Through No Fault of Their Own? A Comparative Critical Discourse Analysis of Undocumented Youth and the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act in Television News

• In Event: 63.018 - Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

In my dissertation I examine the rise of one of the most publicized immigration policy issues of the last fourteen years: The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would create a path to legal residency for young undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Following the 1982 Plyler v. Doe Supreme Court decision, undocumented children gained the right to a free public K-12 education in the United States (Olivas, 2012), but their immigration status and their futures at institutions of higher education were left largely unaddressed (López, 2004; Yates, 2004). In response to the uncertain futures faced by thousands of undocumented students upon high school graduation in this country each year, the DREAM Act was first introduced to Congress in 2001 (Olivas, 2004). In this multi-method study, I examine the DREAM Act versions presented to Congress during President Barack Obama’s first term in office—a time when the DREAM Act was expected to pass for the first time since its inception in 2001. First, through a content analysis of DREAM Act policy documents, I demonstrate how this policy was framed and how DREAMers were socially constructed (Schneider & Ingram, 1993; Schneider & Ingram, 1997). Following this, I conduct a multimodal (Kress, 2011) Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Luke, 1996; van Dijk, 2002; van Dijk, 2003) of national television news coverage of the DREAM Act of 2010, the version that came closest to passing, and highlight the role news media play in communicating education policy issues. Considering Haas’ (2004) argument that news media play a large part in how education policy issues come to be understood by the public, I explore how framing (Hand, Penuel and Gutiérrez, 2012) has been used to portray the DREAM Act and DREAMers. My theoretical framework centers on understanding immigration in the United States as a racial issue (Pérez Huber, 2009) by using Omi and Winant’s (1994) theories of racial formation as well as Bonilla-Silva’s (2010) frames of color-blind racism.

Author

• Ruth María López, Brown University