The end of ‘Welcome Culture’? How the Cologne assaults reframed Germany’s immigration discourse

Abstract

Controversy over immigration and integration intensified in German news media following Chancellor Merkel’s response to the refugee crisis of 2015. Using multidimensional scaling of word associations in reporting across four national news publications in conjunction with key event, moral panic and framing theories, we argue that reporting of events at Cologne station on New Year’s Eve 2015–2016 reframed debate away from terror-related concerns and towards anxieties about the sexual predation of dark-skinned males, thus racializing immigration coverage and resonating with a long history of Orientalist stereotyping. We further identify an increased clustering of ‘race’, gender, religion, crowd-threat and national belonging terms in reporting on sexual harassment incidents following Cologne, suggesting an increased criminalization of immigration discourse. The article provides new empirically based insights into the dynamics of news media reporting on migrants in Germany and contributes to scholarly debates on media framing of migrants, sexuality and crime.

Discursive dynamics and local contexts on Twitter: The refugee crisis in Europe

“…Alencar, 2018; Alford, 2014; Crepaz, 2022) or reframe the European immigration discourse (e.g. Wigger et al, 2022).…”

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“…After a week, the author of the crime was identified, but he was no longer in the country, therefore he had to be brought from Greece to Timisoara to be tried. The emergence of such unfortunate cases and their public debate in the media has led to an even greater reluctance of the local population towards migrants, not only in Romania (Wigger et al, 2022).…”

Geflüchtete erster und zweiter Klasse? Reaktionen auf syrische und ukrainische Geflüchtete in Deutschland

“…Es wurden Illegalität und Gewaltvorfälle betont und somit negative Stereotype über Migrant:innen verstärkt (Eberl et al, 2018). Dabei wurden vor allem Geflüchtete aus dem Mittleren Osten wiederholt mit Aggressivität und sexuellen Übergriffen in Verbindung gebracht, insbesondere nach den Ereignissen der Kölner Silvesternacht 2015 (Wigger et al, 2022).…”