Identifying articles about immigration

• Scraped web archive of Junge Freiheit
• Regular expressions using keywords
• Trained Naïve Bayes classifier based on hand-coded random sample of 600 articles (recall: 0.97, precision: 0.78)
• 5,695 positive predictions in overall data

Development of published articles on immigration

Topic models

• Decompose immigration issue into its thematic subcomponents using Structural Topic Models (STM)
• STM identify word clusters (topics) in texts without restrictions (except for number of topics, here: 30)
• All topics consist of all terms, and all articles of all topics, but both with varying probability
• Modelling a shift in right-wing discursive priorities

Real-world indicators

• Number of immigrants to Germany with non-EU citizenship (Eurostat)
• Islamist attacks w/ at least one casualty or injury in Western countries / in Germany (Fondapol 2021) in 2 weeks before article publication
• Share of reported crimes conducted by non-German suspects (BKA 2021)

Immigration policy topic

• Terms: mass immigration, uncontrolled
• Example: From dilemma to disaster - Immigration policy: Europe and Germany are not deporting too much, but too little (Paulwitz in Junge Freiheit 43/13; 18 Oct 2013)

Asylum topic

• Terms: deportation, authorities
• Example: The difficult path to a “culture of goodbye”: Under pressure from the continuing influx of asylum seekers, the low number of deportations comes under criticism (Persdorf in Junge Freiheit 41/15; 02 Oct 2015)

Effect of immigration

Effect of terrorism

Effect of crime

Conclusion

• Reporting on immigration increased over time, peaking 2015/16
• Topics mostly in line with cultural, economic, and security threat
• Humanitarian topics practically absent
• Content hardly connected to real-world indicators (also see Jacobs et al. 2018)
• Two exceptions: Terror attacks (esp. in Germany) and refugee immigration of 2015/16
• Event based reporting style

Circulation

Source: Informationsgemeinschaft zur Feststellung der Verbreitung von Werbeträgern (2021)

All topics, part 1

A topic model with 30 topics, 5695 documents and a 4777 word dictionary.

     National identity Immigration policy Integration/\ncitizenship Terrorism  
[1,] "volk"            "einwander"        "integration"             "islamist" 
[2,] "kultur"          "einwand"          "einwand"                 "anschlag" 
[3,] "kulturell"       "asyl"             "staatsburgerschaft"      "terrorist"
[4,] "identitat"       "illegal"          "zuwander"                "terror"   
[5,] "begriff"         "paulwitz"         "staatsangehor"           "attentat" 
     Asylum        Religion   International immigration
[1,] "asylbewerb"  "islam"    "migration"              
[2,] "abschiebung" "muslim"   "international"          
[3,] "behord"      "religion" "migrant"                
[4,] "asyl"        "moslem"   "global"                 
[5,] "zustand"     "religios" "pakt"                   

All topics, part 2

     Ethnic violence         Illegal\nimmigration Economy     Demography 
[1,] "jugend"                "illegal"            "milliard"  "bevolker" 
[2,] "schul"                 "afrikan"            "geld"      "anteil"   
[3,] "gewalt"                "migrant"            "unternehm" "demograph"
[4,] "migrationshintergrund" "afrika"             "kost"      "statist"  
[5,] "spiel"                 "schiff"             "bank"      "studi"    
     Crime      Welfare state
[1,] "polizei"  "hartz"      
[2,] "tat"      "iv"         
[3,] "opfer"    "arbeitslos" 
[4,] "polizist" "leistung"   
[5,] "straftat" "anspruch"   

Terror and crime topics

• Terrorism (islamist, attack, terror)
• Crime (police, offense, victim)
• Ethnic violence (youth, violence, migration background, arab)

Culture and economic topics

• Religion (islam, muslim, christ)
• National identitiy (volk, culture, identitiy, nation, history)
• Welfare state (hartz, unemployed, benefit, claim)
• Economy (billion, money, company, cost)

Demography topic

• Terms: population, share, studies, development
• Example: The pyramid becomes a tombstone - Germany 2050: The population projection of the Federal Statistical Office offers gloomy prospects for criticism (Zach in Junge Freiheit 26/03; 20 Jun 2003)

Other immigration topics

• International immigration (global, migrant, pact, un)
• Integration (integration, citizenship)
• “Illegal” immigration (illegal, africa, ship)

Topic prevalence