Elena Ambrosetti

Migration issues dominate both political and media discourse during the campaign period and often play a decisive role in shaping election results. This study examines how Italian online newspapers with different political orientations framed migration during the 2022 Italian general election campaign. Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we collected the headlines of almost 14,000 articles published between 25 September 2021 and 25 September 2022. We conducted a thematic analysis to assess topic salience, actor engagement, recurring subthemes, and the most frequent lexical associations within migration-related discourse. Furthermore, we investigated the sentiments and prevailing tones expressed in newspaper headlines addressing migration. Our findings reveal that Right-wing media amplified migration coverage more intensively, depicting it as an emergency associated with criminality and threats to national security. In contrast, Left-wing and moderate outlets emphasized humanitarian perspectives, particularly during the early months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, promoting solidarity and European cooperation. Over time, both sides tended to frame migration as an exceptional and problematic phenomenon rather than a structural dimension of Italian society. The study also underscores the persistence of emotionally charged and polarized narratives designed to shape public perceptions of safety, empathy, and belonging. Overall, our research contributes to ongoing efforts to understand migration narratives circulating within online media environments.

The study offers a systematic review of scientific literature on ‘return migration’ performing computational text mining and topic modelling. On a sample of 3000 studies indexed in Scopus and published between 1960 and 2020, we present a textual analysis and a clusters' analysis of titles, keywords, abstracts and publications' metadata. Results show a rapid growth in research since the 1970s, mirroring the evolution of migration events and the pace of theoretical advancements. The research landscape appears dominated by receiving high‐income countries' perspective. Throughout the entire period, topics related to culture, ethnicity and political identity have been prominent. A progressive shift in the economic paradigm has been identified, with labour‐related keywords leaving room for more subjective aspects of well‐being. Growing attention has been paid to different forms of migrants' capital and vulnerabilities, along with a declining interest in demographic implications of return, especially with respect to African and European internal and international migrations.

This paper aims to study the self-perceived social exclusion of EU citizens during the COVID-19 emergency, taking into account their socio-demographic characteristics and the specific contexts of their countries of residence. To this end, we draw on data from the third round of the electronic Eurofund Living, working and COVID-19 survey , conducted between February and March 2021, when countries were still grappling with various levels of lockdown and individuals had been living with COVID-19 restrictions for almost a year. We also rely on data from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT), which collected real-time information on government responses to COVID-19 in several countries during the pandemic crisis. We assume that during the pandemic, government accountability and responsiveness were important determinants of social inclusion and well-being. To test our hypothesis, we use multilevel logistic regression. Our dependent variable is a binary indicator of social exclusion. At the country level, we consider two different sets of explanatory variables concerning, respectively, subjective (i.e., citizens' perceptions) and objective (i.e., measures taken) aspects of governments' responses to COVID-19. Our results document a different gradient of social vulnerability across population groups. Our findings also indicate that social exclusion strongly depended on the country context, in addition to individual characteristics and circumstances. Collective perceptions of the efficiency of government responses and levels of trust in government had a positive association with the decrease in the feelings of social exclusion during the first year of the pandemic. Conversely, the objective measures implemented by national governments to mitigate socio-economic and health consequences were not associated with self-reported experiences of social exclusion.

The aim of this paper is to study the subjective well‐being (SWB) of the resident population in Italy, by analyzing the association between self‐reported life satisfaction and institutional trust, controlling for socio‐demographic, human capital, other measures of SWB and government change, whilst distinguishing between Italian and foreign citizens. Indeed, examining disparities in SWB between Italian and foreign citizens is crucial for understanding if their well‐being levels are similar and which factors might either foster or hinder parity. Italy is a peculiar case study, as it is characterized by a general lack of trust in institutions; moreover, the relationship between SWB and institutional trust has so far not been approached from a native/immigrant comparative perspective. We use pooled data from seven rounds (2015–2021) of the Multipurpose survey on households ‘Aspects of Daily Life’ carried out by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT). Our dependent variable is self‐reported life satisfaction. Institutional trust is built as an index of respondent's trust in the Italian parliament, the government, political parties, the judicial system and law enforcement. We run OLS linear regression models with wave fixed effects to account for changes in the distribution between the different years. Life satisfaction is slightly higher for Italians compared to foreign citizens. Institutional trust appears positive and a significant predictor of life satisfaction for both Italian and foreign citizens. However, results suggest that institutional trust has a mediating role for the life satisfaction of foreign citizens, meaning that trust in institutions is more important for non‐Italian citizens. Finally, government change is positively associated with life satisfaction.

The paper focuses on the analysis of the perceptions of immigration in Italy expressed through Twitter. More specifically we aim to identify the main words through which Twitter users talked about migration and migrants in the last decade by highlighting changes over time; to analyse relations between words in the same period; to detect sentiments and emotions expressed by tweets and retweets always verifying changes and persisting views over the years. We apply text mining and sentiment analysis techniques to a database of tweets and retweets in the Italian language published in the period 2011–2020 containing hashtags and keywords related to migration. Text mining converts texts into analyzable structured data while sentiment analysis has the objective of checking whether a sentence expresses a positive, negative or neutral sentiment. Our work confirms that part of the debate regarding migration on social media is linked to specific aspects of the migration phenomenon in Italy and it is strongly polarised. In the last decade, references to arrivals by sea have always been present in the social debate. The importance of the role of politicians or institutional figures is confirmed by our analysis. From the sentiment analysis emerged a gradual shift, most pronounced in the last years, towards a slight predominance of words associated with negative emotions, particularly fear. Our analysis confirms the need of training stakeholders on migration complexities, spreading accurate information through mainstream media, fostering informed social media discussions, promoting cross-cultural interactions, analyzing social perceptions, and implementing policies to reduce stereotypes.

Subjective well-being (SWB) is emerging as an important measure of individual and societal progress. Among the many individual factors associated with SWB, the quality of the neighbourhood is recently receiving growing attention as a factor shaping self-reported life satisfaction in contemporary societies. However, to the best of our knowledge, studies focusing on the perceived quality of the neighbourhood are still scant. We aim to fill this gap, comparing self-reported life satisfaction of different population groups (i.e., immigrants and natives) living in European countries, and to analyse the association between self-reported life satisfaction and the perceived quality of the neighbourhood, controlling for individual socio-demographic and human capital variables and socio-economic characteristics of the country of residence. The data are drawn from the cross-sectional European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) of 2016. Our findings reveal that first and second-generation immigrants report lower self-reported life satisfaction compared to natives. Moreover, our findings show that the positive subjective evaluation of the characteristics and services available in the immediate neighbourhood where people live is positively associated with self-reported life satisfaction. There is also a positive relationship between contacts and social networks in the neighbourhood and self-reported life satisfaction. Finally, the characteristics of the country of residence matter for both native and immigrants’ life satisfaction, with immigrants being more satisfied in countries with higher quality of life captured by country gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, life expectancy and unemployment rate.

The COVID-19 pandemic provoked heritages for all citizens, from the richest to the poorest, but exacerbated, even more, the hardships of vulnerable people in economic, social and psychological spheres. Within the H2020 project “COVINFORM”1, this case study focuses on vulnerable female population, which is “doubly-burdened”, facing both economic vulnerability and gender disparity. Moreover, the study brings out those aspects affecting migrant women. Through a qualitative survey, it was possible to identify the responses of the policies adopted at that time. Women suggest a severe psychological impact of the pandemic about being away from family and losing jobs. Distancing and fear of infections aggravated the isolation of migrants. The solidarity network among NonGovernmental Organizations (NGOs) and civil society was crucial for vulnerable people at all research sites.