For their own good: benevolent rhetoric and exclusionary language in public officials' discourse on immigrant-related issues.

• Date: 22 March 2002
• Author: Menjivar, Cecilia,Kil, Sang H.
• Published date: 22 March 2002
• Author: Menjivar, Cecilia

As EDELMAN (1984a: 25) OBSERVES, OFFICIAL CUES ARE A KEY INFLUENCE IN public opinion on social issues. Public officials' discourse on immigrant related issues can thus powerfully affect the lives of immigrants. The debate over immigration in print media such as news dailies--the issues introduced, their definition and presentation, and the policies called for--has often been inscribed in language that portrays immigrants and immigration in negative terms. Media studies have amply demonstrated the use of overtly biased language in politically charged debates. In this article, we focus on language that is not as openly negative, but is ultimately as exclusionary as the more explicitly negative discourse.

To speak to many groups, politicians must be flexible in their range of language use (Moosmuller, 1989). We argue that when liberal public officials attempt to be sympathetic to the plight of immigrants, their compassionate language can mask divisive tactics that effectively deny immigrants vital resources. This is not the case for every public official or for each instance in which they discuss immigrant related issues in a benevolent manner. It occurs when such rhetoric is used to criminalize immigrants' behaviors instead of proposing viable alternatives to improve the conditions being condemned. When the benevolent rhetoric of public officials is based on law and order, this restricts immigrants' actions and effectively substantiates the more restrictionist language (and actions) of opponents of immigration. We focus on public officials' use of subtle exclusionary language because their words often translate into actions with potentially detrimental consequences.

Our case studies demonstrate how "liberal," benevolent rhetoric in the U.S. can disguise exclusionary practices toward immigrants. The term "liberal" here refers to the political orientation that attempts to advocate measures of progressive reform. For us, benevolent rhetoric is "liberal" because such language shows sympathy for immigrant-related issues. Discourse analysis exposes benevolent language as a strategy used by public officials to make their verbal claims more compassionate or apolitical, while protecting access to resources and thus effectively excluding poor immigrants. We concentrate on issues that affect Latino immigrants (though some also affect other groups), since they have become the center of heated debates in policy circles and among the public. In California during the 1990s, for instance, controversy arose in the immigration debate over negatively framed electoral measures such as the "Save our State" initiative (Proposition 187, which sought to deny emergency healthcare and education to undocumented immigrants), an anti-affirmative action measure (Prop. 209), and an English-only initiative (Prop. 277). Each attempted to cut off immigrants and minorities from access to state resources. By the late 1990s, the exclusionary tactics of many public officials became less vitriolic regarding immigration. The following case studies examine their language with respect to the immediate needs of immigrants: work (food vendors), health (unregulated medicine), and housing. Because this practice is not confined to one geographical area, examples come from across the country. As immigrants face increasing opposition in host societies around the world, particularly in industrialized nations, lessons learned from the U.S. could apply to those contexts.

Public officials who use benevolent subterfuge on immigrant-related matters are not motivated merely by racial bias toward immigrants. Class differences and citizenship complicate the use of this language. Examining this rhetoric through the lens of ethnicity and race alone can distort the analysis, for in many of our cases, exclusionary language is used by people in traditional positions of power or in the majority, as well as by established immigrants. Thus, we include the discourse of Latino public officials. We do not assume their voices to be "representative" of other Latino officials, much less of the Latino community, given the wide variety of views on immigrant-related issues among them. After a brief review of the literature, we present our methods and the three case studies.

Discourse Analysis and the Use of Exclusionary Language

We do not seek to analyze the outcomes of specific policies or the legislative process behind policy decisions. Instead, using discourse analysis we examine the frames public officials use. As Naples (1997: 913) observes in her analysis of welfare policy, this offers a better understanding of how power operates within and outside policy. The comments of public officials are our focus because they represent the voice that cues the debate on immigration matters. Inspired by the work of Michel Foucault (1972) on discourse or "talk," we focus on public officials' language as it is used to maintain power and privilege (van Dijk, 1993). We assume that such language is a constructed artifact and not a reflection of reality (Foucault, 1984; Riggins, 1997). Thus, when public officials claim that increased law enforcement is necessary to protect immigrants from bad medicine or poor housing conditions, this may be a choice in representation rather than a fact. Sometimes politicians "naturalize" their positions through language that seems to be commonsensical, but the result is the protection of power and privilege from those who seek to gain access (Connolly, 1984; Edelman, 1984b; van Dijk, 1993, 1997). To the public, it seems sensible to enforce laws that protect immigrants from dangerous drugs or unsafe dwellings. Beyond the sympathetic rhetoric, however, suggestions for alternative resources are tacit, so shutting down these "unsafe" markets and means of survival leaves immigrants with few or, more commonly, no alternatives.

In seeking to reveal the impact of public officials' benevolent statements, our goal is not to determine whether their claims are true or false, but rather to show that if these statements about immigrant-related issues are heeded, the consequences could be less than helpful for the immigrants supposedly being helped (Fairclough, 1995). Essentially, discourse is an action or speech act with consequences that are not clearly spelled out (Wodak, 1996). This ambiguity is related to public officials' speech as stylistic means of persuasion (Sornig, 1989). Here, the essence of persuasion is to induce the public to believe that punitive measures were introduced for the immigrants' own good.

We analyze the discourse in news dailies because public officials speak through them to a wide audience that relates to the information textually. Thus, public officials must select words that appeal to the interests of many different parties. After U.S. anti-immigrant rhetoric reached its apex, exemplified by California's Proposition 187, politicians became wary of contributing to an "Us versus Them" debate (Mehan, 1997). Blatant Prop. 187-era anti-immigrant bashing is now less politically persuasive. To protect their political reputations while appearing to be effective on immigration, politicians' views on the issue have become more subtle' and savvy. Benevolent language, which expresses empathy for groups lacking access to society's goods and benefits, gives politicians an aura of effectiveness.

Methods

We used U.S. newspaper articles for this study, but not a probabilistic method to select the issues. To identify areas immigrants deem important or of concern to their lives, we drew upon research on major immigrant receiving points in the U.S. (Menjivar, 1999, 2000, 2002; Skop and Menjivar, 2001). In those studies, housing, work, and healthcare emerged as important to immigrants' welfare. We reasoned that the discourse of public officials on these issues would shed light on the use of benevolent rhetoric with potentially exclusionary consequences.

The mainstream newspapers we used for content analysis included the June 1995 through June 2000 issues of the Los Angeles Times, Arizona Republic, and New York Times. Our main data source was Lexis-Nexis, an electronic database of full-text articles from U.S. and international newspapers. We used only articles with direct quotes or stories on public officials, not opinion pieces or editorials. Using an electronic database as the main source of data has limitations. Relying on journalists' accounts rather than directly analyzing politicians' discourse in congressional records could compromise validity. However, we wished to focus on a medium that provides information for the general public (few people regularly read officials records) and to include the accounts of elected officials and comments of those in charge of implementing policy.' Reliability was high, since we obtained the same articles in several tests of the terms in our search and in each trial. (2)

The search was conducted in two stages. Key terms such as "immigrant housing" and "immigrant pharmacies" generated too many irrelevant articles, such as pieces on housing markets, real estate, or local drugstores. To obtain relevant articles, we used terms such as "illegal housing," "illegal pharmacies," "illegal medicines," "food vendors," and "mobile food" as they pertained to immigrants. We discarded repeated articles (mostly syndicated ones) and then looked for direct quotes from public officials speaking about these issues (resulting in 66 hits). After reading all the articles, we only used 22 of them. The rest lacked direct quotes or contained quotes with openly negative remarks toward immigrants. To complement our content analysis, we conducted limited participant observation in different settings. For instance, when possible we attended court hearings dealing with the issues presented here, particularly those concerning food vendors.

Case Studies in Language Exclusion

We selected only three issues, although many others could have been...