A higher level of mobility of people has marked the European Union (EU), with immigrants moving from one place to another, every year, looking for a better quality of life, often fleeing from war and poverty. In the wake of enlargement of the European Union, the United Kingdom (UK) experienced high inward migration. One of the main focuses of UK media coverage was immigration from Eastern European countries. The UK referendum on Brexit on 23 June 2016, was followed by an increase in hate crimes linked to migration issues and, subsequently, a media apparatus of toxic discourse and fear of the criminal ‘Other’. This paper aims to reveal how newspaper articles and personal comments written in response to these articles, represented creative and media-driven anxieties about ‘opening’ borders in the EU. The empirical sample builds on news media coverage of the ‘Euro-Ripper’ case, published in two UK newspapers—the Daily Mail and The Independent. Based on critical surveillance studies and cultural media studies, I elaborate on the notion of moral panic, dramatised by the media, which mobilises specific compositions of ‘otherness’ by constructing suspicion and criminalising inequality by particular social and ethnic groups and nationalities. I argue that the media portrays the dramatisation of transnational narratives of risk and (in)security, which redraws territorial borders and (re)define Britain’s global identity. The analysis shows how the news media in the Brexit vote continually raised and legitimised awareness related to the migration as a vehicle that enables the ‘folk-devil’ to cross borders. This context postulates an ideology that converges on a relationship of intransigence and criminal convictions, in the context of a politics of inclusion and exclusion. I conclude by emphasising how the media intersects different social and geographical spaces in which migration takes place. Media-constructed categories of suspicion targets have been previously created and ‘suspect communities’ have already been socially accepted, thereby confirming and reshaping understandings of their identities and communities.

The media plays an important role in producing narratives and representations of transnational male criminals in crime news stories. The sample examined here includes historical analysis of news published in European newspapers in 2014-2016 related to the coverage of certain highprofile criminal cases. Relatively few studies have focused on media analysis of offenders in general, and even fewer have examined how the media portrays "men who kill" within a specific transnational context. I argue that different newspapers use convergent approaches based on a moral view of gender, guided by the ideology of criminal practices related to masculinities. I conclude that the press, through its style, treatment, and tenor, tends to (re)produce biased, sensationalised, and stereotypical portraits of the behaviour of male criminals, performing them as "monsters", "insane", and "ancestral". This also often occurs by attributing different notions of "otherness" when focusing excessively on "migrant criminals" associated with particularly marginalised populations such as male sexual predators.