The Politics of Selectivity: Online Newspaper Coverage of Refugees Entering Canada and the United States

Abstract

While scholarly work on Europe’s latest “refugee crisis” has blossomed, less attention has focused on the United States and Canada. My research centers on newspaper coverage of refugees entering these two countries, before and after the Paris terrorist attacks of November 13, 2015. I conduct a comparative, cultural sociological analysis of 318 online news articles, reconstructing a system of meaning I call the Politics of Selectivity, in which refugees are portrayed as deserving or undeserving of resettlement. A deep, interpretive reading of the data reveals three dimensions of this political arena in which explicit, implicit, and conditional criteria for accepting refugees are articulated.

Keywords:

• Refugees
• media
• cultural sociology
• deservingness
• United States
• Canada

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the research project “Newspaper Coverage of Refugees Entering the U.S. and Canada Before and After the Paris Terrorist Attacks of November 2015,” from the Grant Agency of Masaryk University, project number MUNI/E/1350/2017, and by the research project "Migration and Social Inequality: Cultural Sociological Perspectives," from the Grant Agency of Masaryk University, project number MUNI/A/1068/2018 .

Notes

1 For the purposes of this research, I consider “refugees” those eligible for resettlement in the United States or Canada.

2 See https://www.unrefugees.org/refugee-facts/what-is-a-refugee/.

3 See https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/refugees/help-outside-canada.html.

4 In his analysis of the Balinese cockfight, Geertz highlights that its function is interpretive, a “metasocial commentary” or reading of the Balinese experience. He defines culture accordingly: “The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong” (Geertz, 1973, p. 452).

5 Ogan et al. (2018, p. 365) find a similar percentage (12.5 percent) for “threat to national security” in U.S. news coverage about immigrants and refugees leading up to the 2016 presidential election.

6 Unlike the findings by other researchers studying media coverage of refugees (McKay et al., 2011; S. Parker, 2015), I find very little use of water metaphors that imply danger and invasion of the nation.