countries. We interpret these findings as suggesting that - while there is substitution across destinations that are similar - a worsening news sentiment in European countries does not induce migrants to return to their origin country.

Our findings have important policy implications. Attempts to discourage migrants from reaching their preferred destination countries based on the use of negative, aggressive, and discriminatory tone in the public discourse on migration are unlikely to be successful. While a more negative tone of the news makes some migrants stay longer in Libya, delaying their journey to their final destination, this happens _only_ for migrants located in specific areas of the country or traveling using a specific route, and only when there are specific conditions in destination countries. Moreover, the strategy employed by populist governments to reduce migration to their country by creating an unwelcoming environment for migrants is politically unsustainable due to spillover effect of the tone of the news across destination countries. Given that a more negative tone of the news in one country increases migration flows to similar destinations (but not the willingness of migrants in Libya to return to their country of origin), the use of this populist strategy undermines the basis for the cooperation between European governments in the management of migration flows from Africa.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the related literature. Section 3 provides background information on migration in Libya. Section 4 describes the data. Section 5 presents the empirical strategy, and Section 6 discusses the results. Section 7 concludes.

# **2 Literature**

Our paper is related to the small - but rapidly growing - literature looking at the effects of media exposure on migration choices. A few studies document a positive association between Internet access and migration intentions and aspirations (Pesando et al., 2021; Grubanov-Boskovic et al., 2021). B ̈ohme et al. (2020) show how geo-referenced online search data on migration-related terms can be used to measure migration intentions in origin countries and to predict bilateral migration flows. Adema et al. (2022) uses individual-level data from 112 countries to provide causal evidence that an increase in mobile internet access increases the desire to migrate and actual migration by lowering the cost of acquiring information on potential destinations. Other studies look at the effect of TV and newspaper articles on migration. For instance, Farr ́e and Fasani (2013) find that exposure to TV reduces internal migration in Indonesia. Wilson (2021) shows that access to newspaper articles and TV news providing information about potential labor market opportunities increases migration to areas mentioned in the news.<sup>6</sup> More generally, our paper is related to the literature on the effect of information on migrants’ decisions. Shrestha (2019) shows that information on migrants’ mortality rates decreases migration flows from Nepal to Malaysia and to the Gulf countries. Baseler (2023) documents that providing information on urban earnings in Kenya increases migration to the capital. Some papers use randomized controlled trials to understand the role of risk information and perceptions in the decision-making process of migrants. Bah et al. (2023) show that providing information

> 6Another important source of information is migration networks at destination. These provide prospective migrants with information about the migration process and economic opportunities, helping them to shape their migration decision (McKenzie and Rapoport, 2010; Beine et al., 2015; Giulietti et al., 2018).

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