Taxpaying, importing, enforcing: Emerging discourse patterns in online newspaper comments about U.S. immigrant education

Recent scholarship suggests that social norms are becoming more permissive of prejudicial talk about immigrants in the United States (Crandall, Miller, & White, 2018). This is in keeping with trends observed internationally (e.g., Krzyżanowski, 2018; Vollmer & Karakayali, 2018). Past studies of discourse about immigration in the United States have identified a number of patterns — most notably those relating immigrants to threat (e.g., Santa Ana, 2002) — though some have found patterns framing immigration as beneficial (e.g., Strauss, 2012). This study explores discursive patterns about immigrant education in online comments from American newspapers. It focuses on change exhibited by exploring salient lexical and thematic patterns in 2016 comments relative to such patterns in 2009 comments. Using a corpus linguistics design, keyword, thematic, and other analytical techniques were applied to identify and describe the most prominent new patterns in the 2016 comments. Seven themes, through which immigration was framed negatively, emerged as new and salient in 2016. The article also includes discussion of cross-thematic patterns (e.g., a zero-sum framework) identified in the analysis.