Constructing Immigrants: Portrayals of Migrant Groups in British National Newspapers, 2010–2012

Abstract

Public opposition to immigration in Britain reflects perceptions of immigrants that focus disproportionately on “illegal” immigration and asylum seekers, rather than more numerous workers, students, and family members. This study examines coverage of immigration in the British national press, to see whether press portrayals of migrants provide a basis for these images of immigration underlying public attitudes. We use corpus linguistic methods to analyze 43 million words of news from 2010 to 2012. Among other findings, we show that press portrayals match public perceptions of migrants, with “illegal immigrants” and “failed asylum seekers” as predominant depictions in broadsheet and tabloid newspapers.

Public attitudes towards support for migrants: the importance of perceived voluntary and involuntary migration

“…1 Although according to the UN convention, the term migrant covers all cases where the decision to migrate is taken freely by the individual concerned, the term comprises a heterogeneous category in public and political debates (Moses 2006). This offers room for construing different understandings of who these newcomers are and why they are "here" (Blinder 2015;Blinder and Allen 2016). The labels "voluntary" and "involuntary" are used in different ways and in different contexts, but underlying these differences is the distinction between, on the one hand, migrants who hardly have any other choice than to leave their home country, and, on the other hand, migrants who do have a clear choice and freely decide to move (Lynn and Lea 2003).…”

Pathological integration, or, how East Europeans use racism to become British

“…East Europeans talked about immigration, benefit scrounging, terrorism, refugees and even political correctness in ways that would have been recognizable to most native British people. That's because these were familiar motifs already in wide circulation (see, e.g., Blinder and Allen ). They harkened back to the immigrants of yesteryear, who stole native jobs and trampled on cherished national customs (see Solomos ).…”

Immigration and the British news media: Continuity or change?

“…News coverage often fails to make adequate distinctions between the various types of migration and the categories associated with these types, instead conflating them together in a relatively undifferentiated way (Baker et al, ; Bennett et al, ; Berry et al, ; Blinder & Allen, ; Buchanan et al, ; Gabrielatos & Baker, ; Goodman & Speer, ; Khosravinik, ; Philo et al, , ; Smith, ).…”

“…In the context of the politics of immigration, the conflation of migration types is important as evidence suggests that the public's (mis)perceptions about the scale, nature, and distinctions between types of immigration align closely with the representations advanced by mass media outlets (Blinder, 2015;Blinder & Allen, 2015). While public opinion about immigration varies depending on preferred attributes such as skill level, purpose of settlement, ethnicity, and cultural proximity, among others (Ford, 2011;Ford, Morrell, & Heath, 2012;Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2014;Kaur-Ballagan & Mortimore, 2017;Naumann, Stoetzer, & Pietrantuono, 2018;Valentino et al, 2017), there are significant differences between "imagined immigration" (i.e., how people perceive immigration) and "statistical immigration" (i.e., government records of immigration).…”