Framing Refugees: The Impact of Religious Frames on U.S. Partisans and Consumers of Cable News Media

ABSTRACT

Existing research posits that Muslims in the West tend to face more prejudice than other groups because they not only belong to ethnic outgroups but also religious and behavioral ones. Building on this literature, this study leverages the case of the Syrian refugee crisis to assess whether White Americans are less supportive of resettling Muslim refugees compared to Christian ones. I explore how different cable news outlets discussing refugees and experimentally test whether framing Syrian refugees as Christian or Muslim impacts the attitudes of regular viewers of cable news differently. Findings show a general preference for Christian compared to Muslim Syrian refugees. I find that conservative media emphasize threat pertaining to refugees more often than liberal media. Finally, I find that framing Syrian refugees as Muslim results in decreased support for refugee resettlement among Republicans and Independents who frequently watch Fox News but not among regular viewers of CNN or MSNBC.

KEYWORDS:

• refugees
• immigration
• public opinion
• media

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the author upon request.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1723753.

Notes

1. See https://www.unhcr.org/5d08d7ee7.pdf.

2. See https://www.wrapsnet.org/archives/.

3. Pew Research Center 2017.

4. A total of 429,995 refugees have been resettled to the U.S. between 2011 and 2017 compared to about one million immigrants being granted permanent residence status every year over the past 20 years (U.S. Department of Homeland Security).

5. See Supplementary Appendix for words included in the dictionaries.

6. See Table 6 in the Supplementary Appendix.

7. The first wave of the experiment was fielded using an internet panel managed by Bovitz Inc. (N = 806). The second wave was fielded on Mturk (N = 737).

8. No significant differences in terms of demographic variables by treatment condition are found.

9. Independents in the following analyses include leaners.

10. The mean level of support for Muslim Syrian refugees is 0.22 among Republicans.

11. See Supplementary Appendix for the distribution of Fox News viewers by party.

12. Tables available upon request.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rita Nassar

Rita Nassar is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Indiana University in Bloomington. She holds a B.A. in economics from the Université Saint Joseph and an M.A. in economics from the American University of Beirut. She later received her M.A. in political science from the University of Illinois-Chicago. She is interested in immigration, public opinion, political communication and race relations. Her current work explores how elite and media framing influence public attitudes toward refugees in the United States.