서강대학교

초록 (요약문)

This work explores the shaping of public opinion on migration in South Korea by utilizing BERT modeling (Grootendorst 2022) which extends transformer language models to Top2Vec (Angelov 2020) which leverages word semantic embedding to find topic vectors from documents. Data are the public discourse on Twitter and the three biggest local newspapers. The study examines the content of these topics, highlighting key themes and their implications. Criminalization and victimization frameworks are found in the media narrative. Predominant topics in the public opinion are found to be sources of union, with topics centering around shared experiences as migrants, language learners, and neighbors. The findings through BERTopic modeling as a tool of discourse analysis on large data shows a complex narrative creating distinctive concepts of migrants, divided into clustered groups to justify confrontational arguments and ensure the potential for union against the exploitative capitalist government policies is limited by the alienation from native workers. To confront this divisive narrative, emphasizing the importance of elevating class awareness in the public discourse can foster alliances between local and migrant workers. The theory that capitalist ideologies have negatively shaped the image of immigrants through media coverage painting migrants as scapegoats for economic crises is quantitatively studied through the analysis of topics in news articles to bring nuance to the understanding of the framing of the migrant coverage in the major South Korean newspapers. The most common frames found in the mass media are criminalization frames and victimization frames, while the most common narratives in the online discourse includes personal experiences as migrants and workers, desire to share language and culture, and compassion for immigrants in vulnerable situations. The acceptance of policies of “compassionate repression” (Didier Fassin, 2005) may be eased by a migrant discourse shaped by these frames. The salience of migration related keywords in the biggest local search engine Naver shows increased interest in immigrants and refugees in times of increased coverage, highlighting the role of mass media on the formation of the public opinion. Moreover, a strong distinction between immigrants migrating for either economic reasons and humanitarian reasons as a distinct binary is propagated in the mass media and correlated to the justification of oppressive migration governmental policies. We find that mass media coverage effectively forms, not a negative opinion through an exclusively negative coverage of migrants, but a divisive opinion, through the separation of groups of migrants into a hierarchy of “good” to “bad” migrants, based on work status and identity politics. As a result, despite shared experiences as migrants and workers, the public discourse is pushed between xenophobia and pity through charity. The extent of the influence of the media coverage on the public reaction with positive and negative views about migrants expressed in social media was further analyzed to find sources of union between migrant and native workers through shared experiences, identities, and class status. Frames of compassion, interest in communication, and understanding of shared social identities between oppressed groups, remain present in the public discourse and show potential for union between local and migrant workers under the condition of an accrued advocating for class consciousness in new media.