APSA Pre-Conference | Narrative and Text Analysis in the Study of Migration and Citizenship

Instructor: Tom Einhorn, Sociology, with training material from the UBC Centre for Computational Social Science

Have you previously done qualitative analysis of texts or discourse, and are curious about how AI and Machine Learning can help with analysis? Does your research rely on human coding and you wonder about the potential – and limits – of computational approaches? Come to this workshop to learn more. The session will be an introduction to Large Language Models and prompt-based text classification. We will touch on ethics and IRB, with time for questions.

Tom Einhorn is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of British Columbia, currently working on a dissertation about post-victory alignments in the American LGBTQ rights movement. Tom Einhorn studies how social movements evolve after achieving major goals, focusing on the American LGBTQ movement following the 2015 legalization of same-sex marriage. Using mixed methods—including computational tools like topic modelling and network analysis—he examines how movements adapt their strategies, discourses, and objectives in response to new social and political landscapes.

(Note: the session is designed for beginners and will not cover advanced techniques. No programming experience required.)

Elder Mary Point serves as the Director of Indigenous Relations at Vancouver International Airport (YVR) and as the Relationship Manager for the Musqueam Indian Band–YVR Airport Sustainability & Friendship Agreement. In her role, she strengthens the partnership between Musqueam and YVR by implementing the agreement’s key elements, identifying new opportunities for mutual learning, and advancing a global Indigenous peoples strategy with a focus on reconciliation. An accomplished Indigenous professional, Mary integrates culture, protocols, and best practices into strategic planning for those collaborating with First Nations individuals and organizations. With over two decades of experience across British Columbia, she has built strategic partnerships between various First Nations communities and local businesses.

• Graphic Detentions - Efrat Arbel, Allard School of Law, UBC

This paper reflects on the process of creating a graphic ethnography focused on the lived-experiences of immigration detention in Canada. This initiative serves to humanize experience, and to shift these experiences out of their relegated invisibility and into public discourse.

Efrat Arbel is an Associate Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law. Her research is focused on Canadian immigration.on detention, refugee protection, and border governance. She has published widely in these fields. Her research has helped shape law and policy in Canada, and has introduced creative tools to advance legal education and public engagement.

• The Ethics of Being an Immigrant - Ashwini Vasanthakumar, Faculty of Law, Queen's University

Why do governments sometimes provide more services than what is specified in formal policies? Focusing on the case of refugee integration in education systems in Africa, I use narrative analysis from observation of policymaking processes, audio recordings of responses from a vignette survey experiment with elites in Kenya, and traditional interview methods to introduce the concept of ‘quiet inclusion’.

Shelby Carvalho is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University’s King Center on Global Development. Carvalho’s research focuses on the politics of refugee inclusion and exclusion in Africa, with particular attention to the education sector. She uses mixed methods to study when and how practices of inclusion differ from official policies and examines the political, economic, and social impacts of policy reforms for refugees and hosting communities. Her research is informed by more than a decade of professional experience in education and international development.

• Trump and Immigration: Discourse and Implications in the North American Space - Abdullah Alzabaidi, Huong Le, Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Geoffrey Rockwell, University of Alberta

This paper investigates significant immigration policy actions, discourse, and public narratives articulated during the first six months of Donald Trump’s second term (January to July 2025) as President of the United States. Our analysis identifies three core discursive strategies: (1) the securitization and criminalization of migration using emergency and wartime logics; (2) the portrayal of immigration as a threat to national identity and sovereignty; and (3) the characterization of executive action as a necessary, urgent response to an “invasion.”

Abdullah Alzubaidi is a researcher and lecturer in Political Science at the University of Alberta. His research focuses on immigration, especially the policies and discourses shaped by the executive branch in countries like Canada and the United States. He also examines the relationship between sports and politics, as well as the economics of sport, tracking the recent growth of investments by sovereign wealth funds and private equity in various sports and leagues worldwide.

Huong Le is a Research Assistant in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. Her current research focuses on the politics of climate change and energy transition, with particular attention to public attitudes toward renewable energy and perceptions of distributive fairness in Alberta. She also conducts critical discourse analysis of U.S. immigration policy, examining how executive actions, media, and congressional responses frame immigration using securitization and national protectionist rhetoric.

• Manufacturing Crisis, Making Europe: How Media Discourses on Migration Produce Negative Europeanisation - Hélène Thiollet, Sciences Po, Romain Leconte, ENS Paris, Michelle Reddy, UCBerkeley, Etienne Toureille, Université de Rouen

This project investigates how migration crisis discourses in the French press since 2015 have contributed to the Europeanisation of the French public sphere. Drawing on a longitudinal content analysis of six major French newspapers (2009–2022), we examine how migration-related crises were framed, politicized, and linked to broader challenges of governance and values at both national and EU levels.

Hélène Thiollet is a CNRS permanent researcher at the Center for International Studies, Sciences Po. Helene's main interests lie in the politics of migration and asylum in the Global South. She focuses her empirical work on the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. She also works on crises and political transformations linked to migration and asylum. She teaches international relations, comparative politics and migration studies at Sciences Po and EHESS.

• Issue Attention, Media Narratives, and Immigration Shocks: An LLM Classification Approach - Alexander Tripp, Political Science, Vanderbilt University

How do media narratives shift in response to immigration shocks? I develop a dynamic model of political communications that conceptualizes a common media response across immigration shocks. I find strong evidence for a humanitarian phase, when an immigration shocks prompt sharp increases in humanitarian narratives in Colombia, Germany and Poland, but no direct evidence for a threat phase, as the proportion of threat narratives does not significantly increase over time. Analysis draws on 200,000 immigration-focused articles from prominent national newspapers, classification of media coverage into themes using a few-shot ChatGPT 4o model (validated with undergraduate coders), and an interrupted time series model.

Alexander Tripp is a PhD candidate at Vanderbilt University. He studies public opinion with a substantive focus on 1) attitudes toward immigrants and 2) immigrant attitudes toward integration and remigration. His dissertation explores how and why immigration attitudes shift in response to immigration shocks, focusing on the Colombian government, media, and mass public responses to Venezuelan immigration. He uses surveys, experiments, multi-level models, and qualitative methods, and his recent work explores the use of large language models (LLMs) for text classification.

• Stereotypes of High- and Low-Skilled Immigrants to Canada: Evidence from an Online Pilot Study - Vincent Hopkins, UBC; Andrea Lawlor, McMaster University and Mireille Paquet, Concordia University

Survey research shows, across diverse contexts, that citizens tend to prefer skilled migrants. But what comes to mind when voters think about immigrant skill levels? Which stereotypes predominate? We report on an online pilot survey (N=2,422) that asks respondents to think about differential skilled immigrant groups and collects open-ended text responses. We use a Large Language Model (LLM) to measure the sentiment of text responses (positive-negative) and use LLM to measure the prevalence of stereotypes in the open-ended survey responses.

Mireille Paquet is a political scientist and Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Concordia University, where she holds the University Research Chair on Immigration Policy. She is the Director of the Institute for Research on Migration and Society (IRMS) at Concordia University and leads several projects under the CFREF Bridging Divides research program. Mireille's work focuses on comparative immigration policy and examines the role of bureaucracies in shaping immigration policy, changing attitudes toward specific immigration programs, and political debates surrounding the use of technology in the immigration sector.

• Liking and Disliking the Major US Political Parties: Understanding the Viewpoints of Asian American and Latino Voters – Jongwoo Jeong, Political Science, Georgia State University

Analyzing open-ended survey responses documenting Asian Americans’ and Latinos’ “likes” and “dislikes” about major U.S. political parties, I find that religious and social conservatism play a pivotal role in shaping immigrants’ “dislike” of the major parties, independent from any positive affinities, such that these negative sentiments overwhelm their likes and more strongly predict turnout. I use machine learning analysis together with transformer models of natural language processing.

Dr. Jongwoo Jeong is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University. His research focuses on American political behaviour using open-ended survey responses, with emphasis on race, immigration, and polarization. He also engages with political institutions and public policy, employing methods from computational social science, causal inference, and experimental design. His work has appeared in AJPS, JOP, BJPS, Political Behaviour, and Politics, Groups, and Identities, supported by the APSA Centennial Center and APSA Advancing Research Grant.

This final discussion will sum up lessons from the day and reflect on whether and how different methods serve distinct purposes within academic circles as well as beyond them.

Julia Harten is an Assistant Professor at the UBC School of Community and Regional Planning. Her research focuses on private rental markets, particularly the housing choices and experiences of marginalized renters, including (im)migrants. To address the lack of reliable data on renting, she combines big data with ethnographic groundtruthing in innovative mixed-methods designs. Her work in Canada and Asia aims to better understand evolving housing needs while amplifying the voices of those often excluded from traditional data sources.