Convergence Despite Divergence: Media Mechanisms and the Normalization of Restrictive Migration Discourse

Contemporary debates about democracy in Europe increasingly examine how communicative dynamics shape the boundaries of democratic contestation. Migration politics is a central site of these dynamics. Despite extensive scholarship highlighting the multidimensional and context-dependent nature of migration, and despite periods of migration-supportive government agendas in Germany, a dominant framing of migration as irregular, crisis-driven, and requiring restriction persists. This paper examines the role of mainstream media as political communication intermediaries in consolidating this “irregular migration” paradigm. The paper asks: How do mainstream German media narrate migration around transformative political and security events, and how do these narratives contribute to the normalization of restrictive understandings of migration? Rather than attributing these narratives primarily to radical right actors, the study focuses on legacy media as productive forces that co-constitute the discursive environment within which policy options and democratic imagination are shaped. Theoretically, the paper builds on narrative and critical discourse approaches to public communication, conceptualizing narratives as structured meaning-making practices that link causes, consequences, and responsibilities, thereby exerting causal productivity over political horizons. It introduces the concept of discursive mechanisms to capture recurrent processes through which media narratives converge at the level of meaning-making across ideological divides. Stabilized over time, these mechanisms form paradigms that define what is publicly intelligible, debatable, and thus actionable. From this perspective, democratic vulnerability arises from communicative processes that foreclose alternative interpretations while maintaining the appearance of pluralism. Methodologically, the study combines critical discourse analysis with interpretive process-tracing to examine coverage of key events between 2015 and 2025. The broader project analyzes 750 articles and broadcasts from three leading outlets – Tagesschau, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – across twenty security, symbolic, electoral, and legislative events. The paper presented at the conference draws on a comparative subset of these events, enabling close examination of discursive dynamics while situating the findings within the broader decade-long research design. The analysis identifies four recurrent discursive mechanisms through which restrictive understandings of migration are consolidated across outlets and event types. By tracing how narratives converge through these mechanisms, the study shifts attention from episodic misinformation to the cumulative effects of media practices, demonstrating how political imagination and perceptions of feasible policy options are structured and constrained independently of actors’ intentions or ideological positions. This convergence is not driven by ideological alignment, but by similar ways of making sense of events across otherwise conflicting editorial positions. As a result, interpretive space is reduced even as media debate appears pluralistic. Seen this way, the media’s treatment of migration illustrates how discursive closure shapes political trajectories and limits democratic choice.