Three narratives to avoid in conversations about unauthorized immigration

*This was written for journalists, but it’s pertinent to everyone who engages in conversations about immigration. If we’re to change the Latino narrative the first effort should be to change the frame, and these three basic things are a good start: stop framing unauthorized immigration as Mexican-specific; stop casting Trump as a focal point; and remember to contextualize individual narratives. It’s worth you time to read this piece.


cjr-logoBy Julia Barajas, Columbia Journalism Review (4 minute read)

Editor’s Note: This post was produced as part of a graduate course on media writing and storytelling taught by the editors of Columbia Journalism Review.

THE STAKES ARE HIGH for immigration coverage. The Supreme Court is slated to rule this year on President Barack Obama’s executive actions, which could grant millions of unauthorized immigrants reprieve from deportation and the ability to apply for work permits. The political battle to succeed him, meanwhile, has been largely driven on the Republican side by Donald Trump’s calls for mass deportations and a more restricted border.

Level-headed reporting and analysis are all the more important with so much on the line. And three common narratives pose a particular threat to that coverage, often obscuring—rather than illuminating—a highly complex issue.

FRAMING UNAUTHORIZED IMMIGRATION AS  MEXICAN-SPECIFIC

Media attention toward unauthorized immigration has long been trained on the southern border, partly in response to the millions of Mexicans who entered the United States in recent decades. But the trend line in recent years has pointed away from Mexico. Singular focus on that country serves to exclude millions of stakeholders from coverage.

Click HERE to read the full story.



[Photo by U.S. Customs and Border Protection/Flickr]

Suggested reading

crossing_borders
Sergio Troncoso
“On good days I feel I am a bridge. On bad days I just feel alone,” Sergio Troncoso writes in this riveting collection of sixteen personal essays in which he seeks to connect the humanity of his Mexican family to people he meets on the East Coast, including his wife’s Jewish kin. Raised in a home steps from the Mexican border in El Paso, Texas, Troncoso crossed what seemed an even more imposing border when he left home to attend Harvard College.
Initially, “outsider status” was thrust upon him; later, he adopted it willingly, writing about the Southwest and Chicanos in an effort to communicate who he was and where he came from to those unfamiliar with his childhood world. He wrote to maintain his ties to his parents and his abuelita, and to fight against the elitism he experienced at an Ivy League school. “I was torn,” he writes, “between the people I loved at home and the ideas I devoured away from home.”
Troncoso writes to preserve his connections to the past, but he puts pen to paper just as much for the future. In his three-part essay entitled “Letter to My Young Sons,” he documents the terror of his wife’s breast cancer diagnosis and the ups and downs of her surgery and treatment. Other essays convey the joys and frustrations of fatherhood, his uneasy relationship with his elderly father and the impact his wife’s Jewish heritage and religion have on his Mexican-American identity.
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