Framing Refuge: Media, Framing, and Sanctuary Cities

Abstract

The refugee sanctuary movement in the United States has shifted to include undocumented immigrants fleeing violence and economic strife. Given the negative tenor of coverage of undocumented immigration, and ties between framing and policy views on immigration, how the media frames sanctuary cities is likely to impact public perceptions of these cities and their policies. To assess media coverage of sanctuary policies, we analyzed articles from five national newspapers from 1980 to 2017 with both human content analysis and dictionary-based computational analysis. We find that framing around religion/morality and conflict has decreased, while stories focusing on crime and partisanship have increased. We discuss implications for public opinion and the likelihood that the American public will take their cues from media framing and elite discourse when it comes to sanctuary policies.

Notes

¹ For a full description of the codebook, see the Appendix.

² The Wall Street Journal articles were added to the corpus at the revision stage, after the initial round of reliability testing had been completed. To include some of the Wall Street Journal articles in reliability testing, and to ensure the testing was sufficiently robust, this second round of reliability analysis was conducted. All results of the human-coded analysis reported below are based on the coding results from the primary coder.

³ We exclude mentions of the potential criminality of providing sanctuary.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien

Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien (Ph.D., University of Washington, 2014) is an assistant professor of political science at San Diego State University. His research interests include immigration, racial and ethnic politics, political psychology, political communication, public policy, and American politics. His is the author of Handcuffs and Chain Link: Criminalizing the Unodcumented in America (University of Virginia Press) and co-author of Sanctuary Cities: The Politics of Refuge (Oxford University Press).

Elizabeth Hurst

Elizabeth Hurst (M.S., University of Tennessee, 2016) is a doctoral student in communication at the University of Oklahoma. Her research interests include the intersection between political and intercultural communication, with special interest in social and communal identity research.

Justin Reedy

Justin Reedy (Ph.D., University of Washington, 2013) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and a research associate in the Center for Risk & Crisis Management at the University of Oklahoma. His research interests include political communication and deliberation, mass and digital media, and risk and environmental communication.

Loren Collingwood

Loren Collingwood, (Ph.D., University of Washington, 2012) is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. His research interests include American politics, political behavior, public policy, race and ethnic politics, immigration, and political methodology. He is the co-author of Sanctuary Cities: The Politics of Refuge (2019) and Campaigning in a Racially Diversifying America: When and How Cross-Racial Electoral Mobilization Works (2019) both with Oxford University Press.