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Description
Mass media has played a central role in the construction of "illegal" immigration as a crisis, despite demographic trends suggesting otherwise, resulting in public concern and extreme policies. Additional coverage by local news has brought the issue closer to home, leading state legislatures to action. This project analyzes trends in a 10 year period in local news articles and state-level legislation about undocumented immigration in Arizona and Alabama. The representation of immigration as a threat has consequences for the lives of immigrants and what it means to be an American.
ContributorsGultz, Chrisanne Marie (Author) / Menjivar, Cecilia (Thesis director) / Doty, Roxanne (Committee member) / Diaz McConnell, Eileen (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
This study examines the social construction of the border by researching how frequently select issues are written about by the media of both countries, and in what light two different groups of actors (Mexico and the US) are portrayed. The Dallas-based The Dallas Morning News, and the Monterrey-based, El Norte are the two newspapers chosen to perform the content analysis. Furthermore, this study seeks to examine differences in the way both newspapers portray the US-Mexico border in 1994, or the year NAFTA began, and 2012, the most recent year for which data is available. A major find of this study is the discovery of how even though the frequency that select issues are brought up in the border vary drastically by year and newspaper, portrayals of the actors around the border stay fairly consistent. More specifically, with the exception of NAFTA in 1994, border issues outside of crime, illegal immigration, drug violence, and the economy, are rarely mentioned by the two selected newspapers a significant amount of the time. Also, issues at the border such as crime, drug violence, and national security are often portrayed as the fault of Mexico and Mexican actors, while immigration issues at the border are often blamed exclusively on each newspaper's host countries.
ContributorsCelis-Aguirre, Ignacio (Author) / Lara-Valencia, Francisco (Thesis director) / Diaz McConnell, Eileen (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Through an interdisciplinary American Studies approach, this thesis examines access to education and immigrant “illegality” as tools of racial domination by investigating colonial legacies and structural inequalities linked with immigration policy. Providing a background on the political formation of immigrant “illegality”, this research focuses on how race relations have influenced immigration policies, as well as political efforts to exclude racialized and minoritized groups from lawful immigration, naturalization, and national belonging. These historic texts shed light on overarching connections between the racialized policy construction of immigrant “illegality” and the role of education in nation building and class conservation. Comprising three analytic chapters; the first historicizes how education was used as a tool of the nation-state in the early formation of U.S. territories, the second chapter applies discourse analysis to link contemporary political rhetoric with color-blind ideologies. The third analytic chapter is a critical review of existing quantitative findings on the effects of legal status on educational attainment for Mexican and Central American immigrants and their descendants living in the United States. Challenging the dominant narrative around immigrant “illegality”, this work highlights the racist formation and continued application of unequal access (to both education and citizenship), further demonstrating how structural inequalities remain racialized.
ContributorsOlsen-Medina, Kira (Author) / Yellow Horse, Aggie (Thesis advisor) / Vega, Sujey (Committee member) / Diaz McConnell, Eileen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021