Policing the boundaries between 'us' and 'them': Immigrants, narrative identity, and the politics of inclusion/exclusion (New York City, California)

New York City and Los Angeles host the two largest concentrations of immigrants in the United States today. During the early-mid 1990s, these two areas demonstrated divergent political orientations toward immigrants. This work analyzes the cultural dimension of the political process and details how mass media narratives of contemporary immigration have evolved over time. A content analysis of The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times and other local immigrant texts is performed in order to compare and contrast elite narratives of immigration in each geographic context. After the introductory chapter, a comparative analysis is pursued with an historical overview of immigration in each area. Chapter 2 demonstrates that while New York City's population growth has long been dependent upon immigration, Los Angeles has managed its impressive growth, until recently, with a relatively small foreign-born contingent. Importantly, a plurality of immigrant-ethnic groups in New York have made it into the middle classes, and beyond, with a persistent sense of their immigrant heritage. Chapter 3 compares scholarly texts on immigration with a geographic focus on California and New York. While immigrant narratives in New York are highly focused on a European immigrant past, the narrative within California is highly focused upon non-Europeans such as Mexicans, Chinese and Japanese. The narrative history of these immigrant-ethnic groups in California points to a tragic past. Although the past has become an increasingly salient temporal focus for immigrant narratives of California, the present-future provides a much more prominent reference point there as compared to New York. Chapters 4-6 chart the development of narratives of illegal immigration in each area's most influential newspapers--- The New York Times and Los Angeles Times---from the early 1970s up through the turn of the present century. Although The New York Times adopted a "threat" narrative in relation to illegal immigrants in the early-mid 1970s, thereafter the issue was framed in a far less antagonistic fashion. The Los Angeles Times was more consistently antagonistic in its portrayal of illegal immigration, despite lower unemployment rates throughout most of this 30 year period.