Contemporary migrants and media capabilities - understanding communication rights in international migration policies

This study highlights how policy makers address issues of communication rights of migrants. In order to do so we conducted a qualitative content analysis of recent international migration policy papers - the UN 'Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration' (2018) and the 'European Agenda on Migration' (2015) published by the European Commission. Our analysis was informed by the model of 'media capabilities' - which are the opportunities the media enable people to do or be - that helped us analyze which media capabilities were promoted by policy makers and what roles they attributed to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the realization of migrants' capabilities. Our study reveals that out of seven media capabilities only two were fully addressed - 'to be informed' and 'to be secure' - other capabilities were either only partly addressed ('identity and belonging') or completely ignored ('voicing', 'identification and imitation', 'civil participation', 'pleasure and entertainment'). The policies, as such, disregarded most of the media capabilities for migrants and ignored the role of ICTs as media capabilities enablers. We conclude that policy makers negated migrants' ability to realize capabilities, thus hindering their 'right to communicate.'