Why Migration Narratives Deserve More Than Lip Service
The word “narrative” increasingly appears in discussions of migration, but its analytical meaning is rarely specified. Campaigners often speak of the need for a “new narrative” on migration, while some narratives, such as “the Great Replacement,” have entered public consciousness. Narratives are not just stories or slogans. They are selective and motivated depictions of reality, reflecting particular values, interests or political goals that link otherwise disparate elements — events, actors, and emotions — into coherent accounts of how the world works. Understanding these linkages is essential for explaining why migration debates take the shapes they do, and why evidence alone rarely changes them.
References to “narratives” have multiplied across migration research, policymaking, and advocacy. Yet the concept is often used loosely, as a synonym for framing or messaging. In analytical terms, however, narratives do something more fundamental: they direct how people perceive and reason about migration.
Narratives do not construct reality, but they shape our orientation toward it. They highlight some aspects while downplaying others, guiding attention, emotion, and judgment. By connecting events, causes, and moral evaluations into meaningful sequences, they define who acts, who suffers, who is responsible, and what outcomes appear legitimate. In this way, narratives influence which issues count as “migration problems” and which responses seem plausible.
To understand migration politics, we must move beyond the accumulation of facts and study how those facts are selectively organized and interpreted through narrative structures.
What Narratives Are
Narratives are selective depictions of reality that make complexity intelligible by linking its elements into coherent wholes. They simplify through choice — what to include, what to omit, and how to connect. This selectivity is rarely neutral. Narratives emerge from motivated reasoning: actors impose coherence in ways that reflect their values, identities, or policy objectives.
In migration politics, narratives often link economic, social, and moral domains — for instance, by connecting migration to welfare sustainability, cultural identity, or social order. Depicting migrants as “contributors,” “burdens,” or “victims” each creates a distinct causal and moral grammar: about fairness, control, or compassion.
Once established, a narrative provides a durable interpretive lens. New information is assimilated within its logic, maintaining coherence even as conditions change. This helps explain why migration debates are so resilient to evidence — facts are filtered through pre-existing interpretive frameworks.
Narrative thinking transcends ideological divides. The political right may emphasize order, threat, or loss; the left, moral progress, solidarity, or injustice. Both tendencies risk treating coherence as truth — replacing analysis with moral certainty.
Analytical reasoning demands that we step outside narrative frames: examining evidence from the ground up and being explicit about assumptions. Yet for communication and policymaking, narratives are indispensable. They are how meaning enters public life, translating complex reasoning into forms that resonate emotionally and morally. The goal is not to reject narratives but to use them with awareness.
Narratives in Practice
Recognizing the narrative dimension of migration politics has practical implications for research, communication, and governance.
First, it clarifies the diagnosis. Public conflict over migration stems less from ignorance than from divergent narrative logics — competing ways of linking facts, values, and identities into coherent worldviews.
Second, it informs communication. Efforts to promote “counter-narratives” or to “myth-bust” often fail because they address factual claims without engaging the underlying structure. Effective communication acknowledges narrative logic — the choice of protagonists and antagonists, the implied temporality, and the moral resolution — and situates evidence within it.
Third, it advances interdisciplinary collaboration. Researchers can map how dominant narrative configurations evolve, revealing how selective linkages emerge and how they might be reframed. Methods from discourse analysis, political psychology, and computational linguistics all offer useful tools.
Toward Narrative Literacy
Migration governance requires narrative literacy: the ability to recognize how stories organize facts, emotions and responsibility, guiding how people understand who is responsible and what responses seem legitimate. Narrative literacy distinguishes between thinking through narratives and thinking about them. It enables analysts and decision-makers to uncover the assumptions embedded in their own reasoning while engaging more effectively with the public’s moral and emotional maps.
Taking narratives seriously does not mean claiming they create reality. It means recognizing that they guide our perception of it — determining what we notice, how we connect it, and what we believe it implies. Used unconsciously, narratives entrench bias and division. Used deliberately, they can connect truth to meaning and analysis to empathy.
Illustration: Jonas Raeber
James Dennison is a part-time Professor at the Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute in Florence and the 2025/26 Pierre Keller Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.
This post draws on James Dennison’s article “Narratives: a review of concepts, determinants, effects, and uses in migration research,” published in Comparative Migration Studies (2021).
