The Glossary includes key terms from discourses on migration, integration, narrative, and media representation that will be used frequently in Opprtunities. In addition to these thematic areas, the glossary provides relevant terminology from corpus linguistics, quantitaive media studies, and narrative theory. This wide semantic field gives shape to our two core concepts, the Cross Talk and the Level telling Field.

With this glossary we launch a fruitful dialogue we seek to initiate on different levels, on political, societal and scientific level.

This report examines the evolution in attitudes towards migrants and migration in Europe. Concretely, the report investigates and discusses the changes in the perception of migrants and attitudes towards migration between 2002-2018 using the European Social Survey data. Both the evolution of migration perceptions within countries and the cross-national evolution across European countries are discussed and illustrated visually. The analyses indicate that most Europeans are either ambivalent or relatively positive about migration. Further, important between-country differences are present in Europe. Central and Eastern European countries are especially negative about migration, and they have also grown more negative in the wake of the 2015-2016 refugee crisis. Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon countries, in contrast, hold more positive views. In fact, in most European countries, citizens have become more supportive of tolerant immigration policies over the examined period, though few are supportive of an open border policy. Finally, certain categories of citizens in the sample tend to exhibit lower levels of support for migration. Citizens with lower levels of income and education, (radical) right-leaning political attitudes, low levels of trust, and the elderly, are on average more negative about migrants and open border policies.

Narratives influence the public perception of migration and attitudes towards migrants and refugees, often with unintended and unanticipated consequences. In order to further our understanding of the construction, emergence of, and interaction between different kinds of narratives, this paper proposes a programmatic concept of narrative dynamics. Narrative dynamics research is equally interested in the pragmatics of narrative framing and the grand narratives of human rights, in fake news, propaganda and
disinformation, in mundane stories of everyday experience and the intangible myths and masterplots which shape organizations, institutions, and cultures. The paper concentrates on wide-spread phenomena, revealing key features of narratives: event modeling and event management, purpose and chaff, aggregation and normalization, as well as (re)alignment and redirection. In addition to this, the paper focuses on scenarios involving multiple and competing narratives, and it introduces a distinction between centrifugal and
centripetal effects. Three examples – German welcome culture in 2015, Matteo Salvini’s confrontation with Sea Watch in 2019, and online hate speech against a Red Cross volunteer in Ceuta in 2021 – demonstrate how these concepts help us to analyse political framings of migration and responses to representations of migration.

The debate between the political left and the political right has increasingly become a debate on the benefits and drawbacks of immigration. In this report we analyze the lexical choices to be found in the Twitter discourse of politicians from four adjacent countries: Austria, Germany, Hungary, and Italy.
Seven Twitter accounts were scrutinised to compare the views of traditional parties (socialist, liberal, and conservative) with those of the “new” far-right, anti-immigration parties. We considered a large sample period going from January 1 st, 2015 to May 1st , 2021 (7,294,569 words). A corpus-based linguistic analysis showed that the concept of “borders” is central to the discourse of the right and far right, while left-wing/centrist politicians favour “integration”. Nevertheless, both far-right and traditional parties use discursive “safety valves” to stave off attacks from the other side. Right-wing/far-right politicians strive to avoid accusations of racism, while left-wing/centrist politicians fear being represented as blindly believing in the benefits of immigration. Regardless of political affiliation, opposition politicians in need of attention also tend to take an antagonistic stance in their communication.