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Abstract
We argue that scholars of immigrant integration should pay more attention to immigrants' ‘civic visibility’ among local government officials, organisations and other residents. To document and analyse immigrants' civic visibility, we examine coverage of the Vietnamese and Indian communities in newspapers in San Jose, Boston, Vancouver and Toronto from 1985 to 2005. We ask (i) do local newspapers cover the lives of immigrants and their descendants and (ii) what explains variation in the amount of coverage devoted to different immigrant-origin communities in different places? We find little evidence that newspaper coverage is affected by the demographics of an area, newsroom factors or simplified models of the national political and discursive opportunity structures. Instead, we take an ‘embedded’ context of reception approach, which takes seriously the intersection between general discursive opportunity structures on immigration and particular discourses about certain types of migrants. Our findings suggest the need to complicate national opportunity structure frameworks by considering how their interaction with specific immigrant communities produces between-country and between-group variation. Our results also underscore the importance of immigrant agency; greater visibility in local media appears to link with immigrants' greater presence in domestic politics.
Keywords:
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the research assistance of Elizabeth Lim, the advice of Karthick Ramakrishnan, helpful suggestions on earlier drafts from Rodney Benson, Erik Bleich, Veronica Terriquez, and Erin Tolley, as well as the financial support of the Russell Sage Foundation (New York) and the Hellman Family Faculty Fund (UC Berkeley).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
[1] Advertising revenue for US newspapers peaked in 2005 at over US$49 billion, then plummeted to just over US$22 billion in 2012. The number of paid newsroom staff, relatively constant from 1984 through 2006 at about 55,000 workers, was projected in 2013 to fall below 40,000 for the first time since 1978 (Edmonds et al. Citation2013). Of course, even before the advent of social media, newspapers competed with radio and television as a source of news. Newspapers, however, often validate what is newsworthy for other media outlets and are more likely to attract policy-makers’ attention (Benson Citation2013; Ferree et al. Citation2002).
[2] All data are from the 1990 and 2000 US Census and 1996 and 2001 Canadian Census to match the time frame of the newspaper coverage. At the metro level, statistics are for the Boston and San Jose ‘urbanised areas’ and the Toronto and Vancouver Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs). The Canadian Census distinguishes between foreign-born residents who are permanent residents and those who are not (e.g., those on temporary visas or with pending refugee claims). Because the US Census makes no similar distinction, where possible the Canadian figures include all foreign-born individuals.
[3] Their first place ranking in Toronto is based on distinguishing migration from Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China. If these two are combined, Chinese migrants are the most numerous.
[4] The Canadian immigration system allocates the majority of permanent residence visas to migrants selected for their potential contribution to the economy; in the USA, the majority of legal permanent residents are family-sponsored migrants.
[5] The first ever Vietnamese American elected to San Jose City Council, Madison Nguyen, won in 2005, and was re-elected in 2006.
[6] The first Indo-Canadian elected to federal office from Vancouver was Herb Dhaliwal, who represented Vancouver South from 1993 to 2004. The seat was subsequently held by another Punjabi Sikh immigrant, Ujjal Dosanjh, who was also the first Indo-Canadian premier of a Canadian province, from 2000 to 2001.
[7] Estimates of Monday–Saturday circulation run a bit above 400,000, with an average daily readership of almost 1.2 million people. Sunday circulation estimates are about 650,000 with 1.8 million readers (Gallup Poll on Media Usage and Consumer Behavior Citation2006).
[8] Monday–Friday circulation is about 350,000, with an estimated 980,000 readers, while on Saturday (the main weekend issue), circulation climbs to over 500,000 with close to 1.3 million readers (NADbank Citation2006).
[9] The average circulation Monday-Saturday was just under 250,000 in 2005, with a readership of 670,000 (Gallup Poll on Media Usage and Consumer Behavior Citation2006).
[10] Monday-Thursday circulation numbers are about 190,000, increasing to 220,000 on Friday and 250,000 on Saturday. Readership estimates are about 480,000 Monday-Friday and 510,000 on Saturday. The Vancouver Sun does not publish a Sunday edition (NADbank Citation2006).
[11] See http://www.sfu.ca/cmns/research/newswatch/monitor/issue6.html, accessed 9 November 2014.
[12] Most Vietnamese- and Indian-origin residents in the four cities are foreign-born, but since newspapers often lump generations together, we refer to ‘Vietnamese-origin’ and ‘Indian-origin’ individuals to capture first- and later-generation residents.
[13] For Indians, our search terms were: (i) ‘Indo American’ or ‘Indo Canadian’, (ii) ‘Indian’ AND ‘immigrant’, (iii) ‘Indian descent’, (iv) ‘Sikh’ NOT ‘Indian’, (v) ‘Hindu’ NOT ‘Indian’ and (vi) ‘Jain’ NOT ‘Indian.’ For Vietnamese: (i) ‘Vietnamese American’ or ‘Vietnamese Canadian’, (ii) ‘Vietnamese’ AND ‘immigrant’, (iii) ‘Vietnamese’ AND ‘refugee’, (iv) ‘Vietnamese descent’ and (v) ‘Indochinese.’
[14] We used the LexisNexis search engine for all newspapers except the San Jose Mercury News, for which we used Access World News. For the Boston Globe, Toronto Star and San Jose Mercury News, online access dates back to 1985; for the Vancouver Sun, it starts in July 1991.
[15] The final sample was slightly less than 10% because of stratification by year.
[16] Over a third of excluded articles (37.1%) were entirely about foreign affairs, such as Hong Kong's decision to repatriate Vietnamese refugees or religious violence in India. We retained such stories if they included a comment from someone in North America or made a link, however slight, to migrant communities in North America. Another quarter of exclusions (26.5%) were features or other stories with no link to North America, such as articles about tourism in Vietnam. A fifth of exclusions occurred because the search term ‘Indian’ referred to Native Americans in Canada and the USA (17.5%) or West Indians (2.2%). The remaining exclusions (less than 17%) ranged from articles where ‘Jain’ was a person's name rather than a religious affiliation to book reviews mentioning a Sikh character. To ensure inter-coder reliability on exclusions, at least two and often three coders did preliminary coding on all articles for each newspaper article published in 1985, 1990 and 1995. Agreement on exclusions averaged 88% across all coders; adjudication of differences led to further standardisation in exclusion rules, which were subsequently applied to all years of data.
[17] Our coding used a two-digit system with the first digit indicating a broader topical focus (e.g., religion, education), and the second indicating sub-topics within the broader one (e.g., stories about religious institutions as distinct from stories about religious practices). Designation of broad categories, used in the analysis here, largely came from theoretical concerns; the fine-grained topics were often generated from the data during early, exploratory coding. The detailed coding schema is available upon request.
[18] For example, a story about a Vietnamese lawyer using his bilingual and bicultural skills to fight for Vietnamese tenants’ rights was coded 1; a story about a mental health facility that served a number of Asian groups, including the Vietnamese, was coded 2; and a story that focused on a church's resettlement of Bosnian refugees, with one sentence reporting that the church had helped Vietnamese refugees 15 years earlier, was given a 3.
[19] All three authors were fully involved in the coding process. Bloemraad oversaw the selection of search terms, determination of inclusion criteria, the creation of coding categories and early cross validation of coding. de Graauw and Hamlin did almost all of the ensuing content coding. During coding, all three authors read initial samples of articles and met weekly to identify and refine coding categories, agree to standard rules and adjudicate coding differences. Coding rules were written up immediately after each meeting and circulated among the research team to ensure uniform application.
[20] We present results by topic only for articles assigned a ‘1’ or ‘2’ centrality score; otherwise the link between the article topic and immigrant group is too tenuous. For most group/newspaper combinations, the frequency of topics was robust to excluding the least central stories. The main exception is for Vietnamese coverage in the Vancouver Sun. Because the number of stories is so low, small variations produce large percentage swings.
[21] US data come from the census ‘race’ question, which includes the option of ‘Vietnamese’ and ‘Asian Indian’ as racial categories. Canadian data are from the census ‘ethnicity’ question, which includes the categories of ‘South Asian (e.g., East Indian)’ and ‘South-east Asian (e.g., Vietnamese).’ To maximise comparability, we only count those who reported a single race or ethnicity.
[22] The smaller number of people reporting Vietnamese ethnicity than birth in Vietnam for Vancouver and Toronto likely reflects the presence of Sino-Vietnamese.
[23] This figure does not adjust for the original 1 in 10 random sampling. The actual incidence of stories would be about 10 times greater.
[24] In her analysis of the Sun's coverage over the 1967–1976 period, Indra (Citation1979) also concludes that reporting on South Asians far exceeded the community's relative size.
[25] In his analysis, Benson (Citation2013) also finds that coverage of immigration is spread over a large number of reporters, few of whom have Spanish surnames and even fewer have Asian names.
[26] The analysis of topic excludes articles with only a passing reference to the immigrant community, as explained in our discussion of centrality coding.
[27] We employed two types of coding that might be considered ‘politics,’ one identifying articles about social policy, such as food stamps, unemployment insurance and the like, and a second coding the practice of politics, from elections to contentious protest. We refer here to the second coding.
[28] First-generation Vietnamese have tended to support the Republican Party, partly because of its perceived toughness against Communism. The second generation is more likely to support the Democratic Party.
[29] Indeed, the Toronto Star gives relatively little coverage to either community. Perhaps Toronto's hyper-diversity makes coverage of any particular community unlikely.