Twenty-first century ideological discourses about US migrant education that transcend registers

Abstract

Widely distributed and often repeated discursive patterns which represent migrants can influence the education of migrant students ( Calavita, 1996 ; Santa Ana, 2002 ; Cutler, 2017 ; and Dabach et al., 2017 ). Ideological discourses (e.g., ‘immigrants are threats’) are particularly potent structures that mediate language, cognition and social life. Whilst there has been a recent increase in studies of texts on the topic of migration generally, there are few that focus on the intersection of migration and education or on discursive patterns that transcend registers. This study introduces a multi-dimensional analysis approach for the identification of ideological discourses from a 9 million-word corpus of twenty-first century, US texts about migrant education from multiple registers (online comments, national and regional newspaper texts, and federal and state government webpages) using the distribution of lexical variables that characterise variants of migrant/ migration. Eleven ideological discourses (e.g., ‘US immigration policies are problematic, but there is no consensus for solutions’) were found. Of these, several had not been previously identified, one confirmed a previously identified discourse, and several complemented and extended previously identified discursive patterns on this topic. Together, these findings reveal the highly naturalised ideologically discursive landscape that shapes educational opportunities for US migrant students.