No abstract

In our research examining how people think and talk about immigration, we consistently find that people want to have a reasonable conversation about politics, but they often decide that productive conversations are not possible because other people are uninformed, irrational, close-minded, and uncivil. We argue that self-serving biases and phenomenological experiences lead to the biased perception that the self is far more capable of adhering to the ideals of rational deliberation than others, a process that we refer to as deliberative bias. In Study 1, we use data from in-depth interviews to develop the concept of deliberative bias. In Study 2, we use a survey to demonstrate that perceptions that other people are uninformed, irrational, close-minded, and uncivil are related to a decreased likelihood of talking politics with loose ties or those with opposing perspectives. These results suggest that deliberative bias may be a significant impediment to productive political conversations.

This research analyzes Spanish- and English-language news discourses in the United States following the announcement of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. It identifies how sources quoted by journalists affected framing of stories in five ethnic and general market newspapers. Coverage of Dreamers and DACA was generally positive, especially compared to common representations of undocumented immigrants as criminals and as a threat to the United States. Certain sources were a strong predictor for some frames about DACA, and undocumented people who arrived in the United States when they were children could be analyzed in communication research as a different category of immigrants than other adults.

This study summarizes the research produced from 1984 to 2014 about coverage of Mexico in the United States media. The most important findings are: in the last three decades there has been an exponential growth in academic production related to this topic; researchers working for public universities in border states (geographic proximity) or with high rates of Hispanics in the population (cultural proximity) are producing most of these studies; and there is a lack of studies related to the coverage of Mexico in United States digital media. Topics of academic interest clustered in four phases: