Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
The hot-button issue of immigration has taken a cruel turn with many Americans labeling Hispanics who flee to this country as criminals, gangsters and drug users, research by a Towson University Communication professor shows.
Jennifer Potter, associate professor and chair of the Communication Studies Department, said a year of research found that undocumented immigrants are described in five primary ways in media with most descriptions having negative connotations. This group of immigrants is associated with terms such as “wave” or “invasion,” connected to drugs at the Mexican border, discussed as criminals or equated with potential or actual terrorists, Potter said.
Potter shared her research on Wednesday during a Multiculturalism in Action Brown Bag Series at the College of Liberal Arts at Towson.
The discussion that drew dozens of students, faculty and staff came a day before 18 former counter terrorism officials released a letter urging the departments of Justice and Homeland Security to retract or correct a report that implies a link between terrorism and immigration.
“Overall the report appears designed to give the misleading impression that immigrants – and even their citizen family members – are responsible for the vast majority of terrorist attacks that have occurred in the United States,” said the letter released on Thursday.
The report was written to comply with an executive order President Donald Trump issued in 2017 banning citizens from six predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States, said officials as it was reported in The Washington Post.
Potter said that the Oxford English Dictionary defined “illegal” as not legal or lawful, while undocumented is defined as not recorded in or approved by not having the appropriate legal document. She explained that while the terms illegal and undocumented have similar definitions, the connotations for the words are different. The term undocumented assumes that a person lacks citizenship papers, whereas the term illegal is a more charged word that makes the person unlawful, she said.
“After doing the timeline work, like how are they being portrayed over long periods of time, my real focus became how to understand the context here,” Potter said. “The focus of the project really turned to what’s the difference between illegal immigrant and illegals?”
Potter said her research included information from more than 360 sources of specific instances where the terms were used in newspapers, magazines and other printed materials. Sources included such magazines as Times, Newsweek, Atlantic and the New Republic. She said her analysis also contained information from “Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse” by Otto Santa Ana.
“I basically mined magazines, documentaries, and music all of the places in which pop-culture is existing and I tried to understand how folks talk about illegal immigrants and how does it get connected to others,” she said.
Potter said that when things are not going well in the country, such as when unemployment rises, the language tends to become more hostile towards immigrants. However, when the language diminishes, she said the circumstance tend to get better for immigrants.
Negative words are not unique to immigrants with brown skin, she said. For example, the word animal has been used against African Americans after slavery to dehumanize them in the minds of citizens. Another example Potter gave was when Native Americans were acknowledged as “savages.”
The counterterrorism officials on Thursday said that the report, released in January, found that 402 of the 549 people convicted of terrorism charges since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were foreign-born. Although Trump has used the data points to support his administration’s hard-line immigration policies, critics said the report’s conclusions relies on flawed data.
Potter said her study now focuses on how Trump, politicians and the public are expanding the notion of illegals and illegal immigration. She said she has begun pouring over Trump’s racially driven rhetoric in tweets.
The president of the United States is essentially saying due-process does not apply to “illegals,” said Potter, who drew loud moans from the audience when she noted that Trump’s tweets connects illegal or undocumented immigrants to crime, the MS-13 gang, Democrats, and drugs at the Southern border.
“He uses nativist language to talk about the influx,” she said.
Potter’s research was generally accepted by the audience.
“I like how she tried to establish and differentiate the terms undocumented, illegal immigrants and simply being illegal and how no human can be classified as illegal, for we are all justly so humans,” said freshman Asiah Williams said.
Tola Pedro, a junior, brought up the fact that many Hispanics are placed under one umbrella and described that association of MS-13 with Mexicans is ignorant.
“Hispanics who come to this country to work and make a living are being targeted because of ignorance and hate,” he said. “Trump’s rhetoric and actions are making life harder for people who are no different from other Americans.”