The Making of an Online Moral Crisis

As we read this week, the media tends to portray immigrants in a negative light, which increases hostility towards immigration (Farris and Mohammed 2018). However, around the media’s coverage of family separation was less about the immigrants’ undocumented entry and more about the shock of the government trying to hide the situation. This Atlantic article is about how the information spread when it was finally exposed, creating national concern over how the U.S. government was treating immigrants. While the focus was naturally on immigrants’ documentation status as these individuals crossed the border illegally, the real emphasis was on the humanitarian crisis at the border under Trump’s family separation policy. Unsurprisingly, some Americans were still hostile towards these undocumented immigrants as the literature suggests, but in the case of family separation, the government was portrayed negatively rather than the immigrants. In turn, immigrants gained sympathy they often lack among the American public.

In precept this week, I think it would be interesting to discuss how exposing the government’s moral downfalls may result in more positive immigration sentiment among the American public. In addition,  does implicitly signaling immigrants’ documentation status rather than making it the forefront of an article make attitudes toward immigration more positive than negative?