Making the “Invisible” a “Visible Problem” — The Representation of Chinese Illegal Immigrants in U.S. Newspapers

Abstract

In this essay, I critically examined how the Chinese illegal immigrants were represented by theu.s.newspapers between the years 2000 and 2010. Four themes were unearthed. These four themes are 1) New Discourse of Racial Binary in Illegal Immigration, 2) Illegalizing “the Other”, 3) Victims of Chinese Culture, Politics and “Compatriots”, 4) Representation of Authentic Chinese Culture. The critical elaboration of these four themes demonstrated how the news discourse constructed Chinese illegal immigrants as the “outsiders within”. Ultimately, this project served two purposes. One was to “fill” the missing gap left unattended by the prior studies on Chinese immigrants. The other was to re-conceptualize the media representation of the “other” as a “contested and multilayered” process of excluding “the displaced outsiders”, who are struggling along the lines of social and national margins. It is through the critical exploration of the multiple theoretical perspectives and the ideological assumptions supported by the news texts that enables the disclosure of the dominant cultural discourse and politics of the host society.

Review on Discourse Studies Concerning Migrants in Media Publications from Brazil and South Africa: Towards more Afro-Latin Perspectives

“…Through most of the abovementioned approachs, we can notice that somehow verbal language and, sporadically, visual features (van Leeuwen, 2000) are considered separately, although in a few cases there are limited attempts to integrate both dimensions (Liang, 2014;Zhu, 2014) with similar results in reference to those we have cited so far.…”

“…They also appear to focus exclusively on a given nation's newspapers, as a context for analysis, since comparative studies are much more difficult to find. Canada (Yang, 2014;Chan, 2013;Bauder, 2008), United States (Airgood, 2017;Zhu, 2014;Benson, 2013) and western European countries (Bruno, 2016;Maneri, 2012;Liang, 2014) are the most frequent settings for data generation.…”

“…The projects carried out within linguistics generally engage with CDA, SFL and/or Multimodality (van Leeuwen, 2000;Zhu, 2014;Baker 2006;Wodak, 2000). Approaching verbal language, Zhu (2014), for example, indicates a binary nature in the treatment of race and nationality of immigrants in media, their portrayal as illegals, their collectivization, inferiorization and stereotyping.…”

The Middle-class Card: A Corpus-based Study of the Characteristics of the Middle Class in US News

“…al., (2008). Other minority groups such as immigrants were studied by some scholars including Aluthman (2018), Silveira (2016), Quinsaat (2014), Zhu (2014), and Khosravinik (2010) who examined the discursive strategies employed by various newspapers to represent them. From the previous short review, it can be concluded that no recent research employing discourse analysis, corpus-based or corpus-assisted approaches studied the image of the middle class in media, especially in news discourse.…”

Spaces of Multilingualism

“…Past research on identities has focused mostly on self-representation and other depictions in discourse produced by mainstream media, by representatives of dominant political ideologies and majority groups, or by the migrants themselves in interviews and focus groups (for a review, see De Fina and Tseng 2017). In the case of public discourse on migrants, investigations of news stories have illuminated the ways in which tropes and stereotypes about migrants are circulated in political discourses and in the media (see, for example, Busch and Krzyanowski 2012;Charteris-Black 2006;Gabrielatos and Baker 2008;Zhu 2014;Simmons and LeCouteur 2008), where they are portrayed through negative metaphors and tropes, related to criminality and ignorance, and compared to animals and floods. Other work investigating everyday narratives and accounts (Perrino 2019;Gotsbachner 2001) has revealed that people who belong to dominant and majority groups in different parts of the world often depict the same negative positioning about migrants found in the press, portraying them as criminals or unwilling to work, while at the same time ideologies diffused in public discourses, such as those that place on migrants the responsibility for integrating, are often taken up by migrants themselves (Cederberg 2014).…”