The Politics of Selectivity: Online Newspaper Coverage of Refugees Entering Canada and the United States

Abstract

While scholarly work on Europe’s latest “refugee crisis” has blossomed, less attention has focused on the United States and Canada. My research centers on newspaper coverage of refugees entering these two countries, before and after the Paris terrorist attacks of November 13, 2015. I conduct a comparative, cultural sociological analysis of 318 online news articles, reconstructing a system of meaning I call the Politics of Selectivity, in which refugees are portrayed as deserving or undeserving of resettlement. A deep, interpretive reading of the data reveals three dimensions of this political arena in which explicit, implicit, and conditional criteria for accepting refugees are articulated.