When Migration Enters the Debate: Media Claims, Belonging, and Policy Controversies in Swiss Cantons

This paper examines how solidarity is constructed in public discourse, with a particular focus on how different forms of solidarity shape the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion within the political community. While existing literature often treats solidarity as either inclusive or exclusive, this paper starts from a different idea: solidarity is not simply extended or denied but actively structures the terms under which belonging is recognized and justified. To explore this, the paper analyses two public debates in the Swiss canton of Ticino that, at first glance, appear to reflect contrasting logics of inclusion. The first concerns the proposal of a universal basic income (UBI), typically associated with universalistic and redistributive forms of solidarity. The second focuses on the revision of the Swiss citizenship law, a domain in which inclusion is explicitly selective and tied to legal and institutional criteria. By analysing these two cases, the paper investigates how solidarity operates across distinct policy arenas and how different justificatory logics contribute to the construction of the civic “we.” Empirically, the analysis draws on a claims-making approach applied to media discourse. Rather than focusing on individual attitudes or institutional outcomes, the paper examines how political actors, institutions, and other public figures articulate claims about deservingness, inclusion, and membership. This approach makes it possible to capture solidarity as a discursive and contested process, in which boundaries are continuously negotiated through competing representations of who belongs and on what grounds. The findings show that the two debates generate distinct configurations of solidarity, but not in a straightforward opposition between inclusion and exclusion. In the UBI debate, solidarity is framed in universalistic terms, extending in principle to all members of society. However, this apparent inclusiveness is accompanied by the emergence of moralized distinctions between those who contribute and those who do not, producing implicit boundaries based on behaviour, productivity, and perceived deservingness. In this sense, universalism does not eliminate exclusion but reconfigures it along different lines. In contrast, the citizenship debate constructs solidarity as explicitly conditional. Inclusion is tied to criteria such as language proficiency, economic participation, and adherence to social norms, transforming belonging into a status that must be earned. At the same time, however, the analysis also identifies counter-claims that challenge this conditionality by framing certain groups, particularly individuals born or raised in Switzerland, as already belonging to the community. These claims shift the focus from conditional inclusion to recognition, emphasizing social embeddedness and intergenerational ties as grounds for membership. Building on these findings, the paper engages with the concept of reflective solidarity, focusing in particular on its dimension of recognition. It argues that recognition should not be understood as a stable outcome, but as a discursively mediated and context-dependent process, through which the boundaries of the political community are negotiated. By bringing together insights from migration studies, welfare deservingness, and media discourse analysis, the paper proposes to conceptualize solidarity as a dynamic form of boundary-making, in which inclusion and exclusion are not opposites but mutually constitutive.