Contemporary Southeastern Europe 2025, 12 (1)

Albanians Ante Portas: Representation of Albanian Migrants in the British Media

The topic of Albanian immigration to the UK recently gained prominence in the British media, evoking sensationalist claims and tropes of Albanians being prone to criminal activities, comprising a majority of people crossing to the UK illegally via the English Channel by small rafts and boats, even emphasising a surge of children born in the UK to Albanian parents. In this article, the authors conducted nominative and predicative discourse analysis in order to identify crucial discursive strategies of the British media’s reporting on Albanian immigration in 2022 and 2023. Three representative outlets were considered: left-oriented The Guardian, conservative The Times and right-wing The Sun. Some 200 articles featuring Albania/ns overall were identified and analysed, the majority of which focused on immigration. It is argued that the over-representation of Albanian immigration in the British media and political life reiterates centuries-old prejudices and stereotypes about the Balkans, often presenting Albanians collectively as “intruders”, “criminals”, abusers of public funds, villains in the old threat narrative about the invasion of the British shores, and arguably instrumentalised them as a smokescreen for pressing internal economic and political problems.
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Aleksandar Pavlović

Aleksandar Pavlović

Aleksandar Pavlović is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, with a PhD in Southeast European Studies from the University of Nottingham. He teaches courses about the Balkans through CEU/IUFU initiative. His research focuses on the cultural history of the Balkans, Serbian and Balkan oral and written traditions, Serbian-Albanian relations, and minority issues.

Romina Begaj

Romina Begaj

Romina Begaj is currently a project coordinator at the Center for Social and Economic Development in Serbia. She holds an MA in Social Integration from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, where she also worked as a teaching associate. Her fields of interest are migration and acculturation of migrants and refugees, inclusion of minority groups, and human and minority rights. Her publications include “Fighting for Empty States: Migration of Albanians and Serbs” (In: Balunović et all, ed. Kosovo-Serbia: A Different Approach, 65-76), and “Give me shelter”: What Teachers Can Do to Help Their Refugee Students from Ukraine.

Keywords:
Immigration media

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