Associate Professor Alexander Caviedes of the Department of Politics and International Affairs has written the chapter, “An Emerging ‘European’ News Portrayal of Immigration?” that appears in a new book, “Migrants, Minorities, and the Media: Information, Representations and Participation in the Public Sphere,” edited by Erik Bleich, Irene Bloemraad and Els de Graauw (Routledge).
The chapter is based on an ongoing research project headed by Dr. Caviedes in collaboration with current and former Fredonia students who review, code and summarize European newspaper articles from five countries spanning the English, French, German, Italian and Spanish languages. The project has examined 10 newspapers for almost one decade. Publication of the chapter affirms the role that undergraduate students can play in producing academic-quality research in concert with faculty.
The particular question addressed in Caviedes’ chapter concerns the relative prominence of certain key narratives for framing immigration and migrants within the British, French and Italian press. A developing literature on the securitization of policy and discourse related to migration suggests the prominence of security narratives, but the prevalence of this particular portrayal of migration has not been placed into comparative context through cross-country analysis of the relative prominence of various immigration-related issues.
The results of Caviedes’ study demonstrate that overt references to physical threat or crime occur relatively infrequently, with only the mention of the border being more common. Instead, issues with economic implications, such as the labor market, asylum and fiscal costs, exhibit greater salience, though the degree to which the press grants attention to specific economic or security issues varies substantially between countries.
The month of November also saw the publication of two Caviedes-penned essays, “Globalization and Migration” and “The Dream Act,” in volume 4 of the reference edited volume “People of Color in the United States: Contemporary Issues in Education, Work, Communities, Health, and Immigration” (CLIO/Greenwood).
