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Dr Otilia [email protected]
9 May 2016
Can you still hear the heart of the world beating?On Immigrants and Immigration in UK
Mainstream Media Representations
UK Public Opinion Toward Immigration: Attitudes and Level of Concern (20 August 2015)
• Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford impartial, independent, authoritative, evidence-based analysis of data
on migration and migrants in the UK, to inform media, public and policy debates, and to generate high quality research on international migration and public policy issues
• Overview of attitudes toward immigration in Britainwhether or not people favour or oppose immigration to the UKhow many see it as one of the most important issues facing the
country
Key Point 1
• General reactions to immigration can be examined by using public opinion data, but such responses may be based in part upon confusion about categories of migrants both among the public and in the questions they are asked.
Issues• different ideas of who ‘immigrants’ are• data from polls and surveys of representative samples of
the adults in Great Britain or the UK• the British Social Attitudes by the National Centre for
Social Research (NatCen)
Key Point 2
• Immigration is currently highly salient and in recent years has consistently ranked in the top five “most important issues” as selected by the British public
Issues
Key Point 3
• Approximately three quarters of people in Britain currently favour reducing immigration
Issues
Research Hypotheses
• H1Confusing terminology• H2 Immigration one of the most important
frequently named issues• H3 High levels of opposition to immigration
Corpus
• BBC news online, The Independent, the Telegraph, the Independent, The Guardian
• 37 articles dating January through May 2016
• WC = 25293 tokens• Control corpus: New York Times
editorials collected in April 2016• WC = 5131 tokens
H1 Confusing terminology• A note on terminology: The BBC uses the term migrant to refer to all
people on the move who have yet to complete the legal process of claiming asylum. This group includes people fleeing war-torn countries such as Syria, who are likely to be granted refugee status, as well as people who are seeking jobs and better lives, who governments are likely to rule are economic migrants
What do dictionaries say?• [Oxford] IMMIGRANT A person who comes to live permanently in a
foreign country: they found it difficult to expel illegal immigrants [as modifier]: immigrant workers an immigrant village
• MIGRANT A person who moves from one place to another in order to find work or better living conditions
• [Webster] IMMIGRANT a person who comes to a country to live there
• MIGRANT a person who goes from one place to another especially to find work
Corpus-based evidence
• Pre-2000s – “immigrant”, “immigration”
• Post-2000s– “migrant”, “migration”
H2 Immigration as news priority in the UK
• Confirmed in the collection of data from UK MSM media
• 1-2 articles per day, in particular starting April 2016
H3 High levels of opposition to immigration
Results
• Higher score in MS correlate with negative news on migrants and migration
• The higher the score in Migration Scare the more salient the issue in the public eye
• Linguistic patterns of opposition
Take me home
• All articles, migration-related, scored high in migration scare
• Fundamental mass communication theories (agenda-setting theories; cultivation theories…)
• Bottom-up approach to explain high levels of opposition to immigration in UK MSM