When Migration Enters the Debate: Media Claims, Belonging, and Policy Controversies in Swiss Cantons

Public debates on migration and inclusion are rarely confined to explicitly migration-related policies. In federal systems, questions of belonging, access to rights, and social membership often emerge within broader political controversies concerning welfare, citizenship, and political participation. This paper examines how migration-related issues are articulated and contested in public debates across different policy domains, focusing on four significant political events in the Swiss cantons of Ticino and Geneva. The study examines debates surrounding: (1) the basic income initiative; (2) the revision of Swiss citizenship law; (3) the Papyrus regularization programme; and (4) debates on political rights for foreign residents. These events vary in their explicit relevance to migration, enabling an analysis of how migration becomes salient in broader governance discussions on welfare, citizenship, and democracy. By comparing Ticino and Geneva, two cantons with contrasting political cultures, media environments, and migration profiles, the paper offers a subnational comparative perspective that highlights local political opportunity structures. This study draws on contemporary approaches to migration governance, solidarity, and boundary-making. Rather than assuming that migration always functions as a key issue, the paper explores the conditions under which migration enters the debate, and how its presence or absence impacts broader discussions of inclusion, responsibility, and belonging. The paper conceptualizes solidarity as reflective, not fixed: it is a form of solidarity that emerges when the boundaries of who belongs and who is deserving of solidarity are publicly debated and contested. Methodologically, this work relies on a claims-making analysis of media coverage from leading regional newspapers in Ticino and Geneva, laRegione and Tribune de Geneve. Approximately 2,000 claims are collected using standardized keyword searches in major news databases and coded using a shared codebook that captures actors, issues, forms of action, and framing dimensions. This approach allows for comparisons across different political moments and cantonal contexts, revealing how migration-related issues are constructed in public discourse and how these constructions shape or constrain solidarity. This paper contributes to contemporary studies of migration governance by offering an understanding of how migration-related claims and discourses are constructed in specific political contexts. Rather than evaluating the presence or absence of solidarity, the paper examines the discursive conditions under which solidarity can be reflexively articulated and contested within public debates.