Governmental border communication in times of European crisis

In response to the recent crises in Europe, such as the ‘refugee crisis’, the terror attacks in Vienna or the COVID-19 pandemic, some governments have unilaterally tightened their border regimes despite considerable criticism from other EU member states, the EU Commission and civil society. While such border politics likely leads to the scapegoating of migrants as ‘external threats’ and to division between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ societies in Europe, we lack systematic evidence of how governments themselves contribute to the further politicization of migration as they inform about - and justify - such measures. Therefore, we ask: How do EU governments communicate about borders during crises? We analyse press releases of the Austrian (‘transit’ country) and German (‘destination’ country) governments over the period of 2009 – 2020, assembling government communication during a decade of European crises. Applying a mixed-methods design, we first employ computer-automated text analysis to handle the large text corpora, focusing specifically on communicated permeability (degrees of openness and closedness) of borders and related sentiment (negative or positive tone). Based on this quantitative analysis, we then apply qualitative discourse analysis to scrutinize governmental narratives at specific crises during this period to better understand whether and how governments relate their border politics to migrants as ‘scapegoats’. Overall, our findings contribute to comparative research about the politicization of migration from the completely new perspective of governmental border communication by drawing connections between political decision-making in response to crises and the communication of these decisions.