POLICY BRIEF October 2023 Communicating on Migration: Choose your battles ABSTRACT Media, policy and public debates about migration in European countries, and around the world, are often polarised and negative, contributing to demand for restrictive migration policies. Where organisations are keen to shift this paradigm they commonly work to insert themselves and their more positive messages more firmly into public debates on migration. This paper discusses whether this proactive engagement is more effec­tive in shifting public debates than the counter-intuitive strategy of attempting to lower the volume of the debate through less participation. We consider these options by examining the question through the lenses of framing and agenda-setting theories. AUTHOR Rob McNeil Researcher and consultant specialising in migration in the media and Deputy Director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society(COMPAS)