Immigrant-Origin Youth’s Responses to Presidential Immigration Debate Clips in an Election Year

• In Event: (Undocumented) Immigrants and Voice: Youth Narratives and Sense-Making of Local and National Immigration Policies

Abstract

Discourse (Gee, 2011) plays a fundamental role in shaping how we understand policy debates, as well as how immigrants are discussed and represented. Previously, scholars have analyzed public discourse about immigration policy (e.g., Chávez, 2008; Hamann & Reeves, 2012; Mehan, 1997) and Orellana and Johnston’s (2012) work especially hones in on the role of children within immigration discourse. However, still needed are the voices of youth themselves and how they make sense of immigration policy discourse. The purpose of this paper is to better understand how immigrant-origin youth understand and articulate their positions vis-à-vis immigration policy debates: How do immigrant-origin youth make sense of immigration debate discourse, as represented in Presidential debate clips?

Drawing from theories of cultural citizenship (Rosaldo, 1994), positioning (Davies & Harré, 1990), and citizenship broadly defined (Castles, 2004; Castles & Davidson, 2000; Ong, 1996), this project emerged during ethnographic fieldwork in a multi-site election-year study designed to better understand how civics teachers of immigrant youth taught about elections. During fieldwork, debates were screened, yet students’ voices (Juffermans & Van der Aa, 2013) were largely silent. Recording students’ private responses to Presidential video debate clips during one-on-one interviews were a means to access student voice and interpretation concerning immigration policy—especially policies about undocumented youth.

This data was gathered during semi-structured interviews with 26 focal students, ages 16-19 who represented 15 different countries of origin from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe. Of these, 12 were first-generation, 6 were 1.5-generation (defined as immigrants who migrated before age 12), and 7 second-generation youth. Participants were shown two 40-second clips from the second presidential debate on October 17, 2012, one from each major Presidential candidate (Barack Obama and Mitt Romney). In each clip candidates discussed their stances on undocumented youth’s status and their proposed policy solutions. All interviews were fully transcribed. We used discourse analysis (Gee, 2011) to examine how immigrant-origin youth articulated their positions, paying close attention to metaphors and linguistic devices present in transcriptions.

Emerging findings suggest that many immigrant-origin youth aligned with politicians’ paradigm of “good immigrants” (students and those contributing to the economy) who should stay in the U.S. and gain legal status versus “bad immigrants” (criminals and those who do not contribute to the economy) who should leave the United States. The theme of “fairness” was prevalent, but how it was expressed and applied varied. Findings reveal how the discourse of fairness appeared to be persuasive to youth, despite the ways in which it was employed to argue against rights for undocumented people.

This paper contributes to understanding what discourses appear to be internally persuasive to youth—across generational status and countries of origin. By better understanding what appears to be persuasive, we have tools to understand and contextualize how immigrant-origin youth think about the sound bites that will continue to move across airwaves with the voices of immigration reform growing louder, across different perspectives that both agree and disagree with policies for inclusion.

Authors

• Dafney Blanca Dabach, University of Washington - Seattle

• Aliza Fones, University of Washington

• MJ (Mee Joo) Kim, University of Washington - Seattle

• Natasha Merchant, University of Washington