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The Internet is a site of particularly potent discourses demonizing undocumented immigrants (Bloch, 2014; Flores-Yeffal, Vidales, & Plemons, 2011; Sohoni, 2006). Anti-immigrant discourses have long constructed Latina immigrant mothers as bearing “anchor babies” and burdens to the state. Representing a distinct case of non-citizen reproduction, online news sources began reporting on Chinese maternity tourism in 2011. This form of maternity tourism allegedly involves wealthy tourists visiting the United States to give birth to their children on US soil. In this chapter, I analyze online comments in response to Chinese maternity tourism. I ask, how do online commenters make sense of Chinese maternity tourism? I find that online commenters overwhelmingly demonize Chinese maternity tourism by including this practice into broader debates about “anchor babies” and the reforming of birthright citizenship. Some commenters also use race-specific tropes and malleable claims about class to construct the children of Chinese maternity tourists as a paradoxical asset or threat to the country, often comparing them to the children of undocumented Latina mothers. When commenters employ Asian-specific stereotypes, some commenters offer a racialized conditional acceptance of maternity tourism, revealing that while citizenship is policed among the citizenry, it can also be expanded precariously and problematically.

Through an ethnographic content analysis of 936 letters to the editor, op-eds, and editorials and 1,195 online comments, this chapter examines how participants in the public sphere neutralized accusations of racism leveled against Donald Trump in the early phase of his presidential campaign. The study shows that both supporters and opponents effectively (if not purposefully) neutralized racism through a number of techniques. Trump’s opponents neutralized racism by calling attention to a number of other perceived flaws in his candidacy. Trump’s supporters obscured the charges of racism by endorsing him and calling attention to positive qualities. Others neutralized racism by changing the subject or making neutral observations. Supporters neutralized charges of racism in three additional ways. Most commonly, they framed Trump’s comments as accurate. Some defensively drew a distinction between legal and illegal immigration. A relative few claimed that others were also racist or xenophobic. That there were a number of ways of defining Trump’s stance toward Mexican immigrants demonstrates the role of human agency in producing social structures. Structural factors in the discursive field such as the stock of existing conservative frames, Trump’s absurdity shield, and political partisanship also facilitated the neutralization of accusations of racism.

Various politicians and public commentators seek to deny birthright citizenship to children born in the United States to undocumented or temporary migrants. Among their claims, critics of universal birthright citizenship contend that the practice flies in the face of liberal principles, in which both individuals and the state should consent to membership. From this perspective, citizenship through naturalization is valorized, since it rests on the affirmative choice of the immigrant and the clear consent of the state. This chapter proposes a different approach to these debates, one that underscores the principles of inclusion and equality. The argument rests on empirical evidence on how those affected by these debates – foreign-born residents and their U.S.-born children – understand belonging in the United States. Interviews with 182 U.S.-born youth and their immigrant parents born in Mexico, China, and Vietnam show that despite a discourse portraying U.S. citizenship as a civic and political affiliation blind to ascriptive traits, many of those interviewed equate “being American” with racial majority status, affluence, and privilege. For many immigrants, membership through naturalization – the exemplar of citizenship by consent – does not overcome a lingering sense of outsider status. Perhaps surprisingly, birthright citizenship offers an egalitarian promise: it is a color-blind and class-blind path to membership. The Citizenship Clause of Fourteenth Amendment provides constitutional legitimacy for the ideals of inclusion and equality, facilitating immigrant integration and communal membership through citizenship.

Kathleen Blee's (1996, 1998, 2002) pioneering work on the white supremacist movement has demonstrated that the contemporary hate movement depends increasingly on women's participation. Oddly, given the import of this claim, few social movement scholars have explored its applicability to the militant factions of the new nativist movement. This chapter begins to address that gap through analysis of online discussion groups moderated by the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC), one of the two major anti-immigration organizations that mobilize monthly civilian border patrol operations on the U.S.-Mexico border. Contrary to stereotypes that depict Minuteman activism as an exclusively male domain, this analysis demonstrates that Minutewomen have carved out a significant niche within the new nativist movement through online activism. This activism includes but is not limited to coordinating campaigns to boycott businesses rumored to employ or profit from the patronage of undocumented immigrants, oppose multicultural programs in local schools, and defend or depose elected officials according to their stance on immigration policy. These findings raise the ominous possibility that the relative anonymity afforded by technologies such as the Internet has extended the quasi-private sphere in ways that have opened new and highly gendered spaces for right-wing activism.

As a growing literature points out (Aronowitz, 2009, pp. 165–213), HT becomes criminal because it involves displacing, exploiting and commercializing a human being, all of these necessitating transportation, trade and torture to varying degrees to survive and succeed (Nair, 2010, pp. 12–19). John T. Picarelli informs us, these began ‘in the Americas’ from 1502, ‘when Portuguese traders brought the first African slaves to the Caribbean’ (Picarelli, 2011, p. 180, but see all of Chapter 9). African slaves continued to be imported into the United States until 1808, but by the time the 13th Amendment ‘outlawed’ indentured servitude in 1865, the 645,000 slaves shipped from Africa had multiplied beyond 4 million, to whom were added (a) Chinese women, ‘to work in brothels … to serve both the Chinese and white communities’ after the 1860s; (b) Europeans, through collusion between ‘criminal syndicates’ and ‘U.S. [law enforcement] officials’, in what was called ‘the white slave trade’ from the 1880s (Shelley, 2010, pp. 235, 237); and (c) Hispanics (Alba & Nee, 2003; Gordon, 1964; Suárez-Orozco, 1998), in tandem with the dominant U.S. migratory inflows and economic needs after the 1960s (Borjas, 1999; Huntington, 2004, pp. 30–45), and the emergence of sex tourism after the Cold War (Clift & Carter, 2000; María Agustin, 2007; Rogers, 2009; Thorbek & Bandana Pattanaik, 2002).

The authors apply topic sentiment analysis (several relatively new text analysis methods) to the study of public opinion as expressed in social media by comparing reactions to the Trayvon Martin controversy in spring 2012 by commenters on the partisan news websites the Huffington Post and Daily Caller.

Topic sentiment analysis is a text analysis method that estimates the polarity of sentiments across units of text within large text corpora (Lin & He, 2009; Mei, Ling, Wondra, Su, & Zhai, 2007).

We apply topic sentiment analysis to public opinion as expressed in social media by comparing reactions to the Trayvon Martin controversy in spring 2012 by commenters on the partisan news websites the Huffington Post and Daily Caller. Based on studies that depict contemporary news media as an “outrage industry” that incentivizes media personalities to be controversial and polarizing (Berry & Sobieraj, 2014), we predict that high-profile commentators will be more polarizing than other news personalities and topics.

Results of the topic sentiment analysis support this prediction and in so doing provide partial validation of the application of topic sentiment analysis to online opinion.