Do Marginalized Sources Matter?

The news media possess the power to let people speak or to silence them, to give groups a voice or leave them voiceless. As non-citizens, irregular migrants are among the most marginalized groups in Western societies today. The present article provides a quantitative content analysis of mainstream media coverage of irregular migration in US, French and Norwegian media. It first analyses to what extent irregular migrants are allowed to speak for themselves, who is quoted, how they are identified, and what they speak about. Second, it examines whether statements by irregular migrants influence the overall arguments and complexity of the articles in which they appear—if migrant voice matters? By combining a fine-grained source analysis (on the utterance level) with quantitative framing analysis (on the article level), it proposes an innovative, systematic approach to analyse the influence of marginalized voices, beyond the concrete utterance. The article maps the presence of the migrant voice in the debate on unauthorized migration and discusses the implications of voice as risk and strategy for the migrant community. It finds that irregular migrants make up less than 10 per cent of the quoted sources; largely confirming the challenges disadvantaged groups face accessing elite-dominated mainstream news media. When quoted, however, the unauthorized migrants represent a more diverse, a more visible and an increasingly politically mobilized group.