Data and scripts for the paper 'Migration in the Threat Landscape: Evidence from National Security Documents across 118 Countries'

How do states formally represent migration in relation to security in their strategic documents? Despite extensive research on the migration-security nexus, this question has not been examined comparatively across a global corpus. This study analyses national security and defence documents from 118 countries (1987–2025) using two independent computational methods and finds that migration is marginal in official threat discourse. Only 25 countries explicitly link migration with threat, 19 of them European, concentrated in Central and Eastern Europe. When the full corpus self-organises through unsupervised topic modelling, migration emerges as a coherent discursive formation but sits 21% below the baseline rate of threat language - actively less threat-linked than the documentary norm. We argue that national security documents function as a genre filter: bureaucratic production processes, consensus-building, and specialist audiences dampen politicised migration rhetoric. This filter is content-specific: terrorism and organised crime - sharing the same departmental remits as migration - are prominently threat-linked. The finding is consistent with Paris School arguments that migration securitisation operates through practices rather than formal declarations. Yet it also exposes a proximity trap: the field’s European focus leaves non-European securitisations - such as corruption, which developing economies frame as undermining state capacity - largely unexamined.