Media and Migration

Constructions of Mobility and Difference

Russell King, Nancy Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134584048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This title explores the close and vital relationship between the contemporary media and immigration. Drawing on newspapers, magazines, film, television and photography, the contributors examine the effects of mass media on migration behaviour and ethnic identity. Using examples from a range of countries, Media and Migration illustrates how the media intervenes to affect the reception migrants receive, how it stimulates prospective migrants to move and how it plays a dynamic role in the cultural politics and cultural identity of diasporic communities.

1
Media and Migration

An overview

Nancy Wood and Russell King

Introduction

Migration and media studies are two richly interdisciplinary fields of study. They overlap in various ways but the interconnections have rarely been explored. These linkages are not just a subject for academic research, but impinge on the consciousness of the ordinary European citizen on virtually a daily basis. This has been very evident in the British press in the recent past when events and issues such as the Afghan airplane hijacking at Stansted Airport, the arrival of Roma asylum-seekers and the British government’s evolving policy for dealing with asylum claims have been reported, discussed, exaggerated and politicised to the extent that so-called ‘illegal immigration’ and so-called ‘bogus asylum-seekers’ are repeatedly claimed (by the British Conservative Party at least) to be major election issues alongside health and education. Exactly how the media influence, shape or determine the knowledge, attitudes and behaviour of British and European citizenry with respect to contemporary migration processes is one of the major lines of enquiry of this volume. What emerges from the analyses carried out by the contributors, of specific migration events and of the national contexts to which these relate, is a complex picture where perspectives and approaches may dovetail at times, but may equally stand in stark contrast to each other. In this introductory overview, we merely wish to draw the reader’s attention to some of these salient points of convergence and divergence.

To be more systematic, we suggest that media may intervene in the migration process and in the individual and collective experience of migration in three main ways. First, images transmitted from the destination countries, or by the global media generally, may be an important source of information for potential migrants. Whether this information is accurate or not, it can act as an important factor stimulating migrants to move. Images of wealth and of a free and relaxed lifestyle in the ‘West’ or the ‘North’ are commonplace in the developing and transforming countries of the world, and the constancy of these images in global media – in films, television, magazines and advertisements – tends to reinforce their ‘truth’ in the eyes of the beholders. Often returning migrants collude in strengthening the veracity of these images, partly to impress, and partly to deny any elements of failure, suffering or exclusion, both to their family and friends back home, and perhaps also to themselves.

Second, host-country media constructions of migrants will be critical in influencing the type of reception they are accorded, and hence will condition migrants’ eventual experience of inclusion or exclusion. Often acting as the mouthpiece of political parties or other powerful groups, media discourses have been shown to be immensely influential in constructing migrants as ‘others’, and often too as ‘criminals’ or ‘undesirables’. Such a focus on migrant criminality creates stereotypes which are very far from the truth and very hard to shake off. In Britain there are heavy hints and assumptions that all asylum-seekers are ‘bogus’ whilst the term ‘economic migrant’ has been invested with a new negative meaning. We pick up the issue of British newspaper coverage of recent migration events later in this chapter.

Third, media originating from the migration sending country, such as films, video and satellite television, as well as new global distribution technologies such as the world wide web, are playing a dynamic role in the cultural identity and politics of diasporic communities. There are interesting linkages here between media and the creation and maintenance of transnational communities whose members are able to function in two or more worlds, with varying degrees of comfort. Such media may help migrants feel ‘at home’ in their country of ‘exile’ but at the same time perhaps slow down their processes of integration and incorporation. A further development occurs when emigrant groups and ethnic communities produce their own media in the form of film, television and music. Such communicative art forms often reflect hybrid inputs from the countries of origin, the destination setting and influences from the global music or entertainment scene. As far as the future is concerned, increasing use will undoubtedly be made by migrant and diasporic communities of internet technologies; the importance of this medium has only just begun to be researched by migration scholars (Elkins 1997; Morton 1999).

These three types of linkage between media and migration by no means exhaust the kinds of interrelationship which exist. In the final part of this introductory chapter we relate how individual chapters of the book explore a myriad of connections. Before we do this, we examine how the ‘media and migration’ interrelationship has been investigated and understood within the respective fields of migration studies and media studies, and we present two fairly specific examples of media–migration analysis – a brief survey of recent migration issues in the British print media, and the use of photographs to document the migration experience.

Media in migration; migration in the media

The migration studies literature – which has been growing extremely rapidly in recent years – is curiously silent on the role of the media. A perusal of the key texts which have been published in the last few years reveals that practically no attention has been paid to media issues: most do not even have ‘media’ as an index entry, let alone as a theme for a chapter or a chapter subheading. Migration tends to be objectified as a time–space event or process which is largely to be explained in economic, demographic or sociological terms and linked to issues of employment, development, population redistribution, class formation and the creation of ethnic communities.¹

The significance of the media lies beneath the surface of these processes and its role is almost never made explicit by migration scholars. Where migration is modelled as a behavioural or decision-making process based on available sources of information to the potential migrant about the ‘place utilities’ of various destinations, the question is never really asked: what are these sources of information? How do potential migrants receive knowledge or impressions about places they might think of relocating to? To put the question in the specific jargon of the migration behaviourists, how do people construct ‘information fields’ about areas and places which then become their ‘migration fields’? (White and Woods 1980: 30–4). For sure, these channels of information are many and varied – word-of-mouth, letters and other communications from friends and relatives who have already migrated, data from employment agencies and other bodies. But there must also be other sources of information and imagery which are received by the migrants but rarely studied by migration researchers. Hence we do not know what the precise roles are of newspapers, television or films in shaping the perception of migrants about places which enter into their migration fields. And we also do not know exactly to what extent these media-related images contribute to an accurate or (more likely) a distorted and exaggerated picture of the reality migrants eventually discover for themselves – at the same time as they discover their own delusion.

From the other side of the media–migration relationship, while the literature on media studies has been slow to engage with migration as a distinct phenomenon, it is fair to say that media and film studies have none the less been attentive to the migration experience in more oblique ways. As we have indicated above, if migration scholars are only now recognising the role that the media play in the migrant’s behaviour or decision-making processes, media scholars have long been concerned with precisely the question of media ‘effects’. Several of our contributors explore this vexed area of enquiry: in one case considering how coverage of immigration issues may have affected voting behaviour, in another looking at host-country representations that may have stimulated the desire to migrate. However, as with all studies of the infinitely complex relation between images and their alleged ‘effects’ on human psychology or behaviour, conclusions must be provisional and cautious.

A number of media scholars has also used ethnographic research methods to investigate the use of media in the everyday life experience of recent or more settled migrants. Marie Gillespie’s pioneering work on how generational relations and conflicts amongst young Punjabi Londoners were negotiated in the course of daily television viewing (Gillespie 1995) has paved the way for further studies of how migrants might use global media, host-country media, media transmitted from the country of origin or media produced by migrant communities to come to terms with their new lives and to make sense of their migration experience.

Finally, if it is in the broader domain of ‘post-colonial’ theory that notions like ‘diasporic’, ‘hybrid’ or ‘transnational’ identities have been explored, elaborated and debated, these terms are certainly ones that both media and migration scholars have invoked to characterise the multiple identities that geographical displacement tends to produce, especially among younger generations of migrants. Again, media and film theorists have been particularly concerned to identify the role that images and sounds originating from media sources might play in the ‘identity politics’ of migrant communities. To take just one striking example, in France, the term ‘beur’, proudly adopted by French youth of North African origin to celebrate their ‘hybrid’ identity (and in defiance of a deeply rooted prejudice against them), is now used in common parlance. It has also come to designate a distinct cinematic genre (‘beur’ cinema) and a national radio station bears the name ‘Radio Beur’. Rap music coming from North Africa, especially Algeria, or produced by beur youth, now tops the French charts. Whether beur media merely gave expression to this identity politics or helped to bring it into being is precisely the kind of question which media and film studies are concerned to address. But however positive and uplifting this example, it cannot be taken for granted that such multiple, hybrid or ‘diasporic’ identities should be celebrated for their own sake; indeed, as we have already suggested, they might equally express a failure to adapt to new lives and an acute sense of alienation and exclusion. This is why, when analysing how the media articulates or engages with this new politics of identity, media scholars need to turn to the insights of migration studies for a more differentiated account of the migrant experience.

Issues of migration as constructed in British newspapers

Probably the largest volume of research on media–migration interactions has been carried out on the representations of migrants, migration events and migration issues in the printed media. Here we briefly review some of this research and provide a preliminary commentary on recent migration events as portrayed through the British press.

From a theoretical and methodological point of view, pioneering research on the analysis of media text has been carried out by Teun van Dijk, although his work tends to focus on media discourses of racism rather than on the process of migration (see especially van Dijk 1991; also 1987, 1992, 1993). Earlier work on racism in the mass media in Britain had been carried out by Hartmann and Husband (1974) and by Gordon and Rosenberg (1989). On a wider front, immigration and racism have received intense coverage in the media of most European countries, particularly since the late 1980s, with numerous reports and features in the popular and serious press and programmes on television (Solomos and Wrench 1993). The broader social and political context of migration partly explains this – and the media itself has contributed to this more prominent social–political debate, as media and politicians conspire to create ‘a dangerous tautology between two supposedly separate realms: that of representation and that of policy-making’ (Rosello 1998: 137). Meanwhile writers such as Balibar (1991), Bovenkerk et al. (1990) and Miles (1993) have portrayed the development of a new kind of ‘European racism’ which has come about, at least in part, from the fact that the construction of a ‘European identity’ inevitably involves an explicit or implicit pattern of exclusion of ‘the other’ – notably immigrants, refugees, Muslims, black people, etc. At the national and local level, this exclusion reaches the level of relentless victimisation and demonisation of certain immigrant groups, as several studies have shown (Brosius and Eps 1995; Kaye 1998; Rosello 1998; ter Wal 1996). More complex cross-currents of media representation are evident in countries such as Switzerland and Belgium, which are multi-ethnic societies of long standing. In Belgium for instance, the francophone public media tend to highlight any expression of racism in Flanders – typical of the media’s exaggeration of negative aspects on the ‘other’ side of the Belgian ethno-linguistic divide (Martiniello 1997: 292).

A good example of a scholarly analysis of the media portrayal of a single migration-related event is Jessica ter Wal’s (1996) examination of the discourse surrounding the occupation by, and eventual eviction of, more than a thousand immigrants who were squatting in an abandoned factory, called La Pantanella, in Rome in 1991. Even though her analysis concentrated on the representation of the issue by a single newspaper (the broadly centre-left La Repubblica), ter Wal shows how the paper’s articles and comments served to build a consensus in favour of the eviction of the immigrants from the building. Above all, La Repubblica gave extensive coverage to the views of local inhabitants who wanted to keep the immigrants out of ‘their’ neighbourhood. Press reports stressed the alleged links between the immigrants and the criminality, urban degradation and climate of ‘fear’ which were said to be characteristic of the area. Within the factory, overcrowding, filth and inter-ethnic conflict between the many migrant groups present were constantly referred to. Only after the eviction had taken place was there some attempt at a more balanced representation of the immigrant populations involved.

There is an interesting parallel between the police’s storming of the Pantanella in Rome and the eviction of a group of sans-papiers (undocumented immigrants) from the church of Saint-Bernard in Paris in 1996. Rosello’s (1998) analysis of the Saint-Bernard case embraces TV and cartoon representations...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 Media and migration: an overview
• 2 Media effects and ethnic relations in Britain and France
• 3 Migrants and media: the Italian case
• 4 'Blaming the victim': an analysis of press representation of refugees and asylum-seekers in the United Kingdom in the 1990s
• 5 Protection or hospitality: the young man and the illegal immigrant in La Promesse
• 6 African immigration on film: Pummarò and the limits of vicarious representation
• 7 'Italy is beautiful': the role of Italian television in Albanian migration to Italy
• 8 Following the Senegalese migratory path through media representation
• 9 Communication, politics and religion in an Islamic community
• 10 Satellite television and Chinese migrants in Britain
• 11 'A space where one feels at home': media consumption practices among London's South Asian and Greek Cypriot communities
• 12 'Blackpool in the sun': images of the British on the Costa del Sol
• Index