Immigration

Immigration has been at the centre of social and political debate in Europe for a long time, but its role has become more and more important in the last decade. Immigration has become one of the defining policy issues of contemporary politics in Europe, for example in the case of the British vote on the Brexit referendum or the national Dutch elections. As the refugee crisis is still in progress, it will play a role for the foreseeable future. Understanding the social representations of immigrations and their evolution in the past years provides valuable data to study the relationship with ‘the other’ in European societies. In this chapter, we analyse the public discourse on immigration present in the national press of several European countries before, during, and at the end of the financial crisis (2007-2015). Combining both qualitative interpretation of texts and insights from text mining techniques applied to a large corpus of newspapers articles in Cyprus 1 , Greece, Italy, Malta, Romania and UK, we both discuss some of the national cases and present a comparative frame