – being able
to access social media, for example – social scientists can look at public opinion from a much broader
perspective. ‘Big Data’ approaches open the possibility of collecting data in a more systematic way
from a lot more sources. Also, in the UK researchers are increasingly being asked to show the impact
of their work. Working with non-academic users is encouraged. On the topic of migration, that often
involves working with civil society groups. Understanding how certain stories about migration are
publicly discussed is highly important for these groups.

I think it’s important to examine the links between where people get their ideas about migration and
how these ideas are shaped by different sources. Then secondly, how do these perceptions inform
changes occurring at policy and electoral levels? Finally, for me, the biggest, broadest level is
examining how these perceptions and different conceptions of migration contribute to wider social
change. Understanding the intersection and interplay of media perception, public opinion and policy
outcomes is crucial.

What reaction have you had from journalists?

For the ‘Migration in the Media’ project, we had a good amount of coverage – including in The
Guardian and the Press Gazette, which is an industry magazine. Since that report was fundamentally a
study that put the press under a microscope, we had to have realistic expectations. Other Observatory
outputs have appeared in tabloids, broadsheets, and television media, including recently on the front
page of the Financial Times. Our Head of Media and Communications Rob McNeil plays a crucial role
not only in liaising with journalists directly but also in actively placing the Observatory as a key
independent source in the UK’s migration debate.

Do you have specific questions you hope your audience will bring with them when looking at your
data?
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We’re hoping people will engage with the data and set aside pre-conceived ideas that they might hold
about how media talk about migration. I also hope they hold us and other organizations to account
and say ‘show us your data’. Are the methods they use sound? And is the analysis sound as well? This
is important when talking about a contested issue like migration. If someone is making a statement
for or against a policy, or promoting a certain agenda, I would hope that people will ask what evidence
they have for their claim, as well as if they have considered any trade-offs or limitations involved in
implementing their position. Perhaps it is a bit idealistic, but that’s why I do this work: I would like to
see debate about migration, as far and as appropriately as possible, to be based on sound evidence and
deliberate debate.

The opinions and arguments in The Migrationist are exclusively that of the individual contributors
and not that of their respective institutions, places of employment, or that of the editors. The
Migrationist does not give immigration advice, and nothing in any posts should be construed as
such. For immigration advice, please consult an attorney.