Collaborative Work: Immigration Research Group
Under the mentorship and guidance of Dr. Allan Colbern, a collaborative online student research group formed in the Spring of 2021. Focusing on immigration and news media, representation and identity formation, the group collected 25,000 news articles from over 35 news sources. The sources selected provide local, state, and national news sources, with Arizona and California selected to reflect restrictive and progressive states and news sources.
The articles collected were retrieved utilizing the following Boolean phrase:
​
((immig* OR migrant* OR refugee* OR "central america" OR "central american" OR "central americans" OR "asylum seekers" OR dreamer* OR (EXACT DACA) OR undocumented OR (unaccompanied NEAR/3 child*) OR (irregular NEAR/2 migrant*) OR “illegal resident” OR “illegal residents” OR “unauthorized resident” OR “unauthorized residents” OR “illegal migrant” OR “illegal migrants” OR “unauthorized migrant” OR “unauthorized migrants” OR “criminal migrant” OR “criminal migrants” OR “non-criminal migrant” OR “non-criminal migrants” OR “illegal immigrant” OR “illegal immigrants” OR “unauthorized immigrant” OR “unauthorized immigrants” OR “criminal immigrant” OR “criminal immigrants” OR “non-criminal immigrant” OR “non-criminal immigrants” OR “illegal alien” OR “illegal aliens” OR “unauthorized alien” OR “unauthorized aliens” OR “criminal alien” OR “criminal aliens” OR “non-criminal alien” OR “non-criminal aliens” OR “illegal student” OR “illegal students” OR “unauthorized student” OR “unauthorized students” OR “alien student” OR “alien students” OR “illegal children” OR “unauthorized children” OR “alien children” OR “illegal child” OR “unauthorized child” OR “alien child” OR “illegal youth” OR “unauthorized youth” OR “alien youth” OR “illegal young” OR “unauthorized young”))
​
(Articles retrieved via: ProQuest, NexisUni and NewsBank)
The huge data set collected by the Immigration Research Group (IRG), provided ample opportunity to learn more about the ways in which immigrants were portrayed in news media through a variety of focuses and over time. Crimmigration, or the association of those who have committed a civil immigration violation as criminals was reflected in the news sources reflecting trends related to enforcement and education.
Within the Immigration Research group, I participated in data collection, the creation of the codebook for analysis, coding of references, and the literature review. This experience provided me with the hands-on learning that facilitated my ability to conduct my own individual research. Assisting in the process of conducting structure focused comparisons, I was able to visualize how the grouping of certain words or phrases often provided insight into the trends of representations and the binaries others are often viewed within. The collaborative efforts helped me to learn to meaningfully engage as a contributor, allowing my research skills to sharpen without sacrificing the ability to also conduct research in my area of passion.
Publications (Accepted & In Progress)
Edited Book Chapter
Colbern, Allan, Katie Glenn, Mapi Baez Lara, Jessica Halasa and Aleesa Nutting. (Accepted in April 2022) “Conceptualizing and Contrasting the Salience of Crisis Framing in Immigration Coverage by American Newspapers, 1980-2021.” In (Re)presentation of Refugees in Media: Local and Global Perspectives, Edited by Nasir Uddin & Md. Delwar Hossain.
​
"Crisis” in the immigration debate in the United States is a highly contested, yet an increasingly powerful concept and frame that shapes how the American public perceives refugees, asylum seekers, DACA recipients and undocumented immigrants. Systematically tracing how crisis framing is used to place immigrants into humanizing or threatening categories, in five national and seventeen California and Arizona newspapers that range in being conservative and progressive, from 1980 to 2021, this chapter situates the media as an important actor in the hotly contested arena of US immigration politics. The chapter reveals the evolution of “crisis framing” as a contested space, where newspapers differentiate varying classes of immigrants through a humanizing category (e.g., refugees, DACA youth) or threatening category (e.g., asylum seekers, undocumented immigrants). The chapter provides a multi-dimensional understanding of each category to capture and reveal when and how varying classes of immigrants are (re)framed into these categories over time and to draw comparisons across national and state level news contexts. The chapter then situates contested (re)framings of crisis and immigrants within national and state level policy developments. Drawing out the evolving debate over federal reform since the late 1990s and a proliferation of state level policies in California (expanding the rights of all immigrants) and in Arizona (contracting the rights of certain classes of immigrants) since the early 2000s, the chapter situates newspapers as a particularly important political actor. Through humanizing or threatening categories, we argue that newspapers can impact immigrant inclusion, protections and rights, by aligning or challenging government policies. This makes newspapers important institutions for immigrant rights movements and counter movements to engage and pressure in their policy advocacy. While US based scholarship in immigration federalism addresses legal and policy developments, it provides little attention to the relation between news and policy in a federalism context. Immigration federalism scholarship is also primarily domestic-inward looking, and therefore, rarely in conversation with global scholarship on migration, refugees, and critical humanitarianism. This chapter contributes a new link between the domestic processes taking place in the US and global processes pushing for immigrants’ humanity to be centered in the work of government policymaking and news reporting on migration as a type of “crisis.”
​
​
Journal Articles
Baez Lara, Mapi, Erin Kitano, Katie Glenn, Alma Borbón Smith, Lauren Kater, Aleesa Nutting, Jessica Halasa, Katelyn Baker-Smith, Allan Colbern. "(Il)legitimate, (Un)deserving: Constructing immigrant belonging in news coverage of education". Preparing for submission to The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences.
​
Plyler v. Doe (1982) is considered the high-water mark for immigrants’ constitutional rights, securing them the fundamental right to K-12 education. Yet, as immigration federalism scholars demonstrate, be immigrant rights to education continue to be expanded or contracted through policies on access to postsecondary education, in-state tuition, and financial aid. This paper explores national, state and local news sources from 1980 to 2021 to capture the evolution in how how immigrants themselves are framed within the contexts of education news coverage. We show broadly how immigrants are framed as legitimate and deserving of education, as well as illegitimate and undeserving of education. Looking at key moments and legal/policy related coverage, such as Plyler (in 1982), California’s Proposition 187 (in 1994), proposals for federal Dream Acts (in 2001, 2007, 2009-2012, 2017, and 2021), and state laws enacted to restrict or provide access to in-state tuition and financial aid (between 2001 and 2021), this paper explores how these frames of immigrants shift and change over time and across jurisdictions. Reflecting on the broader relation between traditional news coverage and immigration federalism, the paper ends by highlighting the how the right to education, immigrants’ identities, and immigrant policy have been politically and culturally constructed and shaped around framing immigrants as legitimate or illegitimate, and deserving or undeserving, in the news.
​
Glenn, Katie, Mapi Baez Lara, Lauren Kater, Aleesa Nutting, Alma Borbón Smith, Erin Kitano, Jessica Halasa, Katelyn Baker-Smith, Allan Colbern. A Federated Construction of “Immigrants as Criminals”: Contrasting Criminality Framing in News Coverage of Interior Enforcement, Border Enforcement, Immigrant Detention and Immigrant Sanctuary”. Preparing for submission to Politics, Groups and Identities.
​
Abstract coming soon
​
​
Awards and Recognition
-Pitchfork Awards 2022: Changemaker Award for Group Service (Finalist)
-Pitchfork Awards 2022: Changemaker Award for Social Change (Finalist)