Immigration Federalism, the Nation-State, and Immigrant Rights in US News

• In Event: Structuring Migration, Mobility, and Citizenship

Abstract

How the news reports on immigration and frames (im)migrants are significant for understanding progressive and restrictive national, state, and local policies. Reporters do much more than communicate to the public important (selected) details about policies: they construct frames and attach meaning to immigration politics and (im)migrants. We argue in this paper that the kinds of experts (e.g., pro- or anti-immigrant organizations, federal or local law enforcement, elected officials, or policy area experts) that reporters rely on are essential to developments in immigration federalism. We examine over 300,000 news items from ProQuest, NexisUni and Newsbank databases to analyze coverage of immigration federalism from 1993 to 2022. We combine machine learning techniques such as name entity recognition, topic modeling, and Social Network Analysis (SNA) with qualitative coding to reveal and contrast prominent patterns in the framing of immigration policy and immigrants and link particular frames to experts that reporters rely on. This allows us to contribute to the study of American political development by highlighting how prominent news media actively engage in the politics of immigration federalism via framing the immigrant rights movement, organizations, campaigns, and immigrant communities as (in)visible, (de)legitimate or (de)centered in their coverage of immigration. Our unique combination of social science and data science methods also contributes to bridging immigration federalism with multiple fields, from critical data science, communication, and journalism to REP and critical migration studies, where the study of framing and language have a much firmer theoretical and empirical foundation.

Authors

• Allan Colbern, Arizona State University

• Shawn Walker, Arizona State University