Reporting Immigration Conflict

In Reporting Immigration Conflict: Opportunities for Peace Journalism, Mariely Valentin-Llopis examines the role of American and Mexican media in promoting harsh views against Central American migrants. This examination focuses on the U.S. southwestern border crossing conflict in 2014 and 2019, both separate consequential periods in time. Valentin-Llopis contextualizes migrants’ plight with careful consideration to unaccompanied minor migrants and the family separation crisis. As a counterpoint, the author also takes the news content analysis through a historical journey to when news reporters seemingly bent traditional journalism principles to protect Cuban children refugees fleeing the Castro regime and communism, showing that it is possible to provide fair depictions of migrants and their struggles. Valentin-Llopis challenges journalism’s traditional approach to news production by introducing the peace journalism rubric to immigration reporting. Scholars of international relations, journalism, history, and minority studies will find this book particularly useful, while media practitioners in the field can also find practical approaches to transforming their work for the benefit of peace solutions to pressing transnational conflicts.

Undocumented immigration across the Mediterranean and the US-Mexican border is one of the most contested transatlantic public and political issues, raising fundamental questions about national identity, security and multiculturalism—all in the glare of news media themselves undergoing dramatic transformations. This interdisciplinary, international volume fills a major gap in political science and communication literature on the role of news media in public debates over immigration by providing unique insider’s perspectives on journalistic practices and bringing them into dialogue with scholars and immigrant rights practitioners. After providing original comparative research by established and emerging international affairs and media scholars as well as grounded reflections by UN and IOM practitioners, the book presents candid, in-depth assessments by nine leading European and North American journalists covering immigration from the frontlines, ranging from the Guardian’s Southern Europe editor to the immigration reporter for the Arizona Republic. Their comparative reflections on the professional, institutional and technological constraints shaping news stories offer unprecedented insight into the challenges and opportunities for 21st century journalism to affect public discourse and policymaking about issues critical to the future of the transatlantic space, making the book relevant across a wide range of scholarship on the media’s impact on public affairs.

The recent level of illegal immigration to the United States has increased debates about the effect of these immigrants on the cost of public services, and states have begun to enact policies that limit the public services available to illegal immigrants. The central issues are how many illegal immigrants reside in particular local areas and states and their effect on public expenditures and revenues and the economy in general. The Local Fiscal Effects of Illegal Immigration workshop selected six studies for analysis. The six case studies focused on one specific aspect of the complex question of the demographic, economic, and social effects of immigration: the net public services costs of illegal immigrants to selected geographical regions.

If Donald Trump, kicking off his campaign for the White House, was saying “what everyone is thinking,” about illegal immigration, it must be that his message mirrored a narrative that already existed in the minds of his audience. That fearful story of criminals invading the U.S. borders has long been a dominant theme in the mainstream news immigration story. Like all news stories, this one focuses attention on some facts at the expense of others. Like many news stories, it draws its power from earlier, well-known tales -- some as old as the Flood. This article recommends that the news media reconsider the storytelling role of journalism in light of a relatively new approach to conflict resolution: narrative mediation. Narrative mediation, simply stated, sees conflict as a kind of story. Narrative mediators approach a conflict by calling its story into question and then by looking for facts that fall outside of its plot. They use these “unstoried facts” to explore the alternative stories that such facts suggest. Then narrative mediators try to help the disputing parties write a larger, more complex, and more useful story together. This article argues that journalists -- without sacrificing their professional ethics -- can adapt certain processes of narrative mediation to thicken the plots of news stories, producing more comprehensive, accurate, and helpful accounts of the conflicts they cover. Although this article focuses on news coverage of immigration from Latin America, the approach of narrative mediation can be applied more broadly. Immigration conflicts are not confined to the U.S.-Mexican border or to the issues of legal status and documentation that arise there. Fearful story lines are also used in reporting conflicts over legal Muslim immigrants, including the most extensively documented of all recent arrivals, Syrian refugees. The same narratives sound again overseas. Beyond the immigration story, and across other reporting beats, narrative mediation offers tools to disrupt predictable news story lines that can result from political pressures and deadlines. These tools can free reporters to construct the stories of news in a thoughtful and deliberate way.

The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration finds that the long-term impact of immigration on the wages and employment of native-born workers overall is very small, and that any negative impacts are most likely to be found for prior immigrants or native-born high school dropouts. First-generation immigrants are more costly to governments than are the native-born, but the second generation are among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the U.S. This report concludes that immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the U.S. More than 40 million people living in the United States were born in other countries, and almost an equal number have at least one foreign-born parent. Together, the first generation (foreign-born) and second generation (children of the foreign-born) comprise almost one in four Americans. It comes as little surprise, then, that many U.S. residents view immigration as a major policy issue facing the nation. Not only does immigration affect the environment in which everyone lives, learns, and works, but it also interacts with nearly every policy area of concern, from jobs and the economy, education, and health care, to federal, state, and local government budgets. The changing patterns of immigration and the evolving consequences for American society, institutions, and the economy continue to fuel public policy debate that plays out at the national, state, and local levels. The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration assesses the impact of dynamic immigration processes on economic and fiscal outcomes for the United States, a major destination of world population movements. This report will be a fundamental resource for policy makers and law makers at the federal, state, and local levels but extends to the general public, nongovernmental organizations, the business community, educational institutions, and the research community.