Media Narratives and the Life Cycle of Immigration Public Opinion

• In Event: Elites, Media, and Immigration Opinion

Abstract

How do views on immigration shift in response to immigration crises? A predominant view in the social sciences holds that increases in immigration lead to more anti-immigrant attitudes within the host country. However, I contend that this view is but a snapshot of a larger and more dynamic attitudinal process. I develop a dynamic opinion model that predicts more positive attitudes during the early stages of an immigration crisis—which I call the humanitarian phase—and differential individual shifts as the humanitarian phase transitions to rising antagonism toward immigrants. To evaluate this dynamic model, I scrape immigration media coverage from three prominent Colombian newspapers and run a Structural Topic Model (STM) to establish themes of the coverage. I find evidence for a humanitarian narrative driving early Colombian attitudes with respect to the initial influx of Venezuelans immigrants. Furthermore, a subsequent narrative shift in coverage of the Venezuelan crisis toward cultural and economic threats tracks with an increase in negative immigration attitudes among the mass public. These findings highlight the changing drivers of mass immigration opinion and contribute to our understanding of the relationship between media coverage and public opinion.

Author

• Alexander Tripp, Vanderbilt University