Engaging with the literature of issue competition and political communication, this paper investigates whether the intensification of a crisis increases issue salience by studying the relationship between the extent of the migration and public and political communication about migration in several European countries. In order to better understand the mechanisms shaping government responses to crises, this paper investigates two dimensions of issue salience. The first dimension examines the extent to which governments devote attention to the crisis based on the actual extent of the policy challenge. The second dimension considers how governments respond to public perception about the crisis by investigating whether governments engage more with the crisis topic as the voters are more dissatisfied about the problems posed by the crisis. To devise a measure of government attention to migration, this study quantitatively codes speeches from prime ministers and presidents of European countries available in the EUSpeech dataset (Schumacher and Berk 2020) using unsupervised topic modelling. The intensity of the crisis is measured by looking at the inflow of asylum seekers. Public discontent related to migration is conceptualised by a sentiment analysis of tweets that concern the topic of migration. These two measures are then regressed on the level of issue attention using mixed effects regression models.The findings indicate that governments respond to negative public perceptions of the crisis, but not to the extent of the policy challenge. The findings illustrate the importance for future research to separate and examine multiple dimensions of issue salience.