From Dreamers to Family Separation: The Content and Consequences of U.S. Media Coverage of Immigrant Children

Abstract

News stories about the DREAM Act, migrant caravan, unaccompanied minors, anchor babies, children in cages, assaults in detentions, and family separation have placed children at the forefront of the current political moment. To what extent is the news that includes representations of children and immigrant youth substantively different from overall immigration news? What are the consequences of these representations on political attitudes and behaviors? This dissertation investigates these questions and connects findings back to the theories of engagement and disengagement of threat in U.S. portrayals of immigrants. Chapter 2 of my dissertation explores the characteristic of age-at-arrival in Dreamer immigration news stories. In 2019, I ran a 2-wave survey experiment in which respondents read a news story about an undocumented immigrant that either migrated at eleven or twenty-one years old. Respondents in the lower age-at-arrival condition report more support for the immigrant; and this effect is most pronounced amongst those who were more opposed to immigration in general. A second 2-wave survey conducted in 2021 explored two possible mechanisms behind the impact of age-at-arrival: attitudes towards (a) assimilation and (b) attribution of responsibility. This study 2 replicates the results of Study 1 and finds that treatment effects are most impactful amongst respondents who hold stronger general attitudes about assimilation and responsibility. Taken together, these experiments suggest that age-at-arrival does indeed impact Americans’ attitudes towards young immigrants, and that this effect is partially explained by general attitudes about immigration, assimilation, and responsibility. Chapter 3 asks: now that I have established that young immigrants do elicit higher levels of support, to what extent is the news that includes representations of immigrant children and youth different from overall immigration news? This study examines 17 national newspapers and their coverage of immigration from 1990 to 2020. Using dictionary-based and structured topic modeling content analytic approaches, I find that newspaper coverage of immigration that includes mentions of children: (a) tends to be more positive in net sentiment, (b) tends not to focus on topics of politics and violence, and (c) tends to correlate with topics about family, education, religion, and community. Threat is found to be a regular feature of this news coverage; however, threat language does not vary systematically with the language of childhood or race. These findings signal a potential influence of (positive) language about community in coverage about immigrant children over the last few decades. Finally, Chapter 4 tests the impact of language about community (i.e., family, religion, and the arts) found in the content analysis. This chapter asks: how do cues of community integration and arriving with children impact support for an undocumented immigrant adult? In 2022, I ran a five-treatment web-based survey experiment in which White respondents read a news story about an undocumented adult that migrated to the U.S. with two characteristics manipulated: (a) arriving with a child or not and (b) being an integrated member of the community or not. Results suggest that community integration of the migrant leads to higher levels of support, while arriving with a child does not seem to impact support. In sum, my dissertation points to how age-at-arrival, assimilation, attribution of responsibility, and community integration in the representations of children and childhood in contemporary U.S. media work to disengage notions of threat often found in regular immigration news coverage.