Migrants, Caravans, and the Impact of News Photos on Immigration Attitudes

Abstract

The migrant caravan is comprised of thousands of people traveling from Central America to the Mexico–U.S. border seeking refuge from their home countries. In news coverage, images of the caravan regularly portray large groups of immigrants walking toward the border. What are the consequences of this depiction on attitudes toward immigration? We suggest that images of groups of immigrants, in contrast with images of individual immigrants, will tend to decrease support for immigration. In 2019, we preregistered and ran a web-based survey experiment in the United States in which respondents read a news story with either an image of immigrants in a crowd setting, an image of an individual immigrant, or a control condition. The group treatment produces no systematic increase in anti-immigrant sentiment relative to the control. However, we do find differences in the group and individual treatments for respondents who are high in threat sensitivity. Findings are discussed as they relate to recent work on the roles of both fear and person positivity in attitudes about immigration, as well as the potential importance of editorial choices in the portrayal of immigration to the United States.