Human Migration in the News, 2019–2026: Attention, Geography and Tone of Global Migration Coverage, and How It Compares with Research

We measure how human migration was covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 737,046 de-duplicated articles about migration, immigration, emigration, migrants and asylum seekers. We set that coverage beside 138,658 research papers on migration published from 2015 to 2025. Six results stand out: Attention moves in waves. Migration's share of news fell by 42% between 2019 and 2022, then rose by 59% from 2024 to 2025, to 69.13 articles per 10,000. The peak month was January 2026, at 110.0 per 10,000. Geography. The United States holds 58.58% of located migration news, 1.21 times its share of all news. India (0.36) and China (0.32) are under-represented. Libya (16.87), Tunisia (15.48), Rwanda (15.27) and Haiti (8.26) are the most over-represented countries, after the Canary Islands (31.78), which the index tags as a separate place; among the 20 largest, Greece (4.94) and Mexico (3.5) also stand out. States. Within India, Tripura (3.43), Manipur (3.31), Assam (2.99) and Punjab (2.93) lead by lift. Within the United States, Minnesota (4.94), New Mexico (2.53) and Illinois (1.98) lead. Shifting attention. Measured against each country's own news, migration coverage rose 3.02-fold in the United States from 2023 to 2025, and fell to about a quarter of its 2023 level in Ireland, Tunisia and Rwanda. In India it rose about six times in 2020, the year of the lockdown exodus of migrant workers. Tone and urgency. 76.2% of migration articles are negative in tone (all news: 33.6%), and 75.4% are rated critical priority (all news: 42.6%). Among the 15 countries with the most labelled articles, the gap is widest in Greece: 94.3% negative against 31.2% of Greek news. Measurement. 21.96% of raw matches for migration vocabulary were removed by exclusion patterns for non-human senses (cell, data and animal migration) and templated pages. Research share grew only 1.11-fold from 2015 to 2025 and peaked in 2018.