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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]

We examine how local news monopolies affect misperceptions about the size of the immigrant population in Germany. We propose a theoretical framework in which het- erogeneous information from different local news outlets diffuses through social interactions. We posit that indirect exposure to information from multiple sources leads to more accurate beliefs in competitive markets. To causally identify the effect of local news monopolies on misperceptions, we exploit overlapping newspaper coverage areas as a source of exogenous variation in the number of available outlets. We estimate that local news monopolies increase misperceptions about the size of the local immigrant population by about four percentage points. We demonstrate that the effect of media monopolies hinges on social interactions. For individuals with fewer close social contacts, misperceptions remain unaffected by local news monopolies. Our results suggest that consolidation in the market for news decreases constituents' knowledge about critical policy issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the role of social media in political agenda setting? Digital platforms have reduced the gatekeeping power of traditional media and, potentially, they have increased the capacity of various kinds of actors to shape the agenda. We study this question in the Swiss context by examining the connections between three agendas: the traditional media agenda, the social media agenda of parties, and the social media agenda of politicians. Specifically, we validate and apply supervised machine learning classifiers to categorize 2.78 million articles published in 84 newspapers, 6,500 tweets posted on official party accounts, and 210,000 tweets posted by politicians on their own accounts from January 2018 until December 2019. We first use the classifier to measure the salience of the four most relevant issues of the period: the environment, Europe, gender equality, and immigration. Then, using a vector autoregression (VAR) approach, we analyze the relationship between the three agendas. Results show that not only do the traditional media agenda, the social media agenda of parties, and the social media agenda of politicians influence one another but, overall, no agenda leads the others more than it is led by them. There is one important exception: for the environment issue, the social media agenda of parties is more predictive of the traditional media agenda than vice-versa. These findings underscore how closely different agendas are tied together, but also show that advocacy campaigns may play an important role in both constraining and enabling parties to push their specific agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigration is a dramatic challenge for Europe: the press has a large influence in determining the opinion climate at this regard. This article investigates how a selection of newspapers in Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy covers the immigration issue from 1 January 2013 to 30 April 2014, before and after the Lampedusa shipwreck on 3 October 2013. Departing from the hypothesis that the media ownership may have a large influence on the content of the news, we investigate 12 different media companies in conjunction with other variables that may affect the coverage of the topic as well. A quantitative content analysis has been first used to derive information from a collection of 2602 articles retrieved through a set of specific keywords from different online database. Afterward, a Multiple Correspondence Analysis has been performed to explore and synthetize the collected information into a small number of 'factors'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a survey among contributors to the online comments sections of four Norwegian newspapers, we investigate the following research question: How do contributors describe their experiences of repercussions from writing comments on newspaper websites? Employing quantitative and qualitative analyses, we explore the influence of four variables: gender, anonymity, attitudes toward editorial policies and issue controversy. We find no influence from gender. However, regarding attitudes we find that the experience of repercussions is particularly prevalent among those who oppose strict editorial control with regard to reader comments, as well as among respondents who write comments on a radical right-wing website. Studying free-form answers which describe incidents of repercussions experienced by the respondents we find no sign of gender differences, but rather a strong dominance of statements related to issue controversies, and particularly regarding immigration and Islam. [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]

Media coverage of migration and migrants can exert considerable influence on the public's understanding of and attitudes towards migration. During the peak of what has been called 'the refugee crisis' in 2015, heated discussions about immigration and its possible impact filled the media landscape. This study focuses specifically on the news framing of insecurities regarding immigration, exploring what we have termed 'uncertainty frames' in the coverage of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants. This study will thus lend empirical support to a novel attempt to combine the concepts of uncertainty, risk, and framing. These frames were analyzed within French and Austrian media from 2015 to 2016. Drawing on a content analysis of tabloid and broadsheet articles, different types of uncertainty frames (economy, values, society, etc.) as well as different types of solution frames (the kind of solutions provided for the issue of immigration) were examined. Results suggest that even though all frames decrease in salience over time, important variations in different types of uncertainty frames do appear. It is argued that frames related to abstract issues seem to stay more salient throughout time in both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The media coverage of immigration serves as an important test for modern democracies' ability to handle difficult public issues. Systematic and comparative studies over longer time periods are, however, still rare. This is deeply unfortunate as the nature of both immigration and the press systems vary considerably not only across nations but also over time. This article charts the immigration debate in seven Scandinavian newspapers from the birth of modern immigration in the early seventies to the present-day situation. While supporting claims about a general historical shift towards a more problematizing and cultural discourse in Scandinavia, the analysis also identifies major differences in how countries, publications, and genres have handled this complex issue, which brings out fundamental dilemmas for both modern welfare states and journalists. Using the method of multiple correspondence analysis and subsequent cluster analysis, the article also demonstrates how historical press coverage can be fruitfully studied using Geometric Data Analysis as an alternative to frequentist methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to analyze how, in news articles published in online versions of print newspapers from both the United States and Mexico, media represent Mexican immigrants based on the wording they use in articles about immigration issues. The study was done by analyzing, counting and comparing the words used by newspapers. Using critical discourse analysis as methodology, this study aims to contribute to a growing body of literature on the language used by the media and its influence on media consumers. [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]

Although prior studies investigating immigration news typically documented a dominant focus on negativity and threats, only limited empirical research is available, which scrutinizes the way real-world developments affect these patterns in immigration news. This study aims to fill this void. First, we report results of a large-scale and longitudinal content analysis (N = 4,340,757) of trends in immigration news coverage in two Western European cases, Flanders (the northern, Dutch-speaking, largest region of Belgium) and the Netherlands, from 1999 to 2015. Both the salience of immigration as a news topic on itself and its linkages with three prominent issues (i.e., crime, terrorism, and socioeconomic issues) are explored. Second, this study builds on previous insights by comparing dynamics in immigration news to real-world events and developments. Overall, the results show that the linkage of immigration to issues of crime, terrorism, and the economy in Flemish and Dutch newspapers was considerable throughout the 17-year period under study. Yet there is limited evidence for a close relationship between news and real-life developments; hence, trends in immigration news seem largely unaffected by trends in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the frames used in the news coverage of the U.S. immigration debate during election years. Stories from four major U.S. newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the St. Petersburg Times, and The New York Times, were content analyzed. The analysis revealed that the conflict frame was the most dominant frame in the news coverage of the U.S. immigration debate whereas no significant changes in the framing of the U.S. immigration debate were found over time. The human interest frame was more likely to have a pro-immigration tone compared to other frames. The findings of immigrant characteristics showed that the “illegal” characteristic was the most frequently used to identify immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recommendations vary on sample sizes researchers should use to represent a year's worth of coverage from electronic databases. We use a keyword search to create two sampling frames of immigration news in 2009. We use LexisNexis to represent elite and regional news outlets and a keyword search of individual Arizona newspapers to represent state coverage. We examine the representativeness of themes, created and coded with IBM's Modeler program. We compare the efficiency of samples created with simple random sampling and constructed week sampling and conclude most variables are representative when sampling between 10 and 14 weeks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the way in which a section of the Italian press, in order to depict immigrants as out of place in Italy, portrays them as a threat to Italian cultural memory; in particular, the description of a space as a crucial element of Italian identity is often followed by the reasons why this space is now endangered by the presence of migrants in that same area. By using as a paradigmatic example the request for a vincolo paesaggistico in via Gluck, and by analysing a selection of articles from major Italian newspapers and two novels, namely Milano, fin qui tutto bene (2012) by Gabriella Kuruvilla and Contesa per un maialino italianissimo a San Salvario (2013) by Amara Lakhous, I argue that the threat to national identity is just a pretext and that this pattern represents an additional cog in the anti-immigration narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous empirical investigations demonstrate that exposure to the stereotypic and oftentimes threatening portrayals of race/ethnicity in the media predict a wide range of unfavorable intergroup outcomes. The current study extends this work by experimentally examining the role of emotions in this process. Specifically, a 2 (Immigration Threat: Present/Absent) × 2 (Ingroup Emotion Endorsement: Present/Absent) + 1 (Control Group) experimental design tests the influence of exposure to immigration news stories on group-level emotions and intergroup behaviors. Findings indicate that exposure to threatening immigration news coverage indirectly influences intergroup outcomes through group-level emotions. Exposure to immigration news indirectly produces active and passive harming behaviors through feelings of contempt. These results provide an important first step in understanding a broader array of media-related intergroup processes and effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agenda setting and community structure theories are conceptual inverses of one another that are rarely considered in tandem. This study employs DICTION 6.0 and McCombs and Funk's research design to compare news coverage of immigration and abortion over a 10-year period in national, high-demographic interest, and low-demographic interest newspapers. Although only modest support is found for inter-media, second-level agenda setting, considerable support is found for community structure effects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On 1 January 2014 the transitional controls on free movement adopted by the UK when Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU in 2007, ended. This paper demonstrates how the discourses of politicians relating to their removal, amplified via news media contributed to the extension of state bordering practices further into everyday life. Based on ethnographic research into everyday bordering during 2013–15 the paper uses an intersectional framework to explore how this homogenizing, bordering discourse was experienced and contested from differently situated perspectives of Roma and non-Roma social actors from established communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The most recent migration of Roma from Central-Eastern Europe to Canada started in the 1990s. Several thousand people from former socialist countries, including Hungarian Roma, moved overseas. There were many reasons but for Roma, the motivations not only included a drastic loss of employment, but re-emerging systemic and increasingly violent racism. This article focuses on the discursive framing of these motivations and the reaction within both Hungarian and Canadian newspapers from 1999 to 2013. In the article we show how the press engaged in framing and counter-framing the policies and politics of the host country through their coverage of “the Hungarian Roma” issue. Specifically, we focus on the differing and shifting spheres of consensus and the changing political/policy contexts by conducting an in-depth comparison of the changing media frames in Hungarian and Canadian newspaper coverage. We show how the “Hungarian Roma issue” becomes an example and reflection of the changing political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I combine theorizations of the selfie as an aesthetic and technological practice of digital self-representation with a theatrical conception of spectatorship, inspired by Adam Smith, in order to argue that the selfie has the potential to operate as a significant ethico-political spectacle in the spaces of Western publicity. I exemplify my argument by using the remediation of migrant and refugee selfies in mainstream news as a case study of “symbolic bordering”—as a technology of power that couples the geopolitical bordering of migrants in the outskirts of Europe with practices of “symbolic bordering” that appropriate, marginalize, or displace their digital testimonies in Western news media. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Over time, research on the ‘immigrant press’ in the communication field has been subsumed by other theoretical concepts, particularly ‘ethnic’ and ‘transnational’ media. This article reevaluates the relevance of the ‘immigrant press’ as a theoretically distinct concept as articulated by Park in his foundational book The Immigrant Press and its Control. Drawing on 27 interviews with editors, journalists, and publishers in three areas of the United States with different immigration histories and profiles, we conclude Park’s defining characteristics of the immigrant press – an emphasis on the specificity of the first-generation immigrant’s experience, serving as a cultural and civic translator while facilitating national identity, and being an aid to assimilation – are all applicable today, more so than the major themes expressed in literature on ethnic and transnational media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La población magrebí ha sido uno de los colectivos inmigrantes más numerosos en el territorio español desde finales del siglo XX, lo que ha motivado que posea una notable representación en sus medios de comunicación. Por ello, este trabajo ha tenido como objetivo examinar el tratamiento de las informaciones publicadas sobre la población magrebí y los aspectos teóricos del binomio framing-mundo araboislámico en los periódicos de tirada nacional y regional en España durante la crisis. Para llevar a cabo el estudio, se empleó una metodología mixta basada en el análisis de contenido cuantitativo y cualitativo. El análisis concluye que el frame más habitual es el de interés humano, aunque se ofrezca una representación negativa de este colectivo, un hecho que puede derivar en actitudes y discursos críticos con lo araboislámico. The Maghreb population has been one of the largest groups of immigrants in Spain since the end of the 20th century. This has led to a noteworthy representation in the Spanish media. By focusing on national and regional newspapers during the economic crisis in Spain, the paper aims at examining the treatment of the Maghreb population and certain theoretical aspects of binomial framing of the Arab-Islamic world. A mixed methodology based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of content was used to carry out this study. The analysis concludes that the most common frame is human interest, although a negative representation of this group is offered, a fact that may lead to critical discourse and attitudes towards the Arab-Islamic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study tests the influence of threatening-mediated intergroup contact on intergroup relations. A 2 (Immigration: Threat, No-threat) × 2 (Ingroup Group Exemplar: Present, Absent) + 1 (Control Condition) experimental design was used to examine both the direct and indirect influence of news exposure on attitudes toward immigration. The moderating role of previous local news consumption was also investigated. Results indicate that exposure to a threatening news story about immigration directly affected attitudes toward immigrants’ human rights, but not attitudes toward immigration policy. News exposure also indirectly influenced both types of immigration attitudes through feelings of intergroup anxiety, particularly for heavy news consumers. The discussion highlights the implications for both intergroup threat theory and cultivation research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public opposition to immigration in Britain reflects perceptions of immigrants that focus disproportionately on "illegal" immigration and asylum seekers, rather than more numerous workers, students, and family members. This study examines coverage of immigration in the British national press, to see whether press portrayals of migrants provide a basis for these images of immigration underlying public attitudes. We use corpus linguistic methods to analyze 43 million words of news from 2010 to 2012. Among other findings, we show that press portrayals match public perceptions of migrants, with "illegal immigrants" and "failed asylum seekers" as predominant depictions in broadsheet and tabloid newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotions play an important role in explaining why news framing has effects on opinions about immigration. Yet, our knowledge regarding which emotions are relevant for different types of news frames is limited. This survey experiment (N = 715) determines to what extent positive and negative emotions mediate framing effects about immigration, and whether mediation depends on the type of frame at stake. We exposed participants to one of four preestablished frames: the emancipation, multicultural, assimilation, or victimization frame. Results show that the emancipation and multicultural frames cause the most emotional response. Positive emotions function as mediators of framing effects on immigration opinions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented to the issue of the journal that discusses topics such as public perceptions of the journal, submissions from authors, and framing of the press coverage of immigration.

Interest groups or “think tanks” influence how people and policymakers understand public policies in part by using impression management to enhance their credibility as information sources. Using immigration policy as a case study, this research examines the impression management tactics of one interest group (the Center for Immigration Studies), compares its coverage of immigration issues to that of large-circulation U.S. newspapers, and determines the extent to which it has spread its messages across various news outlets. Although the organization’s positions on immigration represent a negative outlier in the debate, it has entered the dominant political discourse. The study offers a new methodological and conceptual framework for analyzing the behavior and impact of think tanks, as well as for studying impression management more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

The issue of immigration has become a major topic of discussion and policy activity in liberal democratic states in the twenty-first century. In the policy discourse, the media discussion and the academic literature there are two key assumptions which typically underpin thinking on the topic: first that a majority of the public are in favour of more restrictions on immigration and second, that public pressure pushes policy on immigration controls in a restrictive direction. This collection aims to open up discussion on these assumptions. This introductory contribution introduces the topic of the public and the politics of immigration controls and briefly outlines some of the key points from the articles in the collection. We conclude by suggesting four key questions that future research on the public the politics of immigration controls should engage with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some studies suggest that challenger parties push new issues onto the agenda, especially when they ‘own’ these issues. Others claim that established parties largely determine how prominent issues appear on the agenda. This article contributes to this debate by focusing on an issue on which challenger parties have most ‘ownership’: immigration. Political claims on this issue made by political parties in newspapers in seven West European countries after three events that could potentially trigger attention to immigration were studied. Large and government parties appear most prominent in the news. However, findings show a significant, positive effect of associative issue ownership on claims-making in the news, while controlling for party size and government status. So, when challengers have issue ownership they appear as claim-makers on the issue. These results paint a balanced picture of the role that challenger and established parties have in setting the agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The media have a strong tendency to frame political issues with a focus on personal and emotional cases. We do not, however, know if there is a close link between the news media’s use of these frames and the news preferences of the public. Such a close relationship may exist either because human interest news coverage is driven by audience demand or because the public might be influenced by the degree of individual news stories in the news. On the other hand, the audience’s news preferences may be unrelated to the actual media coverage on irregular immigration due to citizens’ selective media exposure, which may be driven by political predispositions. Based on a large quantitative content analysis conducted in the United States, France, and Norway and a following public opinion survey in the same countries, we find that the application of a human interest frame in a country’s news coverage of irregular immigration does not correspond with the public’s preferences for this type of news coverage. On the individual level, our findings demonstrate that liberal audience groups favor human interest–framed news coverage, while conservatives do not agree that individual news stories would provide a better understanding of the issue of irregular immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay addresses the question of how irregular migration is framed in Western media from the location of the migration researcher. What challenges and dilemmas do media frames and practices of framing create for researchers’ participation in communicating research about irregular migration to the public? The essay is written in dialogue with topics raised by the articles in the special issue and seeks to supplement, and at times interrogate, its scrutiny of how irregular migration is covered in the news and received by the audience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This comment focuses both on issues related to comparative analysis of media systems, and to issues related to immigration, specifically. It explores the implication of findings on the prevalence of human interest framing in immigration coverage for comparative analysis, suggesting that it may be too simplistic to assume that commercialization is always associated with human interest framing, particularly in coverage of marginalized populations. It also explores the complexity of public opinion on immigration, and issues about how to understand the role of media over time in the evolution of public opinion. [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]

The media coverage of irregular immigration has the power to influence public opinion, fuel the formation of popular movements, and mold the political climate related to immigration. Based on comparative and multimethod data sets, this special issue of American Behavioral Scientist contributes to a renewed understanding of the role and impact of the mass media on the current climate, opinions, and policies related to irregular immigration in three different Western countries. Analysis of source strategies and ethnographic methods is combined with large-scale quantitative content analysis of news and surveys measuring the reception of this news coverage by audiences in the United States, France, and Norway. The research design pursued in this special issue of American Behavioral Scientist identifies (a) the dominant voices, narratives, and arguments in the mainstream media coverage of irregular immigration; (b) how stakeholders work strategically to promote their messages in the media; and (c) what attitudes the public holds about the coverage of irregular immigration in the media, and how these media evaluations relate to their attitudes toward immigration. Together, the articles in this issue offer new and surprising insights into how a controversial and important issue is strategically framed, covered in the news, and understood among the audience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Internationally, the issue of irregular immigration is highly contested and actors promote different frames in the news. In this article, we analyze the strategizing that goes on behind the scenes among nongovernmental organizations and public immigration authorities. Many studies have documented how strategic actors take advantage of mainstream news media conventions, but there is a dearth of research on how these frame sponsors critically reflect on their strategies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews, we analyze the dilemmas and challenges the actors face in adapting their communication strategies to the news media. The immigration authorities are systematic and professional in their media work, with easy access to leading media. Faced with the news media’s emphasis on dramatic individual stories, however, they struggle to find a media strategy that balances efficient communication with bureaucratic regulations and values. The NGOs, on the other hand, have the opportunity to exploit media conventions and pitch emotional, individual stories to journalists. Still, for both type of actors, the challenge is to expand the media interest beyond such stories to foster a systemic debate on immigration policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite an extensive dialogue on the subject of immigration, there has been little systematic cross-national investigation into the framing of immigration in the news media. Understanding the evolution of frames is an important piece of how we conceive of the link between the public's political priorities and policy makers' responses. While the multi-directional relationships that exist between media, public policy and public opinion often pose challenges to precisely extracting media effects, there is still much that can be said about how the content and tone of immigration frames change over time in response to major policy changes or focusing events. Using automated content analysis (ACA) of print news data from Canada and Britain, I examine immigration framing from 1999 to 2013, identifying immigration-related frames in print news coverage and identifying trends in the volume and tone of frames over time. Results offer insight into striking commonalities in the frames used by each country's print media, and the divergent evolution in the emphasis on certain frames over others, largely predicated on coverage of focusing events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sheds light on recent discursive shifts in representations of the “Balkan” in the Slovenian press. I focus on the strategies that the media, and the left-wing press in particular, uses to construct the identities of immigrant workers in Slovenia. I use critical discourse analysis to show how the media has recently attempted to avoid Balkanism and tried to create a more inclusive, democratic rhetoric on these workers and how they become a legitimate “other” in Slovenian society only when constructed as helpless victims. I analyze the role of the victim in the Slovenian imaginary, its disillusioned hero a cogent signifier for collective national identification, and how this figure’s characteristics are transposed to ex-Yugoslav immigrants to Slovenia, placing them within a rhetoric of victimization that is framed within a broader humanitarian discourse in order to interrogate what Maria Todorova has defined as Balkanism. I conclude by exploring victimization as the process of desubjectivation and point out aspects of victimization that reaffirm long-standing power relations between Europe and the Balkans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a quantitative examination of how newspaper articles in the UK, France and Italy most commonly frame immigration and migrants. A developing literature on the securitisation of policy and discourse related to migration suggests the prominence of this narrative, but the prevalence of this particular portrayal of migration has not been placed into comparative context through cross-country analysis of the relative prominence of various immigration-related issues. To test the securitisation thesis I tabulate not only security narratives in the press, but also economic ones, comparing the relative frequency of these two broader narratives. The results indicate that it would be premature to speak of a pre-eminent securitised meta-narrative within the European press. I find that overt references to physical threat or crime occur relatively infrequently, with only the mention of the border being more common. Instead, issues with economic implications, such as the labour market, asylum and fiscal costs, exhibit at least equal salience, though the degree to which the press grants attention to specific economic or security issues varies substantially between countries. [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]

The aim of this article is to identify whether differences exist in local and national news framing of immigration. Using 12 years (2001–2012) of print media data from 15 Canadian and British print media sources, this article presents the first attempt to look for systematic differences in cross-city, within-country and cross-national framing on the subject of immigration. Contextual variables such as change in the unemployment rate and in the rate of foreign-born within cities and countries are introduced to test the robustness of the findings from a computer-automated content analysis. Findings suggest that, contrary to expectations, there is little by way of systematic evidence that national and local newspapers frame immigration according to different concerns. Furthermore, cross-city news coverage does not vary based on local contextual factors such as changes in the unemployment rate or rate of foreign-born. Indeed, it would appear that there is little evidence to support hypotheses that local coverage attends only to the ‘local consequences’ of immigration such as crime and unemployment, and that national concerns such as border security and broader economic outlook are solely the purview of national media. Rather, there are far fewer differences in the content and tone of immigration framing among print news sources than conventional wisdom might suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented which discusses articles within the issue on the theme of immigrants and minorities in the press with topics, including mass media framing, Muslims in the British press and the relationship between immigration and national security in Europe.

This article aims at problematizing how some international newspapers with global impact cover the phenomenon of Portuguese high skilled mobility in recent times. In this sense, the article is grounded in the literature about history, motivations and impacts of high skilled professionals as well as in studies concerning media coverage of migration phenomena. Assuming that high skilled mobility is a phenomenon of political and ideological relevance, the article presents the results provided by the analysis of a sample of international newspapers contents. The conclusions emphasise that media tend to describe the current mobility flows from Portugal, following a line or argumentation which is deep-rooted in colonial and imperialistic frames of representation through which mobility to countries such as Brazil and Angola, are presented as negative and depreciative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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