Rice Undergraduate Theses

Permanent URI for this collection

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1

A Crisis of People or Politics? : Revisiting the Impact of Narrative Framing of Immigration in German Newspapers in 2018
(Rice University, 2019-05) Schumacher, Erika; Hamm, Keith
In 2017, a report (Georgiou & Zaborowski) traced the media portrayal of the 2015 refugee crisis and of immigrants in European countries. The authors reported a general negative portrayal of immigrants in the news. Additionally, they showed a shift: the refugee crisis was initially described as a humanitarian issue that transcended boundaries; by the end of 2015, each country viewed migrants as an issue of national security. My research revisits the media narrative around the migrant crisis in 2018, specifically in Germany, which accepted an exceptionally large number of refugees. My research categorizes newspaper articles written on the topic of immigration over the course of 2018, finding that the issue of immigration has shifted narratives once again. While not necessarily making value statements on immigrants themselves, German print media presents positive images of immigrants in an economic context and negative images of immigrants in a societal context. Further, immigration is overwhelmingly an issue of politics and policy. In this way, the print media talks around immigrants, showing them as an issue of electoral politics instead of societal participants.