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At the turn of the twentieth century in Italy and the United States, a transnational media dialogue emerged that promoted facilitated emigration policies that their supporters called colonization. Designed to permanently transfer a highly mobile population to a region with a proportionally small foreign-born population, colonization's press coverage exhibited an elite class and race consciousness that sought to remake landless Italian migrants, undesirable in other areas of the United States, into good citizens working their own farms in the American South. A close reading of articles published in Progressive Era magazines in Italian and English, and direct appeals for settlement to the Italian ambassador in Washington, demonstrate how proposals to colonize Italians in the American South shaped the debate over desirability in a period grappling with policy solutions, both in Italy and the United States, to an emerging immigration problem. Race and the immigration problem intersected powerfully in the Progressive Era South in unusual ways as colonizationists adopted their own definitions of racial desirability that centered white southerners' economic needs. When historians take distribution policy as seriously as Progressives did, the public debate over desirability that drove turn-of-the-century restrictionism becomes more complicated and the significance of the regional setting more pronounced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An online survey experiment with 897 US adults demonstrated that the level of believability of news headlines about illegal immigration was for a large part the result of an interaction of perceptions about news source trust and news content expectancy. This study was a second, successful attempt to test a theoretical news content believability model to explain correct and wrongful perceptions of reality. A better understanding of how people assess the believability of news would allow educators to fine-tune media literacy modules. There is certainly a need for enhanced media literacy as the participants of the experiment demonstrated that many of them believed news headlines about illegal immigration that contain misinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Migration was one of the most important issues in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. While Hillary Clinton promised an immigration reform that would create a path to citizenship, Donald Trump said he would deport illegal aliens, build a wall between the United States and Mexico, and suspend immigration from countries with a history of terrorism, capitalizing on some of the public’s fears through his rhetoric. We examine the ways mainstream national and regional press covered this issue from the Republican National Convention through Election Day. This content analysis of 12 news outlets finds that political themes drove the coverage more than anything else, with Donald Trump or a member of his team most often serving as theme sponsor. Though about half of the stories were neutral or balanced in tone, negative stories were sponsored either by the Trump team or other actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Miami-Dade County, Florida, has 2.5 million residents, with more than half (52%) born outside of the United States. Catering to these immigrant populations is a rich landscape of community media outlets focusing on the multiple Hispanic immigrant communities in this region. Drawing on the confluence of these geographic and socio-cultural factors, as well as the growing political influence of Hispanic populations, this study presents the results of a content analysis of election articles (N = 398) produced by four Hispanic immigrant media outlets in Miami-Dade over the course of a year. The results show an emphasis on covering elections in the home country, and contribute to the growing body of research on the increasingly transnational lives of immigrant populations and provide new insights into how these media outlets shape the coverage of elections that impact these communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent literature elucidates the ways in which news coverage of immigration and immigrants reflects, as well as shapes, discourse on citizenship, rights and belonging. Scholars find that undocumented immigrants are particularly vulnerable to media representations of illegality that reinforce bounded citizenship. However, more positive representations of certain groups of undocumented immigrants have emerged in recent years. This article draws upon content analysis of English-language print and online coverage of undocumented immigrants whose anti-deportation campaigns were led by national undocumented youth organisations in the USA. We find that campaigns for undocumented students were more likely to receive coverage than those of non-students. Regardless of a mention of educational status, articles included pro-immigrant quotes four times more frequently than anti-immigrant quotes. News coverage of anti-deportation cases represented citizenship in three related ways: citizenship as acculturation, citizenship as civic engagement (or ‘good citizenry’) and deservingness vis-à-vis victim status. We conclude that the media regularly expose the public to understandings of citizenship and membership that go beyond nationality, in ways that express empathy for particular immigrants during the enforcement (implementation) stage of the policy process. However, selective representations of citizenship may ultimately reinforce public support for restrictionist policies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Determining the speakers and arguments that dominate the news has long been a core task of media sociology. Yet systematic evidence linking the two—who says what or nothing at all—is lacking in news analysis, especially on the important issue of immigration. In this article, we analyze quoted sources and issue frames in U.S., French, and Norwegian news coverage of unauthorized immigration during 2011 and 2012. Supporting claims of transnational media homogenization, we find most quotes are “frameless,” that is, do not contain any substantial arguments addressing the problems, causes, or solutions associated with immigration. Of those quotes that do offer frames, problem frames are far more common than causes and solutions. Across nations and media types, government sources dominate the news, focusing on problems for society, while pro-immigration associations and unaffiliated individuals help account for overall greater attention to problems for immigrants. On the other hand, providing limited support for structural variation, less narrative-driven French media featured fewer frameless quotes and also tended to offer more cause and solution frames than U.S. or Norwegian media; dominant frames varied notably across nations; and elite right newspapers were more likely to quote anti-immigration speakers and emphasize problems for society than other types of outlets. We also find that the mediated immigration “debate” is often only a series of opposed monologues; even ideologically diverse groups such as unaffiliated citizens tend to be linked to a small range of frames, suggesting that “who says what” is not a reflection of society, but rather the outcome of journalistic practices and sources’ rhetorical tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on a quantitative, comparative analysis of U.S., French, and Norwegian news media, this article examines the use of human interest stories in the coverage of irregular immigration. In an innovative design, it systematically analyzes how human interest framing is related to the frequency and complexity of dominant arguments and perspectives (issue-specific frames). In contrast to the extant literature, arguing that news on immigration reduces immigrants to dangerous and anonymous threats, the article finds that about half the news stories studied have a human face or example. Moreover, these human interest articles tend to frame the issue from the immigrants’ perspective, describing their personal stories and struggle. This result nuances the commonly held assumption that human interest frames signal declining news quality, as the number and range of arguments presented are not significantly reduced when human narratives are employed. The prevalence of human interest frames is highest in Norway, where we also identify a reduction in frame complexity in human interest stories, indicating the need to rethink the democratic corporatist model in media system theory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We argue that scholars of immigrant integration should pay more attention to immigrants' ‘civic visibility’ among local government officials, organisations and other residents. To document and analyse immigrants' civic visibility, we examine coverage of the Vietnamese and Indian communities in newspapers in San Jose, Boston, Vancouver and Toronto from 1985 to 2005. We ask (i) do local newspapers cover the lives of immigrants and their descendants and (ii) what explains variation in the amount of coverage devoted to different immigrant-origin communities in different places? We find little evidence that newspaper coverage is affected by the demographics of an area, newsroom factors or simplified models of the national political and discursive opportunity structures. Instead, we take an ‘embedded’ context of reception approach, which takes seriously the intersection between general discursive opportunity structures on immigration and particular discourses about certain types of migrants. Our findings suggest the need to complicate national opportunity structure frameworks by considering how their interaction with specific immigrant communities produces between-country and between-group variation. Our results also underscore the importance of immigrant agency; greater visibility in local media appears to link with immigrants' greater presence in domestic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Prior research found that stereotypical media content shapes the perception of racial groups and social policy. Using the UCLA Communication Studies Digital News Archive, we sampled 146 cable and network news programs aired between 2008 and 2012. Findings revealed that Blacks were actually 'invisible' on network news, being underrepresented as both violent perpetrators and victims of crime. However, Whites were accurately represented as criminals. Moreover, Latinos were greatly overrepresented as undocumented immigrants while Muslims were greatly overrepresented as terrorists on network and cable news programs. The implications of these findings are contextualized using the 'guard dog' media coverage theory, structural limitations/economic interest of media, ethnic blame discourse, and the community philanthropy perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines media representations of immigration in Williamsburg, Virginia, a ‘new immigrant destination’ in the USA. Through a content analysis of coverage in Williamsburg's local newspaper, we explore how reporters, columnists and readers draw on nationally and internationally circulating discourses to produce public interpretations of immigration issues and construct symbolic boundaries between and among in-groups and ‘others’ in the community. ‘National boundaries drawn locally’ captures how media actors use nationally recognizable frames to interpret local issues and define the parameters of community and national belonging. ‘Localized symbolic boundaries’ take their meanings from place-based, cultural understandings, specific economic conditions and demographics in the local setting. Newspaper discussions in Williamsburg distinguish between ‘deserving’ foreign student workers (primarily from Eastern Europe and Asia) and ‘undeserving’, racialized, Latino ‘others’. Our analysis advances theories of boundary construction and holds implications for the politics of belonging more generally in other immigrant-receiving contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the past 2 decades, cable television and the Internet have greatly increased the availability of media content. The phenomenon has reinvigorated a longstanding debate about the effects of this media landscape, as people selectively get exposed to specific content. Based on U.S. national survey data, this article advances research in this area by analyzing the interplay between individuals' ideological predispositions, their selective exposure to cable news, and the relationship between selective exposure and their attitudes toward an issue with key policy-making implications: Mexican immigration. Results indicate conservative Republicans are more likely to watch FOX News, which is associated with negative perceptions of Mexican immigrants and higher support for restrictive immigration policies. Findings also suggest that liberals who get exposed to FOX News also show less support for Mexican immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how geographic proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border influences newspaper coverage of immigration issues. The authors investigate two questions: Do media organizations spatially proximate to the border offer more frequent coverage of Latino immigration than media organizations farther removed from the border? Do media organizations spatially proximate to the border offer more frequent coverage of the negative aspects of immigration than media organizations farther removed from the border? We find that news organizations closer to the border generate a higher volume of articles about Latino immigration, articles featuring the negative aspects of immigration, and articles regarding illegal immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When compared to studies of media effects, relatively few studies of the media focus on factors that influence the behavior of media organizations. Specifically, there are few empirical studies of the attributes and incentives of news organizations that might lead to slanted coverage of particular policy issues. In this study, we identify factors that lead to negatively slanted coverage of a specific policy issue: immigration. Using content analysis, geographic information systems (GIS) data, and contextual data, we find that newspaper ownership and proximity to the U.S.–Mexico border are related to slant in news articles and opinion pieces regarding immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the passage of the 1965 reform of American immigration law, the "newest" immigration has been one of the major concerns of American magazines including Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report. These magazines have published issues covering immigration, and in so doing, projected images of immigration and American identity as the nation of immigrants. Covers on immigration issues in the 1970s projected both affirmative and negative imagery. Some images displayed the virtues of immigrants, while others raised the specter of immigrants or the threat posed by them. A delicate balance between 'immigrants as a threat' and 'immigrants as central to the American identity' was maintained. However, the 1980s witnessed a turn toward a more negative view on immigrants, especially in imagery. The frequency of magazine covers with images of the negative implications of immigration dramatically increased, as the post-1965 debate over immigration culminated in the Immigration and Controlling Act of 1986 and the Immigration Act of 1990. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes prose metaphors about immigration in California that were published in the `Los Angeles Times' newspaper. Constitutive power of metaphor; Newsprint media's reinforcement of particular concepts in contemporary American discourse on immigration; Conflict between the anti-Proposition 187 editorial position and the anti-immigration metaphors of news stories.

The article focuses on the development and birth of the "Asmonean," the first English-language Jewish weekly publication in the U.S. and its editor Robert Lyon.The publication which Lyon acts as the editor, has said to play important role during the Jewish immigration in the U.S. It states that pioneer ehtnic publications tend to develop in response to the activities of other people. It mentions that the first publication in English was the "Asmonean" started in 1849, wherein Lyon established an umbrella factory but could not find permanent living in the field. It adds that the first issue of the "Asmonean" appeared on October 19, 1849 and politics held an important place in the publication.