Framing Immigrants at the Intersection of Education and Immigration Enforcement in United States Newspapers

Abstract The United States Supreme Court ruled in Plyler v. Doe (1982) that all children regardless of their legal immigration status have a fundamental right to K-12 education. Despite education being a fundamental right, it remains fragile and contested for undocumented immigrants. Federal courts have had to reaffirm Plyler multiple times, including issuing a permanent injunction over California’s Proposition 187 (1994), which banned undocumented children from K-12 public schools and required officials and teachers to report anyone they suspected of being undocumented to federal immigration authorities. More recently, the courts blocked Alabama’s HB 56(2012) provision that required schools to check and report newly enrolled K-12 students’ immigration status. The entanglement between postsecondary education and immigration, which falls outside of Plyler’s protection, has grown more pronounced over the past two decades. Federal immigration law in 1996 opened the door for states to actively regulate undocumented immigrants’ right to postsecondary education, including banning admissions or creating discriminatory hardships by denying in-state tuition or financial aid. While a rich scholarship covers these policies and their effects, no systematic study exists on the news framing of the intersection between education and immigration. This article examines 40,469 news articles published from 1980 to 2022 in six national and state news sources in the United States to explore the (dis)connections between education (K-12 and postsecondary) and immigration. Combining machine learning techniques and social network analysis with qualitative coding, we show that reporters’ use of a range of experts creates a deep conflation of education with immigration enforcement and illegality framing. Despite quests for journalistic neutrality, we argue that the use of experts by reporters prevents immigrant education from being a topic on its own or a topic where immigrants are framed primarily in a positive and inclusive way.