Sending and receiving: The ethical framing of intra-EU migration in the European press

Abstract

Labour migration in the European Union (EU) has become a hot topic in public debates, particularly around the issue of European enlargement. The media are frequently criticized for stirring up debates around immigration but analysis has overlooked the underlying ethical justifications for migration controls. This article addresses this by developing an innovative approach that applies an ethical lens to media coverage of intra-EU migration. It shows how a generally narrow range of communitarian and cosmopolitan arguments are employed by the press in two European countries that occupy very different positions in the migratory system: Bulgaria and the UK. It finds a convergence of communitarian arguments across the case studies, and a significant importation of frames, reversing the roles of sending and receiving country.