Deserving to Belonging: How and Why Immigrant Advocacy Organizations Change Their Framing of Immigrants

Traditionally, immigrant advocacy organizations depended on utility-based arguments of economic and social contributions of immigrants: increasingly, however, the organizations invoke a rights-based discourse based on intrinsic human rights and equality, the very discourse that right-wing nationalists attack. Within the context of the new wave of right-wing nationalism, this dissertation explores how these organizations have changed their discourse through a qualitative discourse analysis of documents and staff interviews. Through qualitative textual analysis of when, how, and why the organizations have changed their discourse, this dissertation shows that the organizations use a more nuanced mix of utility-based and rights-based discourse depending on the type of issue that they are responding to. Despite the overall trend of increase in the rate of use of rights-based discourse, there are sharp increases in use for utility-based discourse in response to the announcement to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and in response to the “Public Charge” announcement, which was supposed disadvantage immigrants who have used any public benefits. Furthermore, staff interviews show that this change has been motivated more by the impacted population’s call to reflect their diverse experiences and identities, an endogenous change, rather than just as a response to the rise in anti-immigrant right-wing rhetoric in the recent decade, an exogenous change in framing.