Officers in biohazard suits reach out to help migrants onboard. This is the image many Europeans see when they think of irregular migration. But what’s missing from the frame?
In this post, I explore how media images in Europe and Africa portray migration differently — and why that matters. As a postdoctoral researcher on the Shut-Med Project — which investigates the securitization of migration across the Mediterranean — I draw on an analysis of newspapers in Italy, Malta, Libya, and Niger to argue that these visuals create a “politics of invisibility”: they don’t just inform public understanding — they shape it.
European media have long framed migrants as both at risk and a risk, a duality that plays out powerfully through pictures. In Italy and Malta, pictures of border agents clad in full biohazard suits became common well before COVID-19. In fact, data from 2013 to 2023 show that over 60% of pictures in conservative newspapers like Il Giornale and The Times of Malta depicted border personnel wearing some form of biohazard protection, with the trend spiking during the Ebola crisis and again during the pandemic.
But these pictures do not reflect real health policy; they’re part of a pattern, a visual playbook. While the presence of biohazard gear is ostensibly tied to outbreaks, the timeline tells another story: biohazard suits appeared in European newspapers even when no active public health crisis existed, reinforcing a narrative that frames migrants as potential disease carriers. Meanwhile, Libyan and Nigerien newspapers—such as Al-Marsad (2016–2023), Aïr-Info Agadez (2017–2018) and L’Événement (2020–2021) show almost no use of biohazard imagery. Their visuals feature soldiers, guns, and desert checkpoints, not facemasks and gloves—language that casts migration in terms of physical security. Migrants may be a risk to the state, not to its immune system.
What this contrast reveals is stark: In Europe, the health security frame justifies containment and legitimises emergency measures, even when the acutual risk of disease? is minimal. In Africa, the absence of medicalised pictures reflects not a lack of concern but a different politics, one where irregular migration is not managed through sanitised control measures.
In Italy and Malta, irregular migration is visually anchored at sea. The archetypal image is the overcrowded boat, a precarious vessel met by masked officers, rubber dinghies intercepted by both Italian and Maltese coast guards. These pictures frame migration as a spectacle of arrival, a humanitarian or sanitary emergency. But as we move south, to Libya and Niger, the landscape changes, and so does the frame.
A Guest Editorial