USCA Annenberg Norman Lear Center’s Media Impact Project said U.S. television over emphasizes criminality representations of immigrants, reinforcing xenophobia and negative stereotypes.
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The study titled “Change the Narrative, Change the World: How immigrant representation on television moves audiences to action” assessed the storyline of 129 immigrant characters from 97 episodes of 59 TV shows that were broadcasted between August 2018 and July 2019.
Shows as Orange Is the New Black, Madam Secretary, and The Conners, which included immigrant characters, called for viewers focusing on massive deportations, illegal and dangerous arrivals, as well as penitentiary treatment to the undocumented.
The analysis found the shows reinforced several criminality stereotypes about immigrants by representing about 22% of them as law-breachers and 11% as convicts, in total disproportion with real-life statistics. According to the Cato Institute and the Marshall Project, in 2018, native-born U.S. citizens committed more crimes than immigrants.
The study also revealed that TV over-represented undocumented immigrants, as 63 % of the characters were under that position, and only 24% had legal status. Besides, fictional ICE and other authorities detained about 25% of immigrant characters, mainly in Orange Is the New Black and Madam Secretary.
Half of the represented characters were Latino, a figure matching real-life figures. However, Asia and Pacific Island’s migration made up 12% of the represented migration, while being 26% of real-life asylum seekers.
Also, black immigrants representation was coherent with real-life numbers. They are under 10% of total migrants but missed representing them as undocumented, considering there are 600,000 undocumented black immigrants in the US.
Other migration-intersectional communities remain almost invisible for the audiences, transgender and gender non-conformist migrants, despite TV shows include several gay immigrant characters in their plots.