Immigration in the Chilean Press: An Analysis Based on Facebook Data Mining

As Chile has gone from being an export-based country to a country that receives migrants in transit, immigration has become a common subject in Chilean society. In this context, this article provides a content analysis of the headlines of 156 Chilean media reports related to immigration using data mining from the social media website Facebook. The main objective of the study is to observe how this phenomenon has evolved compared to other studies that analyzed the subject of inmigration in 2017, considering that during this period, the Venezuelan population became the most prominent foreign population in the country, overcoming the Peruvians that had occupied this position since 1990. The results indicate that there is an incidence of headlines linked to illegal immigration and safety, linking these two phenomena closely. Furthermore, there is a regional aspect to the findings because a number of the headlines were from reports in the Northern zone of the country, especially the village of Colchane, where humanitarian crises were caused because of people wanting to enter Chile illegally.