This week’s course content centered around the role of the media in shaping immigration attitudes. The material was especially focused on three concepts: agenda setting, priming, and framing, The readings, especially Adida, Dionne and Platas; Utych; Marshall and Shapiro; and Branton focus on the role of elite rhetoric in agenda setting, priming and framing. The readings show that elites can communicate through the media to directly affect attitudes on immigration. Work such as Jones and Martin shows that when elites cue the public that immigration is a priority, individual voters also vote with immigration in mind. Johanna, Brandon, and Abrajano show that the increase in framing immigration as a Latino issue leads to an increase in GOP partisanship among whites, while Valentino, Brader, and Jardina show that this framing has led whites to view “immigrant” as synonymous with “Latino”.
This article from FiveThirtyEight, “Trump Put Immigration Back in the Headlines. Will it Boost GOP Turnout?”, cuts right to the heart of the issues we have been covering this week. It discusses how Trump uses elite cues to frame immigrants as Latinos, criminals and terrorists in order to prime this issue as significant for elections. He is hoping to prime GOP voters in swing states with recent influxes of Latino immigration such as Arizona and Florida (in which Jones and Martin demonstrated immigration has greater salience) to vote in the midterms.
Trump mentions that “Middle Eastern terrorists” are in the caravan. Given that he uses this framing to create a negative view of immigrants in the caravan, do you think Valentino, Brader, and Jardina should have included “Middle Eastern” as a possible class of immigrants in their analysis?
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