Crisis Framing of Immigration Politics in United States Newspapers, 1980-2022

Abstract

The United States (U.S.) news media is a critical actor in the deeply contested arena of immigration politics. Using an original dataset of 100,521 news articles that mention “crisis” alongside references to “(im)migration,” “border,” “(im)migrants,” “refugees,” and “asylum,” this chapter identifies multiple crisis frames and their connections to U.S. immigration politics from 1980 to 2022. We combine Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling, Social Network Analysis (SNA), corpus linguistics (collocates), and qualitative content analysis to scale and triangulate our analysis across the corpus, topic, and news article levels, allowing us to reveal prominent crisis frames and ground them in context. We show how Democrats and Republicans construct a series of crisis counter-frames that center partisan division in the news. We also find a bi-partisan construction of a migration crisis frame. We argue that this frame ascribed to migration reinforces the dehumanization and exclusion of different categories of (im)migrants. The news media’s uncritical reporting of this bi-partisan migration crisis frame, we argue, further reinforces the absence of humanity and dignity in framing (im)migrants while legitimizing (by not scrutinizing) the U.S. migration regime’s violence.