Immigration in the Press: An Analysis of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal During the Obama and Trump Presidencies

Over recent decades, immigration and xenophobic reactions to it have become issues of heated public debate in many countries around the globe, with immigrants being routinely constructed negatively and silenced in the Western press.To understand such constructions, this thesis analyses broadsheet newspaper representations of unauthorised immigrants from south of the U.S.-Mexico border during the eras of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, two presidents with staunchly disparate political standpoints on immigrants/immigration. More specifically, the thesis offers a qualitative analysis of news articles from the relatively liberal New York Times and the conservative Wall Street Journal, covering the periods 2009-11 and 2017-19. Aside from, first, enquiring about constructions of social actors and events, it asks, second, why/if there are (dis)continuities between the two sources, and third, how/why emotions and voice manifest in the representations of immigrants.The thesis responds to these questions by analysing four corpora of news articles from immigration-related events in the two newspaper sources, representing the first two years of Obama and Trump’s presidencies. Operating within the framework of critical discourse analysis, the thesis considers the different ideological positions of the two news sources as affecting the representations and undertakes thematic analysis, social actor analysis, and detailed textual analysis to understand them.This thesis reveals an at times affirmative, humanising (i.e., inclusive) construction of immigrants. Thus, the thesis contributes to an understanding of multilayered representations around actors and events in newspapers with different ideological orientations, illuminating how voice and emotion are activated. The thesis not only documents outright negative portrayals, but also decodes the complexities of seemingly humanising representations, which are ultimately rather ambiguous as they are regularly rooted in what appears to be a neoliberal perspective on deservingness and undeservingness. As such, the thesis uncovers the role of these media in potentially shaping public understandings of immigration.