Moving beyond securitisation and deservingness: Convergence between political and media discourses about ‘irregular migrants’ in Germany

Irregular migration has become a politically and socially charged topic in Germany, shaping public sentiment and electoral outcomes alike. This article presents findings from a large-scale discourse analysis that examines how ‘irregular migration’ and the figure of the ‘irregular migrant’ are constructed across political and media discourse. Irregularised migrants, whose legal status falls outside regular residency, are rendered vulnerable to exclusion, precarity, and heightened control. Drawing on a corpus of over 6000 texts (67 million tokens) from major newspapers and parliamentary sources (2019–2023), the study investigates how discursive strategies reinforce exclusion and normalise control. Our mixed-methods approach combines corpus-based analysis with qualitative narratology, revealing a convergence between political and media discourse in conflating legal categories, using vague terminology, and advancing overlapping exclusionary logics. We show how discursive patterns of securitisation, economisation, and deservingness shape representational and narrative strategies. These findings reveal how language reinforces exclusion and normalises control, indicating the need for conceptual clarity and alternative discourses beyond technocratic or moralistic framings.