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Human Migration in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of news about human migration from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). It covers migration, immigration, emigration, migrant workers and asylum seekers. Every row is one news article, with its date, location, tone, editorial priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API.
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Key findings
In a global news index covering January 2019 to July 2026, migration took 69.13 of every 10,000 news articles in 2025, 59% more than in 2024 (43.54) and the highest annual share between 2019 and 2025.
Basis: Annual articles about migration, immigration, emigration, migrants and asylum seekers divided by all articles in the index for the same year (737,046 matched articles in all).
Migration's share of global news fell by 42% between 2019 and 2022, from 60.29 to 34.96 articles per 10,000 news articles, before recovering to 44.7 in 2023.
Basis: Annual matched articles divided by all articles in the index, 2019–2025.
January 2026, the month of the federal immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota known as Operation Metro Surge, was the month in which migration took its largest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 110.0 articles per 10,000.
Basis: Monthly matched articles per 10,000 news articles, every month from January 2019 to July 2026.
Of migration articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 76.2% were negative in tone, 2.27 times the 33.6% negative share across all news in the same index.
Basis: Top sentiment label of each article, grouped into negative, neutral and positive; 99.8% of sampled articles carry a label.
The index's machine-assigned priority ratings placed 75.4% of migration articles at critical priority (7 or higher on a 1–9 scale) between January 2023 and July 2026, 1.77 times the 42.6% share for all news.
Basis: Top priority label per article; critical = priority ≥ 7.
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 136,911 | 58.58% | 1.21 |
| United Kingdom | 13,181 | 5.64% | 0.97 |
| India | 11,175 | 4.78% | 0.36 |
| Australia | 4,940 | 2.11% | 0.99 |
| Canada | 4,411 | 1.89% | 0.88 |
| Germany | 4,216 | 1.8% | 1.53 |
| France | 4,073 | 1.74% | 0.88 |
| Italy | 3,872 | 1.66% | 1.71 |
| Mexico | 2,528 | 1.08% | 3.5 |
| Nigeria | 2,201 | 0.94% | 0.69 |
| China | 1,940 | 0.83% | 0.32 |
| New Zealand | 1,872 | 0.8% | 1.24 |
| Spain | 1,843 | 0.79% | 0.81 |
| Singapore | 1,576 | 0.67% | 0.76 |
| Greece | 1,447 | 0.62% | 4.94 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "migration" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Human Migration in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/migration/