Parties’ Platforms, Migration, and Security: Patterns and Determinants

Abstract

ABSTRACT The integration of national security concerns in states’ treatment of international migration has become a prominent issue in recent years as global migration is regularly presented as a security threat to host countries. In this paper, we illuminate a number of patterns and determinants of political parties’ treatment of immigration as a security matter–the securitisation of migration–through the comparative study of a new data set of parties’ platforms in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States that spans seven decades. We distinguish between the salience of migration and of security in parties’ platforms and explore the effect of various migration-related domestic-level factors in accounting for both phenomena. Our empirical strategy to assess the extent to which political parties have presented, promoted, and framed the security concerns associated with migration is based on textual data from parties’ platforms. We report three findings. First, parties have increasingly mobilised migration in their platforms regardless of ideological or partisan commitments since the 1990s, and the number of refugees hosted by a country constitutes the primary migration-related explanatory factor for this fact. Second, we show that mainstream right-wing parties account for the increase in the securitisation of migration in parties’ platforms. Finally, among migration-related domestic factors, the number of refugees has (surprisingly) a negative impact on the securitisation of migration in platforms. Overall, this paper illuminates important patterns in how parties discursively link security and migration, and investigates the determinants of this widespread phenomenon.