Making the headlines: EU Immigration to the UK and the wave of new racism after Brexit

This chapter explores the immigration-related topics in the news media during the EU referendum campaign in the UK (April–June 2016) and after (July–September 2016). The chapter argues that attitudes anti-EU immigration are a wave of “new(s)” racism (van Dijk 2000) in the UK and EU immigration is frequently used as an umbrella term for Eastern European immigration being often mixed with non-EU immigration and the refugee crisis. The data shows that the prevalence of negative news stories has led to a distinctive immigration-narrative, confirming the claim of Hoffner and Cohen (2013) that members of minority groups are almost always associated with violent and threatening media content

The Impact of Hispanic and White Group Cues on Attitudes Towards the Violation of Generic Norms

While much work in political science has examined the impact of racial cues on individual perceptions, we know little about how individuals evaluate members of minority outgroups on issues that are not linked to stereotypes. We measure the impacts of Hispanic and White cues on individual assessments related to a stereotype-independent norm violation: alcoholism. We test three competing theories – cognition, intergroup emotions, and social identity – using a population-based vignette experiment included in the General Social Survey. Our results contradict much of the literature, but keep with social identity theory's predictions. Hispanic alcoholics, when Hispanics constitute the outgroup, are assessed less negatively than White alcoholics in the ingroup, the latter experiencing what is called the black sheep effect. The black sheep effect occurs when ingroup members are more punitive towards members of the ingroup than the outgroup. However, the black sheep effect does not extend to measures that are more consistent with outgroup stereotypes, such as violence or money mismanagement; Hispanic alcoholics are evaluated more negatively than Whites on these measures. The implication is that the effect of racial cues depends strongly on issue linkages to group stereotypes