“Second-class citizens”: framing domestic migrant workers in Vietnamese news media during the fourth wave of COVID-19

Abstract

This study investigates how domestic migrant workers were framed in Vietnamese news media during the country’s fourth wave of COVID-19. Although the experience of domestic migrant workers in urban settings has been a relevant issue of studies among domestic and international academia, few papers have looked at migrant workers from the perspective of communication and media study. In an attempt to fill this knowledge gap, 239 news articles about migrant workers taken from three major Vietnamese online newspapers from April 27 to December 31, 2021, were content analyzed to understand how migrant workers were portrayed in the news media. Five generic news frames, (i) Economic consequences, (ii) Conflict, (iii) Human interest, (iv) Morality, and (v) Attribution of responsibility, were used for coding. It is found that migrant workers were multidimensionally depicted in the media as both pitiful, vulnerable, and helpless victims of the pandemic and objects of blame for new outbreaks, but the “victim” portrayal was more prevalent. Such findings align with previous studies on the framing of outgroups, i.e., immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees, especially during medical crises.