In Spring/Summer 2017 there was an increase in Haitian nationals from the United States, entering Canada, reaching numbers as high of 7,787 (Government of Canada, 2019). This increase in irregular migration was covered by various news outlets and Canadian government officials addressed this as a ‘problem’. Given this important media and political reality, this thesis sought to explore the media representation of Haitian irregular migration. More specifically, I examine the media’s depiction of Haitian asylum seekers as well as the nation. Therefore, the goal of this thesis is to contextualize this media representation within a wider socio-political context.
Through a Critical Race Theory perspective, I conduct a qualitative content analysis of news media articles published in the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. The analysis reveals that the nation is imagined as innocent while the asylum seekers are constructed as threats. This thesis goes on to demonstrate how the media has relied on a discourse of inclusion/exclusion and of victimization in order to positively imagine the nation. Meanwhile, by framing asylum seekers’ motivations for entering Canada as frivolous and by utilizing techniques of vilification, the media is able to delegitimize the asylum seekers’ claims. Finally, this thesis concludes that the media has a tendency to omit the socio-political context of its portrayal of the asylum seekers and of the nation. Therefore, it is important for the media to accurately represent irregular migration in order to expose global inequalities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/40947 |
| Date | 04 September 2020 |
| Creators | Joseph, Robynn S. |
| Contributors | Nagra, Baljit |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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