Illegality and Enforcement in the Framing of Immigrant Education in US Newspapers

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Published Aug 8, 2023
DOI https://doi.org/10.36367/ntqr.16.2023.e797

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Allan Colbern
Arizona State University, United States
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2425-0381

Shawn Walker
Arizona State University, United States
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7052-5705

María del Pilar Báez Lara
Arizona State University, United States
https://orcid.org/0009-0009-6726-5429

Katie Marie Glenn
University of Colorado-Boulder, United States
https://orcid.org/0009-0001-3400-5788

Lauren Kater
Arizona State University, United States
https://orcid.org/0009-0006-3678-2333

Shelby Busha
Arizona State University, United States
https://orcid.org/0009-0005-8623-0169

Abstract

The United States Supreme Court ruled in Plyler v. Doe (1982) that all immigrants, regardless of their legal immigration status under federal law, have a fundamental right to K-12 education. Despite having a constitutional right to K-12 education, immigrants’ right to postsecondary education remains contested and is shaped by federal and state laws on the matter. This article examines 40,469 news articles from 1980 to 2022 covering the fight over immigrant’s right to education, guided by the questions: what frames do reporters construct about immigrants and education, and what role do experts mentioned in an article play in the construction of these frames? Combining machine learning techniques and social network analysis with qualitative coding of news articles by hand, argue that reporters’ use of a range of experts creates a deep conflation of education with immigration enforcement and illegality framing. Thus, despite the quest for journalistic neutrality, the use of experts by reporters across progressive and conservative news sources prevents education from being a topic on its own whenever it includes immigrant children.

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Issue
Vol. 16 (2023): Qualitative Research: Practices and Challenges (Book Series)
Section
Empirical Articles

How to Cite

Colbern, A., Shawn Walker, María del Pilar Báez Lara, Katie Marie Glenn, Lauren Kater, & Shelby Busha. (2023). Illegality and Enforcement in the Framing of Immigrant Education in US Newspapers. New Trends in Qualitative Research, 16, e797. https://doi.org/10.36367/ntqr.16.2023.e797
Copyright
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

openAccess

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