Fabricating the American Dream in US media portrayals of Syrian refugees: A discourse analytical study

Syrian refugees as victims

Discursive portrayals of Syrian refugees in predominantly left-leaning media often rely on victim narratives, which offer opportunities for readers to become sympathetic consumers of political news reporting. This recontextualisation of Syrian refugees from potential threat (as espoused by the Trump Administration and close allies, including right-leaning media) to trauma victims makes use of several discursive strategies and rhetorical tools. Namely, the discursive portrayals of plight by and large rely on the narrative that migration is not only obligatory, but also that the reasons for needing to resettle are based on trauma, death, turmoil and shattered dreams:

(Extract 1) She walked through the war-torn streets of Syria with a baby in her arms … three more children following closely behind as civil war erupted around her. She was a young, widowed mother and the streets were filled with chaos and countless dangers, but in her mind, she had no other options. And so she walked. (Tomlinson, 11 December 2016, The Hour)

(Extract 2) Ahmad dodged bullets in Syria. Bushra received death threats in Iraq. Awino walked a thousand miles to flee civil war in Sudan … Five years into Syria’s bloody civil war, Ahmad’s story sadly sounds familiar. The 38-year-old salesman for an electrical company abandoned his Damascus home when fighting erupted. He escaped sniper fire; witnessed executions. (Basu, 20 June 2016, CNN)

(Extract 3) Beginning three years ago in the Syrian city of Aleppo, it has taken them through streets patrolled by snipers and across a militarized border where guards shoot to kill. It has taken them through three years eking out a living in Turkey as Syria’s war killed hundreds of thousands and turned their old street into piles of shattered stone … Amid the largest refugee crisis since World War II, families like the Khojas represent just the tiniest fraction of a human exodus encompassing the rich and poor of every faith. (Loveluck, 7 February 2017, The Washington Post)

(Extract 4) The Syrian refugees I have met are ordinary people whose lives have been upended by extraordinary suffering. Some were tortured for peacefully calling for freedom. Others spent months eating leaves when their communities were encircled and starved. Still others barely escaped bombs that flattened their neighborhoods. They have lost homes, limbs, loved ones, dreams. All say that they would prefer to live with safety and dignity in their own country if they could. But they cannot. (Pearlman, 30 January 2017, The Washington Post)

(Extract 5) Ali’s [director of Interfaith Ministries in Houston] definition of refugees is very simple. Refugees, he says, are normal people in abnormal circumstances … they flee because they have to, not because they want to leave their homeland. The subtext to both definition and corollary: any one of us can become refugees. That is, says Ali, just the nature of the world in which we live. (Meyer, February 2017, Texas Monthly)

In the extracts above we see a sympathetic portrayal of refugees, whereby through a series of emotive parallelisms they are cast as victims rather than potentially dangerous to Americans. The rhetorical function of the victim narrative is remarkable as it humanises not only refugees, but also current immigration policy debates that treat communities from predominantly Muslim countries as a threat to the American way of life. In dramatic juxtapositions, for instance, the vulnerability of refugees (‘a baby in her arms’, ‘three more children’, ‘young, widowed mother’, ‘communities were encircled and starved’) against the harsh realities of war is exposed (‘war-torn streets’, ‘civil war erupted’, ‘chaos and countless dangers’, ‘bloody civil war’, ‘streets patrolled by snipers’, ‘guards shoot to kill’, ‘bombs that flattened their neighborhoods’). Words and actions depicting survival and determination are attributed to refugees (‘dodged bullets’, ‘flee’, ‘escape’, ‘eking out a living’), who are represented as part of a ‘human exodus’. This biblical reference recontextualises the tribulations of refugees in terms of the departure of the Chosen people from Egypt in the Old Testament, playing down their association with Islam, playing up their human-ness and thus making them more relatable and palatable to those of Christian and Jewish faiths.

The victim narrative is fortified by additional discursive tools, such as death and upheaval. The extracts, for example, emphasise the mortality of refugees, their ‘homes, limbs, loved ones, dreams’, at threat from ‘war’, ‘bullets’, ‘death threats’, ‘executions’, ‘sniper fire’ and ‘bombs’. The displacement of so many individuals is further recontextualised through the topos of illustrative example (Wodak et al., 2009), framed as the ‘largest crisis since World War II’. The direct comparison here between both world events are expressed through the superlative ‘largest’ and temporal reference ‘since’, connecting the past with the present, and in doing so transferring the connotations of one event onto the other so that ‘neither memories nor histories seem objective any longer’ (Burke, 1989: 98), and both history and the present become socially conditioned, distorted by subjective conceptualisations of reality.

In these discursive portrayals, the media performs the role of ‘social educator’ (Hall, 1975: 11), evaluating the current refugee crisis through the frame of past war experiences of the 1930s and 1940s during which time ‘megalomaniacal tyrants who desired to conquer and enslave the world truly existed’ and the US policy ‘by its passivity, aided in the rise of these monsters’ (Stoler, 2001: 386). This particular media narrative now reminds Americans of the dire consequence of ‘their 1919-20 rejection of collective security’, urging them to reconsider international involvement in light of the blunders of their historical past (Stoler, 2001). Americans, through the strategy of compensation (Wodak et al., 2009), are reminded of their past failures and the loss of millions of lives as a result, and in doing so the media invokes in audiences not only a sense of guilt, but also the need for White saviourism.

Furthermore, use of temporal references in the extracts (‘for 13 days’, ‘beginning three years ago’, ‘three years of eking out’, ‘since WWII’, ‘spent months’) emphasises the length of refugees’ struggle, their narratives of loss justifying the need for their acceptance in America. The use of past experience justifying a present course of action encourages individual memories of suffering to become collective experiences of war, so that ultimately, even if audiences ‘do not embrace memories of events that occurred in unfamiliar or historically distant cultural contexts’, their understanding of these narratives become a ‘mediated phenomena’, assuming ‘collective relevance when they are structured represented, and used in a social setting’ (Kansteiner, 2002: 190). There seems to be, then, a visible attempt in these extracts to fight the more aggressive immigrant discourse purported by the Trump Administration within which we see colours of an ‘ugly strain of nativism, stoked by the prospect of a terrorist infiltrating the U.S. by posing as an asylee’, this discourse coursing through the veins of ‘national politics, from the campaign trail to the U.S. Capitol. With fear spreading and solutions in short supply, the refugees have become a target’ (Altman, 2017).

This pivot away from the political rhetoric of the Trump Administration is further demonstrated in the portrayal of Syrian refugees as ‘ordinary’ and ‘normal’, which counters the depiction of the cultural Other as ‘evil-infiltrators’ (Zahani-Bekdash, 2017). In a positive presentation of the people more typically cast in the role of the dangerous Other, and through a series of juxtapositions, refugees are cast as not only determined and brave, but also peaceful, resonating many of the same values that America stands for (‘peacefully calling for freedom’, ‘live with safety and dignity’). And although refugees are depicted as resilient individuals with sympathetic experiences, they are discursively stripped from their agency through a series of uncontrollable events (‘because of war and persecution’, ‘bombs flattened’, ‘were tortured’, ‘sniper fire’, ‘filled with chaos and dangers’), with war being personified as a ruthless being responsible for killing ‘hundreds and thousands’, turning streets into ‘piles of shattered stone’.

Interestingly, this media version of events also demonstrates a more personal human face given to refugees, where instead of being ‘essentialized and imagined as homogeneous’ (Gal and Irvine, 1995: 975), they are given individual narratives (‘with a baby in her arms’, ‘a young, widowed mother’, ‘38 year-old salesman for an electrical company’, ‘Ahmad’s story’), names (‘Ahmad’, ‘Bushra’, ‘Awino’, ‘Khojas’) and homes that they have left behind (‘abandoned his Damascus home’, ‘living in Turkey’, ‘their old street’, ‘their communities’, ‘their neighborhoods’, ‘their own country’, ‘their homeland’). As Steimel (2010) reiterates, such media discourse proliferating narratives of individual refugees, in which they ‘are humanized and made sympathetic through their harrowing stories of victimization’ (p. 227), both projects them as victims who need to be heard and empowers them by giving them an opportunity to share their version of reality. Here, we also see the power and effect of media that work to position the audience to a story, to a group of people or an issue through ‘repetition of particular ways of handling causality and agency’ (Fairclough, 1989: 54).

What is most noteworthy in the discursive construction of Syrian refugees, however, is the creation of the ‘asymmetric category set’ (Jayyusi, 1984) of War versus War Victim: refugees are favoured with the opposite of everything war stands for (‘chaos’, ‘danger’, ‘executions’, ‘killings’, ‘blood’, ‘torture’, ‘persecution’, ‘loss’, ‘bombs’) and everything that contemporary popular discourses associate with terrorism (‘We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!’; @realDonaldTrump, 4 June 2017). In this scenario, our past understanding of war leads to a certain ‘category-boundedness’ (Sacks, 1992), within which any ‘projected action is a possibility embedded in the features of that categorization … provided for by the guarded prediction of a consequence … [and further] provided for, as having been generated by a knowledge of, and familiarity with’ (Jayyusi, 1984: 24) such types of people or contexts. Here, audiences are reminded of the expected repercussions of war, including mass ‘human exodus’, and State responsibility. Audiences are also reminded that refugees are not chasing the American Dream because they want to, but rather because ‘they have to’: the use of obligatory and prohibitive modals (‘have to’, ‘cannot’) again countering typical migratory discourses which claim,

We must reevaluate our policy regarding refugee resettlement to protect the safety, freedom, and liberty we value as American citizens. Our current program is a Trojan horse allowing ISIS and other terrorist groups an open invitation to immigrate into the U.S. and establish bases of operation legally and at taxpayer expense. (Babin, 18 August 2016, National Review)

The American Dream

The discursive construction of Syrian refugees as victims can be understood in its own capacity as an attempt to portray a sad and sombre story. And while reporting on the plight of these individuals can – independent of other social issues – offer a way of uncovering the discourse of US media, victim narratives are inherently ideological. That is, a more critical analysis of these texts reveals that victim narratives allow readers to engage in an ideological struggle with notions of nationhood and nationality, as the familiar narrative of overcoming hardships has become, through cultural influences and elite discourses (Van Dijk, 1993), both a necessary feature of the American Dream and a marker of national identity. Put differently, the American Dream provides a lens through which to understand both Syrian refugees and the extent to which the country is obligated to assist with resettlement efforts.

For example, while the victim narrative allows readers to become sympathetic consumers of US news media, the more culturally significant issue within the United States is not whether refugees should be viewed as casualties of war, but rather the ideological debate that is responsible for much of this reporting is related to whether the country should provide a better life for Syrians. Much of the debate regarding whether the American Dream should be extended to Syrian refugees is related to safety and security, which are often discussed in terms of time and resources:

(Extract 6) After almost six years of war, Turkey is hosting at least 2.8 million refugees. In Lebanon, at least a million. Fewer than 17,000 reside in the United States. Families approved for resettlement in the United States have undergone up to two years of security vetting by multiple international and government agencies. (Loveluck, 2 February 2017, The Washington Post)

The juxtaposition between the resettlement efforts of the United States and other countries frames the refugee crisis in quantitative terms (‘2.8 million’ and ‘17,000’), providing a concrete way of measuring the extent to which the American Dream is extended to Syrian refugees. Each numerical measurement is qualified with an approximation (‘at least’ versus ‘fewer than’) that, by further contrasting the large disparity in resettlement efforts between these countries, presents the crisis as evidence that the United States is not assuming a fair share of the responsibility. The underlying discourse here is important in a political environment and country where immigration, especially by people from predominantly Muslim countries, is met with much criticism and scepticism (cf. Marlow, 2015). In contextualising the crisis in temporal terms (‘two years of security vetting’), the text moves the reader away from the discourse of fear that is frequently associated with refugees from Muslim countries (Baker and McEnery, 2005) by repositioning Syrians as demonstrably safe (‘security vetting by multiple international and government agencies’).

Although safety and security are important issues in the larger discussion of to what group of people resettlement efforts should be extended, the American Dream is also constructed as a reality that is currently experienced by Syrian refugees. Here, the ideological work is not whether refugees are safe, but rather that Syrians possess the characteristics needed to achieve the American Dream. In other words, by portraying refugees as resilient, hardworking individuals who escaped war but now face additional challenges of creating a better life in the United States, media discourse can situate Syrians within and alongside other fellow Americans who aspire to achieve the American Dream:

(Extract 7) Today Abdulsalam’s family lives in a small, cream-colored house in Dearborn. They’ve got a small garden where they grow vegetables, a grey Honda minivan donated by local volunteers, and a sparsely decorated living room with a flat-screen TV, which Abdulsalam watched until 11 on election night – with minimal interest. ‘I would like to congratulate President-elect Trump’, says Abdulsalam, who like others interviewed prefers to use his first name only out of fears for those back home. ‘I hope America will thrive during his presidency’. (Haynie, 19 December 2016, US News & World Report)

(Extract 8) Ahmad dodged bullets in Syria. Bushra received death threats in Iraq. Awino walked a thousand miles to flee civil war in Sudan. They each found a new home in the United States. Strangers in a strange land, they started new lives with elation, the dates of their arrival indelible in their minds … This country expects new arrivals to become self-sucient [sic] within a few months, says Alaa Naji, life skills coordinator at the Refugee Women’s Network in Atlanta. The system is designed for healthy, hard-working people, she says. But the reality is that many refugees arrive with physical and psychological traumas, problems that often are chronic and require the attention of specialists. (Basu, 20 June 2016, CNN)

(Extract 9) Since late 2016, more than 200 Syrian refugees originally settled elsewhere in the United States have made a fresh start in Fresno … But behind the low rent is a city struggling with high poverty and unemployment, making it more difficult for the refugees to secure jobs. And Fresno has no federally funded agency to help them find work, learn basics like bus routes and understand United States culture and rules, like with the practice of animal slaughter. (Jordan, 20 July 2017, The New York Times)

(Extract 10) … a refugee student sells the treats to help support his parents and four brothers. … He will only be allowed to continue high school this year, Tayara said, before he becomes too old, but during any spare time he must work to provide money for the $1,000 rent his family pays on their house in Kalamazoo. ‘I want to go to college. I want to own a restaurant. I want to start a bakery. I want to do a lot of things’, Tayara said. (Parker, 2 March 2017, Kalamazoo News)

We see in these extracts a contextual repositioning of Syrian refugees as participants of the American Dream (‘a small, cream-colored house’, ‘a grey Honda minivan’, ‘living room with a flat-screen TV’). The portrayal of Syrians presently living in the country, as opposed to fleeing one, feeds into the immigration debate by creating a familiar narrative of individual liberty (‘to secure jobs’, ‘provide money’, ‘own a restaurant’). In so doing, such narratives participate in a war of cultures, where arguments against the resettlement of Syrian refugees are based on the notion that they do not hold the same values as most Americans. By associating Syrian refugees with material and consumer objects, such texts exploit a sentimentality that is central to how individuals construct a sense of national identity (Billig, 1995). Indeed, the category-bound discourses (Sacks, 1992) of the American Dream (‘hope’, ‘hard-working’, ‘new lives’) create a sense of oneness by folding the stories of Syrian refugees into the value systems of the nation.

However, as with most American Dream narratives circulated in popular culture and media (Gosh, 2013), success and achievement are not certain life outcomes. This is especially true of portrayals of Syrian refugees. Cast as agents of the American Dream, Syrian refugees are given some agency in their quest to pursue a new life in ‘a strange land’. Yet they face a number of political (‘I hope America will thrive during his presidency’), social (‘learn basics like bus routes’), economic (‘during any spare time he must work to provide money’) and psychological (‘refugees arrive with physical and psychological traumas’) uncertainties and challenges. Syrians are not, in other words, portrayed as the cultural Other, but rather the stories depicted here suggest that refugees are like any other ordinary, hard-working individual attempting to achieve the American Dream.

This portrayal of Syrians as members of the unmarked norm, pursuing dreams like other members of society, helps confront the common ideological position that refugees are not only a burden on national resources, they are also a threat to the security of the nation.

Syrian refugees as a threat

In order for society to be receptive to the idea that the United States must engage in more resettlement efforts, Syrian refugees must not only be depicted as victims, but must also be discussed with categories and actions that are inextricable to the values, dreams and cultural practices of Americans. This discursive fabrication is needed because the victim narrative orients society to the humanitarian crisis, while the American Dream trope helps decouple Syrian refugees from the discourse of fear and danger.

In the same vein, the ideological struggle that comes with excusing the United States from the refugee crisis is motivated by isolationists’ belief systems. Specifically, the discursive work needed to promote the ideology that the United States is not obligated to engage in resettlement efforts relies on a narrative of terrorism and threat, which moves the political debate away from a humanitarian crisis to an issue of security and war:

(Extract 11) The mainstream media, liberals and Hollywood are pitching a super-sized hissy fit over President Trump’s decision to protect the fruited plain from blood-thirsty jihadists. They seem to think we are under some sort of moral obligation to allow refugees to flood into the country without vetting and pray that nobody gets blown up … spare us your righteous indignation. (Starnes, 30 January 2017, Fox News)

(Extract 12) Make no mistake. What we are seeing in Europe is the hard lesson of what happens when you put out the ‘welcome mat’ to hundreds of thousands of refugees from known terrorist hotspots … We are also seeing the hard lesson of what happens as a result of the Western world devoting fewer and fewer resources to national security and less emphasis on protecting its citizens. (Hipp, 21 December 2016, Fox News)

(Extract 13) A seven-year-old Iraqi boy, plus 14-year-old and 10-year-old Sudanese boys, reportedly cornered the tiny victim in a laundry room at the Fawnbrook Apartments in Twin Falls … They stripped her naked, sexually assaulted her … federal programs that delivered the foreign boys to the girl’s apartment building … After the attack, the Muslim refugee families of the boys collectively swarmed their victim’s apartment and urged the parents not to call police after the attack, he said. (McHugh, 6 April 2017, Brietbart)

(Extract 14) President Obama’s own FBI director has warned that he cannot properly screen refugees coming from troubled terrorist hotspots such as Syria. But political correctness blinds far too many in Washington to this imminent peril … There are currently 800 ongoing FBI investigations of ISIS-inspired terrorist suspects in the U.S., 48 of which are serious enough to justify round-the-clock surveillance. Last year, 31 ISIS terrorists were arrested plotting terror attacks against Americans … future jihadists are radicalized to the point where they aim to kill the very people whose generosity and cultural liberalism welcomed them into their country in the first place. (Babin, 18 August 2016, National Review)

Social reality as we know and live it is not ‘out there’ to be collated in some way, but rather it is ‘constructed by individuals from the raw materials provided to them by the social context in which they live’ (Tajfel, 1981: 158) and constituted through the social categories and classifications generated by cultural groups. We see also, as a result, much contestation between various discourse clans, in their efforts to cast issues, people and events in various categories according to their respective sociopolitical agendas. In contrast to the liberal representation of refugees as victims, conservative media propagates the threat to national security that refugees pose. This particular discourse proliferates a negative other-presentation of refugees in which they are depicted as terrorists (‘bloodthirsty jihadists’, ‘suspects’, ‘radicalized’), with their actions a threat to the ‘fruited plain’ and American citizens (‘flood into the country’, ‘blow up’, ‘sexually assault’, ‘aim to kill’).

The threat of ‘future jihadists’ is justified through connection with their past (‘from known terrorist hotspots’, ‘from troubled terrorist hotspots’), an image that conjures up fear of the present when Syrians are discussed as flooding ‘into the country without vetting’. In this sense, ‘participants enrich the here-and-now of action by connecting it to the past’ (Leudar and Nekvapil, 2011: 67) in order to predict the future. Here, historical details layer or ‘thicken the descriptions of people and activities – providing them with meanings they would not have had otherwise’ (Leudar and Nekvapil, 2011: 80). The creation of future history through connection to contemporary activities also becomes the cause for subsequent actions, dissociating any possible past cause to current activities (denying the Others justification for their actions). Thus, historicising in sociopolitical and media discourse becomes ‘a Janus-like method: one element of it is to situate a current event relative to selected historical antecedents; another to constrain the historical particulars available to situate the future events’ (p. 81).

In place of individual narratives that tell their stories of struggle and pain, right-wing media discourse transforms refugees into fearful statistics (‘800 ongoing FBI investigations’, ‘48 … are serious enough’, ‘31 ISIS-inspired terrorist suspects’, ‘hundreds of thousands’), homogenised as a threat based on their origins (‘Iraqi boy’, ‘Sudanese boys’, ‘foreign boys’). Through use of an attack versus self-defence antonym, the threat to America and in fact the ‘Western world’ is intensified (‘gets blown up’, ‘Europe is the hard lesson’, ‘imminent peril’, ‘attacks against Americans’), and audiences are reminded that policy decisions that devote ‘fewer and fewer resources to national security’ put the country, the American Dream and way of life, and its citizens at risk. Use of an insect metaphor to describe the actions of such threats (‘collectively swarmed their victim’s apartment’) dehumanises refugees, and in doing so denies them any sense of legitimacy.

Through the topos of comparison (Wodak et al., 2009), the relatively more barbaric actions of jihadi refugees are juxtaposed with positive self-presentation of Americans, whose ‘generosity and cultural liberalism’ set them apart in this asymmetric category-set (Jayyusi, 1984). Americans are attributed a conscience (‘moral obligation’) and faith (‘pray’), making them civilised and humane. Categorisation as such can be regarded as a multifunctional rhetorical device, which can be used to lay ground for future actions, amplify the scale of an event or issue, provide grounds for assessment, help retain or achieve moral superiority and maintain legitimate power over others (Bhatia, 2015).

Through the topos of illustrative example (Wodak et al., 2009), audiences are further warned about the flaws of current US policy (‘federal programs that delivered the foreign boys to the girl’s apartment building’, ‘when you put out the welcome mat’, ‘fewer resources to national security’, ‘into the country without vetting’, ‘cannot properly screen’): ‘Trump’s decision’ to protect the American way of life, for example, constructs immigration policies as defective by using recent terror attacks in Europe as a teaching moment (‘hard lesson’, ‘make no mistake’). In doing so, the connotations of fear, as well as the threat to security, are transferred onto refugees from ‘terrorist hotspots’ seeking asylum, while the liberal perspective is delegitimised (‘political correctness’, ‘dismissive’, ‘a supersized hissy fit’) as ignorance of the actual situation at hand.

Make America great again

The American Dream is based on the belief that the country possesses the social and political conditions for individuals to prosper economically, pursue individual liberties and live a life devoid of oppression. It is not simply a way of life, but this ideological commitment represents the lens through which many Americans view and understand the world, including Syrians and refugees. In reporting on the refugee crisis, for instance, political ideologues use Syrians to engage in a larger discussion of whether the United States has a moral obligation to provide support and whether individuals from predominantly Muslim countries should be viewed as potential Americans.

Syrian refugees are also used in the media to explore the extent to which the American Dream is being attacked, an issue that has recently entered mainstream political discourse because of the ‘Make American Great Again’ (MAGA) platform championed by the Trump Administration. Specifically, Syrian refugees are used in the media as a discursive springboard for adopting and engaging in the more sentimental position and ideological struggle regarding the extent to which the hopes and dreams of Americans are threatened because of outside forces. In short, political texts against resettlement efforts use Syrian refugees to argue that the country is not great, and in order to protect the ‘American’ way of life (i.e. the Dream), Syrian refugees must be met with fear, disdain and even anger:

(Extract 15) In order to stop terror and to ‘make America safe again’, as Trump has vowed to do, access to the trough – wherever it is found – must be curtailed … In order to ‘make America safe again’, we must swiftly hit the reset button. Instead of adopting policies designed to circumvent the truth about terrorism’s relationship to political Islam, we must hit the institutional reservoirs and ideological purveyors … allowing for the past decade of gruesome Muslim-on-Muslim bloodshed to speak for itself … attributing responsibility for jihadism’s relentless rash of barbarity to political Islam’s history. (Lappin, 7 June 2017, The American Spectator)

(Extract 16) Is a ‘nation of immigrants’ our deepest American value? Are fairness, equality, openness, generosity, or courage, for that matter, immigrant values … Globalists claim immigrants provide added value and vitality, bringing new ideas into closed, fearful societies composed of aging citizens who want to protect their self-interests. But these claims are one-sided. For millions of established residents in the U.S. and Europe, uncontrolled immigration threatens safety, schools, livelihoods, and quality of life. Slums, crime, filth, and parasitism might be coming to a once tidy neighborhood near you. (Sewall, 10 May 2017, The American Spectator)

(Extract 17) Times aren’t as good now as they were then. Trump’s objectives, like America’s local and international enmeshments, are larger: vanishing industrial jobs, terrorism, energy, urban decline, immigration, police relations, health care, retirement policy, and so on … the repeated pledges to ‘make America great again’ … a thriving, well-functioning, and most of all free community …. (Murchison, 24 January 2017, The American Spectator)

(Extract 18) The Fort Hood shooting, the Boston Marathon bombing, the San Bernardino shooting, and the Orlando nightclub massacre, to name a few, were Islamic terrorist attacks on innocent Americans. And yet in every instance, the Obama administration, with high praise from leftists, rushed to protect and defend Islam … why do leftists feel that American lives do not matter when the villains are Islamic … Incredibly, leftists deem Trump’s desire to make America great ‘racist hate speech’. What is wrong with these people? Why do they hate their and our country so much? … (Marcus, 10 April 2017, The American Thinker)

Although the belief that resettlement efforts are not in the interest of the United States is constructed in different ways, the extracts all rely on the same allegorical representation of reality: the country is not great (‘uncontrolled immigration threatens safety’, ‘vanishing industrial jobs’, ‘the Orlando nightclub massacre’). Allegories are needed for mainstream media consumption because they provide a simple (and simplistic) lens through which to understand complex issues (Ronen, 1988). For instance, situating Syrians within the larger narrative that America must be great again suggests that the betterment of society (or lack thereof) is tied to a single cultural group. Furthermore, in situating the discussion of the refugee crisis within the MAGA narrative, the media is able to flatten Syrian refugees into one-dimensional monsters (‘gruesome Muslim-on-Muslim bloodshed’, ‘relentless rash of barbarity’, ‘Slums, crime, filth, and parasitism’, ‘terrorism’, ‘attacks on innocent Americans’), thereby creating a separate allegorical representation of a cultural group.

These one-dimensional representations of Syrian refugees are possible because the MAGA narrative is, in its own semantic capacity, a fabrication of reality based on binaries: great or not great, American or un-American, Obama or Trump, then and now. One such binary that is crucial to the MAGA narrative is the static view that Syrians are a threat to the American way of life (‘uncontrolled immigration threatens safety, schools, livelihoods, and quality of life’). In these instances, the threat that is ascribed to Syrians is based on religion, and more specifically the image of fear that is widely circulated in popular culture is the juxtaposition of Islam and terrorism (‘terrorism’s relationship to political Islam’, ‘the villains are Islamic’), again a set of discursive constructions that are defined by, and according to the belief systems of, ideologues against resettlement efforts.

Static representations of Syrian refugees allow the media to create new understandings of the American Dream that are inextricable to the MAGA narrative. That is, by constructing Syrian refugees as dangerous individuals, the MAGA narrative suggests that the American Dream is not limited to the hopes and aspirations of immigrants (‘Is a “nation of immigrants” our deepest American value?’), but rather is primarily about maintaining security (‘make America safe again’) for non-Muslim individuals who are currently residing in the country (‘fearful societies composed of aging citizens who want to protect their self-interests’). The immigration and refugee positions of the Trump Administration are thus constructed as solutions to the preservation of the American Dream, a set of policies that equates the inclusion of refugees from predominantly Muslim countries to hatred for the country (‘Why do they hate their and our country so much?’).