Immigration politics and debates center border enforcement, the prevention/deterrence of asylum seekers from crossing the border, and interior enforcement and deportation of immigrants living in liminal statuses in the United States. Our lab is developing research and partnering with organizations to problematize these dominant frames and to add urgency to reframing immigration and (im)migrants around humanity, protection and rights.

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A focus of our current work is on the politics of framing the U.S.-Mexico border project, which is in partnership with the Southern Borders Communities Coalition (SBCC), who launched A New Border Vision many years ago. SBCC’s vision is to center humanity in framing the border. Our lab is conducting original research to understand and contrast how the news media, politicians, and organizations in the immigrant rights movement frame the border. Given the prominence of increasing enforcement and deterrence at the border in bi-partisan national efforts to reform immigration law since the late 1990s, our research explores how and where enforcement framing occurs (media, partisan politics, and the IR movement) and the explores how and when enforcement framing is in conflict with recognizing immigrants' humanity and the responsibility to offer them protection and rights.

 

Our work in the lab is in partnership with Dr. Shawn Walker, and combines qualitative and computational-quantitative methods to study the framing of the border and other areas of immigration, including:

 

• the politics of immigration (e.g., comprehensive immigration reform, Dream Acts, “crisis” on the border or due to influxes of asylum seekers)

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• state/local policies relating to expanding or contracting immigrants’ rights (e.g., driver’s licenses, health care, in-state tuition, detention, immigration enforcement, border enforcement (as in Texas today)

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• the terms: immigrants, migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees (including undocumented, illegal, alien, unaccompanied)

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• crimmigration: the framing the connection between immigrants, legality and criminality

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