Abstract
Historically, black leaders and institutions generally opposed immigration for economic reasons. Today, however, they largely support immigrant rights for reasons of principle and strategy. This article establishes and explores that change over time, using a content analysis of 1413 articles from black newspapers (2000–2013) to evaluate contemporary trends. The results indicate that a shift toward greater support for immigrant rights in the black press culminated in the years after 2007, despite the Great Recession that began in 2008, in which blacks suffered deep losses. This study highlights political factors, as opposed to the conventional economic explanations, as key determinants of the changing public discussion of immigration in black newspapers. It makes a case for further attention to the relationship between Republican resistance to immigrant rights and black support for those rights.
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Notes
Examples of black institutions include the black press, black churches, historically black colleges and universities, and the popular blog The Root. See Harris-Lacewell (2004) for details.
Along with many political theorists, I use the word “interests” to include not only material interests but also significant other-regarding and ideal-regarding commitments (see Mansbridge et al. 2010).
Because the vast majority of blacks (86 %) receive most of their news from television (two responses were allowed; see Guskin et al. 2011), it would have been preferable to perform a content analysis of television news, but black-oriented television news programs are rare and usually short-lived. Not a single one spanned the 13 years of this study. Future research might study related issues using black-oriented news websites, from which 35 % of blacks report getting most of their news, and Twitter, from which about 25 % of blacks report getting their news. These sources were unsuitable for my purposes, however, because they did not exist in 2000.
In this first stage, I read through the universe of items to remove unwanted duplicates: same article/editorial, same paper, same date—though duplicate articles/editorials that were printed in different papers remain in the dataset.
A central part of the bill sought to build a 700-mile wall of double-layer fencing along the US/Mexico border. H.R. 4437 also targeted for prosecution citizens who aided or abetted the undocumented. Nurses, members of the clergy, immigrant service providers, and even friends of immigrants could run afoul of the law by providing humanitarian assistance.
It is beyond the scope of this study to ascertain the extent to which the relative surge in “anti” and “ambivalent” articles in 2006–2007 was causally related to the immigration restrictionists’ concurrent endeavors. Both “anti” (e.g., Barnes 2007) and “pro” articles (e.g., Anthony 2007) in these years mention right-wing efforts to cultivate black supporters.
In a multiple logistic regression, publication type was significantly associated with “Refugee/Asylee” articles (b = .871, OR = 2.390, SE = .180, p < .01), holding time period constant.
In addition to “Anti-Racism,” the other themes that I have coded as “Principles” are “Humanitarian,” “American Dream,” “Fairness,” and “Anti-Exploitation.” Although “Black Linked Fate” could be considered a principle-based rationale, I report it separately in Figure 2 and in Table 1 in order to evaluate it separately.
I controlled by state to ensure that news sources from a few states did not drive the results. The state did not independently predict the “Economic” rationale (b = .002, SE = .002, β = .028, ns). The results indicated that, independently, state significantly negatively predicted “Linked Fate” rationale (b = −.003, SE = .001, β = −.109, p < .01). State also significantly and independently predicted negatively the “Anti-racism” rationale (b = −.008, SE = .002, β = −.097, p < .01). State did not independently predict the “Political/Electoral” rationale (b = .001, SE = .002, β = .020, ns).
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Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Jane Mansbridge and Sidney Tarrow for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this work. She also thanks Harvard University's Ash Institute for Democratic Governance, the Taubman Center for State and Local Politics, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
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Appendices
Appendix 1
Appendix 2: Coding
Each of the 1413 items was coded into five variable categories: time period, type of publication (African American or Afro-Caribbean), “tone” (pro, ambivalent, or anti immigration), substantive topic, and rationale. An item could be coded only once within each variable category. For example, item no. 1305 was coded within the time period variable as “2008–2013,” within the type of publication variable as “African American,” within the tone variable as “pro,” within the substantive topic variable as “state-legislation,” and within the rationale variable as “anti-racism.”
The author coding began with reading each item and assigning it a provisional “tone” code using three sub-categories: “pro,” “ambivalent,” or “anti”. Examples:
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Coded as “Pro”: “Rather than continuing to enforce policies that aren’t working, what if we gave these folks a chance to get on the right side of the law, while securing our borders and reforming our laws so that this doesn’t happen again? Imagine the economic impact of millions of immigrants paying their back taxes and a fine to register with the government. […] Imagine the benefit for American workers when bad apple employers can no longer exploit these immigrants to bring down wages” (Feghali 2010).
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Coded as “Ambivalent”: “The state legislature and Governor of Arizona have just passed a very unfortunate law that will fan the flames of racism and bigotry. However, I understand why this is happening. They are frustrated. Crime in Arizona caused by border crossings is skyrocketing. Ranchers are being shot for apparently no reason other than inspecting their lands. Murders in Arizona cities are at an all time high and this is caused by warring drug gangs” (Alford 2010).
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Coded as “Anti”: “More African Americans are unemployed than any other ethnic group. […] So it comes as a slap in the face that many believe a guest worker program is the solution to the country’s current worker shortage. […] What about African Americans, on whose backs the wealth of this nation was built?” (Mathis 2007).
The second round of author coding focused on the substantive topic variables using two steps: I first read each article and assigned it a provisional code based on my assessment of the central policy matter, and then I collapsed certain provisional policy topics, such as “International Trade” and “Family-Based Visas,” into the “Other” category because they appeared so infrequently. This process resulted in six final substantive topics: Border Security, Citizenship/Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR), Employment, Immigrant Integration, Refugees/Asylees, and State Legislation.
The third round of author coding followed the same procedure to generate provisional “rationale” codes. This process resulted in nine final rationale variables (listed below in alphabetical order with examples). When there was overlap between the various equity-related rationales, I chose the dominant rationale. Examples:
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Coded as “American Dream”: “Clearly the [immigration] system is broken, but […] are we the United States of America, the land of immigrants who came, and come, to live in a society with a yearning to breathe free?” (Jackson 2010).
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Coded as “Anti-exploitation”: “So, you ask, why not simply shut off immigration and then things will improve for Black America? Good question, yet the answer is not so simple. First, irrespective of laws, Border Patrol, etc., people will come to the USA if their homelands are in a mess, particularly a mess created by the USA… It is not that African Americans or anyone else ceased to be interested in [working-class] jobs; the jobs and the living standards that they once produced were essentially destroyed by the employers. If we build and strengthen unions, it becomes that much more difficult to displace workers” (Fletcher 2007).
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Coded as “Anti-racism”: “I found myself wondering what Dr. King would think if he visited Alabama…[in 2012]…what would he think of Alabama’s new immigration law? Would he say, ‘Wow, this is just like the law we faced in the Jim Crow era’? Maybe he would join the thousands of Alabamians including many of the clergy that have protested the law in Montgomery and around the state” (Mitchell 2012).
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Coded as “Black Linked Fate”: “African American onlookers should not feel passive about this topic [immigration]. While immigration has been treated as a buzzword to appeal to one segment of the population, it is an arena that includes Haitians and other Caribbean citizens as well as men and women from a wide swath of Africa, seeking to find a more prosperous life” (Hicks 2013).
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Coded as “Economic”: “Despite the stance of many civil rights groups, immigration’s impact on native Blacks and their communities is disproportionate, direct and devastating. Blacks are losing faith because the government continues a pattern of bestowing the rights that should first go to native Blacks to immigrants from foreign countries. […] A 10 percent increase in the number of immigrants reduces the earnings of native Blacks by three-tenths of one percent” (Westside Gazette 2004).
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Coded as “Fairness”: “‘I call upon the Bush Administrations—both in Tallahassee and in Washington—to end this disparate treatment of Haitian immigrants [said Rep. Meek]… Haitians deserve the same treatment as Cuban immigrants.’ Meek has long sought to ensure fairness for Haitians” (Smith 2002).
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Coded as “Humanitarian”: “Those who suffer the greatest harm in ICE raids are children. If our nation is to make any claim for humanity, children deserve to be protected and cared for when their parents are taken away” (Culvert Chronicles 2008).
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Coded as “Political/Electoral”: “So while the GOPers and their Tea Party base run around deriding the term ‘illegal aliens’ like it’s the dreaded end of time, the real message is that they have no solution. […] They cannot even think of supporting an amnesty, because heaven forbid their conservative base turns its back on them in rage due to the fact that so many of those 11 million are Brown and Black and would darken the hue of the country further, lessening the power of this largely white base” (Persaud 2011).
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Coded as “Public Safety”: “Local police involvement in the enforcement of federal civil immigration laws shapes how immigrants perceive police agencies, it increases fear and avoidance of the police, it limits how frequently they report crime and it jeopardizes the safety of entire communities” (Julal and Davis 2009).
In the fourth and final round of the author coding, I conducted a blind recode of the entire dataset and then compared the two codings. I recoded the discrepancies based on a final close reading of each article. In the last step, a Master’s student independently coded the items using this study’s coding scheme. The inter-coder reliability score for this study was 76 %, thus meeting Krippendorf’s (1980) standards for coding scheme validation.
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Williams, K.M. Black Political Interests on Immigrant Rights: Evidence from Black Newspapers, 2000–2013. J Afr Am St 20, 248–271 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-016-9330-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-016-9330-8
Keywords
- Immigration
- Black elite opinion
- Coalitions