ABSTRACT
Immigrants are one of the most scapegoated and stigmatized groups in U.S. media. Backlashes against the foreign-born (and their citizen children and grandchildren) have historically centered on the accusation that immigrants disadvantage native-born workers by taking jobs or depressing wages. However, in addition to framing immigrants as “job stealers,” the media paradoxically demonizes them as “freeloaders”: indigent, non-working people in poverty, dependent on charitable or government support. The media juxtaposes stories of immigrants flooding into the United States to “get on welfare” with images of them as vectors of social problems associated with poverty, including contagious diseases, addiction, sexual immorality and crime. These framings of immigrants as both dangerously competitive and parasitically “poor” have emboldened mass, sometimes violent, opposition to open-border policies. This chapter will look at ways that U.S. media have demonized immigrants by associating them with poverty, beginning with a discussion of framings of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Irish, Chinese and Mexican migrants. The chapter will also address the role that the foreign-born “welfare cheat” played in the 1996 welfare reforms and the 2008 and 2012 election cycles. It concludes with a case study of media framings of migrants as vectors of disease during the COVID-19 outbreak.
