Framing racial position and political standing: Hmong Americans in the Wisconsin State Journal and the Chico Enterprise-Record

Although membership is regarded as an important condition of immigrants’ capacities to influence the political system, the literature on immigrant political incorporation has tended to focus on formal citizenship status, giving the impression that other forms of membership matter less for immigrants’ political capacity. Arguing for the need to account for ethnic groups’ perceived racial position within local contexts, this paper explores how media outlets, as public institutions, construct the identity of Hmong Americans in ways that affect their political standing. Using a textual analysis approach, we examine how two newspapers within two US communities frame Hmong’s group identity. Our findings show that the papers situate Hmong within a field of racial positions, albeit, not in the same ways that past research predicts would apply to Asian Americans. While differing in the particulars, the two newspapers are quite similar in the frames they use to depict Hmong Americans: civic ostracism, racial ambiguity, and threat. The media neither refer to Hmong as Asians nor valorize them vis-a-vis another racial category. Nevertheless, media representations frequently sully Hmong as a threat to the community. We discuss the implications of our findings for immigrant political incorporation.

Beyond Academic Achievement Outcomes: The Impact of School on the Immigrant Political Incorporation of Undocumented Latinx Youth

The immigrant political incorporation scholarship tends to stress the positive role that schools play in integrating undocumented Latinx youth. Yet, the racialization in school literature indicates that school is often a disempowering place for students of color. This study helps to explain this divergence. It draws from a case study of a struggling high school undergoing state-led reform in a new immigrant destination and analyzes data from school ethnography and student interviews. Deploying the concept of “critical bureaucratic incorporation,” this study explores how school reforms emphasizing high-stakes testing affected the students’ political incorporation. The findings show how these reforms disproportionately negatively affected the Latinx students, nearly all of whom were undocumented immigrants. The results suggest that future studies of immigrant political incorporation consider the case of struggling schools and insights from average students; and that the racialization in school literature address how school reforms affect students beyond academic achievement outcomes.