Katie Glenn

Framing Immigrants at the Intersection of Education and Immigration Enforcement in United States Newspapers.

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 19:53:35 +0000

Framing Immigrants at the Intersection of Education and Immigration Enforcement in United States Newspapers. Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 13:53

Framing Immigrants at the Intersection of Education and Immigration Enforcement in United States Newspapers.

By: Allan Colbern, Shawn Walker, María del Pilar Báez Lara, Katie Marie Glenn, Lauren Kater, Shelby Busha

Abstract:

The United States Supreme Court ruled in Plyler v. Doe (1982) that all children
regardless of their legal immigration status have a fundamental right to K-12 education.
Despite education being a fundamental right, it remains fragile and contested for
undocumented immigrants. Federal courts have had to reaffirm Plyler multiple times,
including issuing a permanent injunction over California’s Proposition 187 (1994), which
banned undocumented children from K–12 public schools and required officials and
teachers to report anyone they suspected of being undocumented to federal
immigration authorities. More recently, the courts blocked Alabama’s HB 56 (2012)
provision that required schools to check and report newly enrolled K–12 students’
immigration status. The entanglement between postsecondary education and
immigration, which falls outside of Plyler’s protection, has grown more pronounced over
the past two decades. Federal immigration law in 1996 opened the door for states to
actively regulate undocumented immigrants’ right to postsecondary education,
including banning admissions or creating discriminatory hardships by denying in-state
tuition or financial aid. While a rich scholarship covers these policies and their effects,
no systematic study exists on the news framing of the intersection between education
and immigration. This article examines 40,469 news articles published from 1980 to 2022
in six national and state news sources in the United States to explore the
(dis)connections between education (K-12 and postsecondary) and immigration.
Combining machine learning techniques and social network analysis with qualitative
coding, we show that reporters’ use of a range of experts creates a deep conflation of
education with immigration enforcement and illegality framing. Despite quests for
journalistic neutrality, we argue that the use of experts by reporters prevents immigrant
education from being a topic on its own or a topic where immigrants are framed
primarily in a positive and inclusive way.

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Crisis Framing of Immigration Politics in United States Newspapers, 1980–2022

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 19:51:41 +0000

Crisis Framing of Immigration Politics in United States Newspapers, 1980–2022 Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 13:51

Crisis Framing of Immigration Politics in United States Newspapers, 1980–2022

By: Allan Colbern, Shawn Walker, Katie Marie Glenn, Rockell Schmidt, Jaime Harrigan

Abstract:

The United States (US) news media is a critical actor in the deeply contested arena of immigration politics. Using an original dataset of 100,521 news articles that mention “crisis” alongside references to “(im) migration,”“border,”“(im) migrants,”“refugees,” and “asylum,” this chapter identifies multiple crisis frames and their connections to US immigration politics from 1980 to 2022. We combine Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling, Social Network Analysis (SNA), corpus linguistics (collocates), and qualitative content analysis to scale and triangulate our analysis across the corpus, topic, and news article levels, allowing us to reveal prominent crisis frames and ground them in context. We show how Democrats and Republicans construct a series of crisis counter-frames that center partisan division in the news. We also find a bi-partisan construction of a migration crisis frame. We argue that this frame ascribed to migration reinforces the dehumanization and exclusion of different categories of (im) migrants. The news media’s uncritical reporting of this bi-partisan migration crisis frame, we argue, further reinforces the absence of humanity and dignity in framing (im) migrants while legitimizing (by not scrutinizing) the US migration regime’s violence.

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Illegality and Enforcement in the Framing of Immigrant Education in US Newspapers

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 19:49:46 +0000

Illegality and Enforcement in the Framing of Immigrant Education in US Newspapers Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 13:49

Illegality and Enforcement in the Framing of Immigrant Education in US Newspapers

By: Allan Colbern, Shawn Walker, María del Pilar Báez Lara, Katie Marie Glenn, Lauren Kater, Shelby Busha

Abstract:

The United States Supreme Court ruled in Plyler v. Doe (1982) that all immigrants, regardless of their legal immigration status under federal law, have a fundamental right to K-12 education. Despite having a constitutional right to K-12 education, immigrants’ right to postsecondary education remains contested and is shaped by federal and state laws on the matter. This article examines 40,469 news articles from 1980 to 2022 covering the fight over immigrant’s right to education, guided by the questions: what frames do reporters construct about immigrants and education, and what role do experts mentioned in an article play in the construction of these frames? Combining machine learning techniques and social network analysis with qualitative coding of news articles by hand, argue that reporters’ use of a range of experts creates a deep conflation of education with immigration enforcement and illegality framing. Thus, despite the quest for journalistic neutrality, the use of experts by reporters across progressive and conservative news sources prevents education from being a topic on its own whenever it includes immigrant children.

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