Migration crisis in the local news: Evidence from the French–Italian border
(2025) Journal of Urban Economics — Vol. 150, p. 103808 (2025)
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- Abstract
- This paper examines how undocumented migrant displacements affect local news markets and the political economy of EU internal borders. I focus on a policy that took place in June 2015, in which French authorities introduced militarized controls at their borders with Italy, to return waves of irregular border-crossing migrants transiting from Italy to Italian lands. Natives’ exposure to resettled migrants varied across Italian municipalities, depending on their proximity to push-back areas. I exploit this quasi-experimental setting in a diff-in-diff framework and compile novel text and count data from local news in Liguria, Italy. Results show that migration coverage declined with distance from the border after the push-backs. In contrast, anti-immigrant discourse intensified away from the events and weakened at the border. Exploring further this framing dimension, I observe readers’ demand to be closely associated with local news discourse and voting preferences to broadly follow anti-immigrant slant in the news.
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Peracchi, S. (2025). Migration crisis in the local news: Evidence from the French–Italian border. Journal of Urban Economics, 150, 103808. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jue.2025.103808 (Original work published 2025)