The process of constructing a society's memory is relevant to the phenomenon of migration, and the challenges it raises in places where people seek shelter, protection and recognition. Indeed, it is through a shared collective knowledge of the past that groups develop a sense of togetherness and "communityness" (the notion of "us") which also implies the construction of "others" – those who do not share the same story about the past. As such, in many places, migration turns to a memory-driven contestation between different memory actors: the migrants, local governments and activists in varied political organizations among others. As part of these contestations, migrants try to gain recognition of their collective story about the past and to "remind" hosting societies' of their moral duty towards them. These contestations manifest in local and international media, turning media as a crucial social arena determining if and how migrants are welcomed. According to the UNHCR, as of today almost 80 million people are forcibly displaced. Among them, 45M are internally displaced, 26M are recognized as refugees and 4M are seeking asylum in shelter states all over the world. As such, the contemporary "migration crisis" is the worst human catastrophe since the Second World War. Consequently, debates about migration, its influence and the integration of migrants in hosting societies take place worldwide. However, questions of memory and how individuals and collectives relate to the past are not usually considered as integral part of the discussions about contemporary migration. In order to demonstrate the role of memory in migration-related discourses, this study uses the World Refugee Day as a case study. In 2001, the U.N. marked June 20 as the World Refugee Day in an attempt to raise awareness and shape public discussions about refugees and their situation. During the World Refugee Day different news media cover and publish migration related stories. As such, in this study we compare between four prominent daily newspapers from both Germany and Israel (Süddeutsche Zeitung; Die Welt; Haaretz and Yediot Achronot), two countries that are both very much occupied by questions of memory and remembering and of migration and its consequences. This longitudinal comparative analysis enables us to better articulate how memory processes become an integral part of the public debate around migration and what role news media play in these memory processes. We will use this study's findings in order to introduce what we define as the media-memory-migration nexus – a term describing all the mediated and communicated processes of memory that influence and shape public discussions about contemporary migration.
