‘Unassimilable and undesirable’: News elites’ discursive construction of the American immigrant during the Ellis Island years

Abstract

This research examines the historical role news elites have played in shaping public perceptions of immigrants as a distinct social group. To that end, we identify the discursive strategies used by The New York Times to construct the 'American immigrant' during the Ellis Island years (1892-1924), a pivotal period when some of the nation's earliest immigration restriction laws were established. Data were collected from front page newspaper articles and analysis was developed using the techniques of critical discourse analysis. Drawing on Foucault's (1977) theoretical understanding of the enmeshment of power relations in discourse as well as Blumer's (1958) group position model, we develop and test five hypotheses about the role of news elites in constructing this social group. Finding support for all hypotheses, we show how the article's discursive choices dehumanized immigrants, trivialized their experiences, silenced their voices and helped legitimate an unequal social hierarchy that positions immigrants beneath non-immigrants.

Taxpaying, Importing, Enforcing: Emerging discourse patterns in online newspaper comments about US immigrant education

“…In addition to the local patterns described in the previous section, qualitative investigation of patterns related to the use of top keywords associated with emerging themes found two global patterns: (1) a consistent pattern of metonymy in which all immigrants are equated to illegal immigrants; and (2) an underlying assumption across arguments that immigration policy in the United States is a zero-sum game. The term "illegal immigrant" operates as code to implicitly indicate threat tied to an ethnic/racial identity (Cabaniss & Cameron, 2017;Stewart et al, 2011). This study robustly confirms the presence of this metonymic pattern in the 2016 emerging themes data.…”

“…Overall, use of these words appears in comments problematizing either immigrants (importing, handouts, populated, dumbed) or liberal immigrant supporters (fools). This more generalized theme was found less explicitly in previous work (Cabaniss & Cameron, 2017;Stewart et al, 2011;Strauss, 2012). The samples below are representative of patterns found in the deployment of these top keywords.…”

“…They also found a pattern of one individual immigrant standing for all undocumented immigrants who in turn stood for all Latinos. Cabaniss and Cameron (2017) examined 156 front-page articles of the New York Times about immigration published 1892-1924. Using CDA, the authors found that 75% of the articles referred to immigrants as groups rather than individuals, nearly half of the articles (46.8%) presented immigrants in negative ways, figurative lan-guage presented immigrants as animals and immigrants as uncontrollable forces and there was a strong pattern of associating immigrants with disease.…”

News Framing of the Arab Spring Conflict from the Lens of Newspaper Editorials

“…In fact, to enhance several interpretations of meaning, newspaper editors utilise particular linguistic structures such as rhetoric, metaphors and others. For manoeuvring such strategies, the news media is vested with the power to alter public discourse and (re) shape their public perception of certain groups (Cabaniss & Cameron, 2017).…”

Bordering work in contemporary political discourse: The case of the US/Mexico border wall proposal

“…In their historical study of newspaper articles about immigrants to the United States, Cabaniss and Cameron (2017) found that immigrants were categorized by using relatively neutral descriptors such as ‘newcomers’, ‘immigrants’ or ‘foreigners’; however, negative descriptors were used along with these categories, especially when discussing immigration policy. Examples of these descriptors included ‘undesirable’, .…”