Dr Otilia Paceaotiliapacea@yahoo.co.uk

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