Crimmigration Framing in News Media- Methods

Normalization of Crimmigration Framing in News Media

At the intersection of criminal law and immigration law, the new term “crimmigration” has emerged. Through contextual proximity, the media uses phrases and placement to criminalize immigration by using key terms and connecting immigration and criminality in the audience’s minds. By using these various phrases and the intentional placement, the person receiving the information takes on an opinion that is not rooted in the actual information, but the framing itself.

When a person’s citizenship status is mentioned when talking about a crime that is unrelated, it subconsciously connects immigrants with crime with the placement of the words in such short distance from each other, reading as one thought. Using terms such as “illegal immigrant” as opposed to “spouse of green card holder” or “parent of U.S. citizen child” have had a significant impact on the empathy and attribution that the audience has towards immigrants (Hoops and Braitman, 2019, pp. 9). Terms such as “illegal immigrant”, “illegal alien”, or “illegal” are harmful, as they negatively portray the mere existence of a person as bad. Hoops writes that these terms are not extended to other crimes, such as driving under the influence or committing murder (Hoops and Braitman, 2019, pp. 3). One would not be labeled as an “illegal murderer”, but in regards to immigrants, it has become commonplace for media outlets to use these terms when describing someone.

Research Questions

How is “crimmigration” framed in news coverage of immigration enforcement?

Do “crimmigration” frames vary across news sources (national and state, progressive and restrictive) and over time?

Methods

To be able to fully study how the media portrays immigrants as criminals through contextual representation in print, it was important to sample a wide variety of sources. Utilizing a robust query and searching three major databases (ProQuest, NexisUni, and NewsBank), over 10,400 articles were downloaded from various national, state, and local news sources, spanning from 1985-2021. Running a more detailed search on these articles to find instances specifically related to enforcement-type verbiage, (crime, criminal, etc.), results were then narrowed down by news source.

Using text-based analysis to sort through the articles, each reference was coded to a coding scheme with parent nodes of Criminalization and Anti-Criminalization, which then had child nodes that broke down even further. Being mindful that references could be coded into one or more categories, not specific to only crimmigration and anti-criminalization, the intent was to see where the most common occurrences were.

Sifting through initial findings, it became apparent that news sources (national) seemed to mirror each other, regardless of historical political leaning. Findings from both Washington Post and Washington Times had a great amount of overlap with each other within codes. Specifically taking note of the Binary nodes and the Threat Narrative node being so closely similar, a new question emerged.

Has Crimmigration Framing Become Normalized in News Media?

When doing network analysis across the crimmigration and anti-criminalization codes, there is a great deal of clustering that is being seen. At first glance, it might seem as though this points to the normalization of these binaries and narratives across news media, but in order to explore, the research must shift.

Studying the unit level (full articles) shows that both instances are occurring within the same article.

As opposed to focusing on the unit level for analysis, moving to the within-unit level to see how these various clusters are working in tandem with each other paints a clearer picture of what is actually being framed.

Next Steps

Before making any direct claims or inferences, the next step in the process is to analyze on a within-unit level. Opening up the entire article to code and seeing the ways in which the two narratives work in relationship to each other will be crucial to fully see the framing slant that the article is taking and how immigrants are being portrayed in the media.