Date of Completion

2019

Document Type

Honors College Thesis

Department

Global Studies

Thesis Type

Honors College, College of Arts and Science Honors

First Advisor

Pablo Bose

Second Advisor

Eleanor Miller

Third Advisor

Maeve Eberhardt

Keywords

immigration, media, crime, immigrant, Latino

Abstract

This project works to uncover the ways in which Latinx immigrants who have committed crimes are represented in popular media and White House correspondence through a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods, namely word counts, content analysis, and coding. The data consists of news articles and White House correspondence related to several high-profile immigrant criminal cases and policy decisions. News articles were selected at random from a pool of articles written in the aftermath of the immigrant cases being analyzed. Quantitative analysis in this study consists of word counting and context observation through word trees and reveals that the words used to describe Latinx immigrants in the data are largely negative. Content analysis and coding reveal three dominant narratives: immigrants as a threat, immigrants as a burden, and immigration as a bargaining chip. Along with each dominant narrative exists an accompanying counter-narrative, which opposes the main theme but is significantly less perceptible. This study contributes to important dialogue about immigrant criminality, a topic which is often conflated and misunderstood in the United States.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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