At the turn of the 20th century, St. Louis was rapidly growing in part due to the waves of migration to the city. Groups such as German, Italian, Polish, and Chinese Americans settled in the area for job opportunities. African Americans migrating from the denial of opportunities under sharecropping, along with Eastern European Jews fleeing persecution, sought the city’s refuge. These communities immediately started newspapers to help themselves integrate economically and politically into American society while maintaining cultural autonomy through stories in their native languages and news from their home countries.
St. Louis emerged as a center of immigrant journalism, as Hungarian American publisher Joseph Pulitzer would go on to own the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the most widely distributed newspaper in Missouri during the late 19th century was the German-language newspaper Westliche Post.
With prominent immigrant communities came prominent newspapers, where they can signal their success as they thrive. From the past to today, St. Louis remains a city that grows with the success of immigrants settling down in the area and building up their communities.
The St. Louis area has sought to attract immigrants to reverse the city’s decline. The reception of Bosnian refugees during the Yugoslav Wars, who then revived the south St. Louis region of Bevo Mill, was a sign that cultivating thriving immigrant communities was the future of the city’s development. With assistance from the immigrant assistance non-profit The International Institute, refugees from Afghanistan have managed to resettle in St. Louis, as well as immigrants originating throughout Latin America, South and East Asia.
However, recent waves of immigrants differ from past ones due to one key factor that shapes their politics: a lack of journalism. Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism discovered in a report that the nation has “lost more than one-third of its newspapers” since 2005, which the report argues is primarily driven by competition with digital news sources on the internet.
Whenever I talk with my Korean immigrant parents or my friends with immigrant parents from other communities, their news sources vary dramatically. They either gain all of their news from social media, often buying into disinformation, or they have taken the time to form a web of news sources they trust, written in English and their native languages.
And what I have seen in person generally tracks with nationwide trends. According to polls from Nielsen Media Research and the Pew Research Center, 63% of Asian Americans and 65% of Latinos say they prefer to get their news online.
Observing the 2024 election, many were baffled that immigrant voters swung towards the now-President Donald Trump, who was vocally outspoken against immigration reform. An NBC News article published on Nov. 6, 2024, was titled “Asian Americans favored Harris but shifted right by 5 points,” and another headline by the same publisher on Nov. 14 read “Latino advocates grapple with Hispanic vote shift and its impact on policy agenda.”
You would imagine that immigrant communities would be repulsed by promises to deport upwards of 15-20 million people, regardless of legal status, as stated by Trump in a TIME magazine interview on April 30, 2024. When Trump made promise after promise to limit legal immigration into the US, why is it that so many immigrants embraced a return to Trump last year?
One major factor is how immigrants in the US receive their news. Without any resources or guidance on what English-language news sources to trust outside of their friends and family, combined with disinformation made to appeal to immigrants by using their native language and tailoring to their cultural values, immigrant voters are extremely vulnerable.
Democratic systems depend on the citizens they govern, and whether or not they are informed is vital. If people disengage from politics and receive their news from untrustworthy or often anonymous sources, they will be misinformed. If people who want to be engaged need to spend time finding information, expect that camp to be in the minority. For immigrants, the situation is much worse.
When institutions and journalism watchdogs in the US are mostly staffed by native-born writers who are only fluent in English, disinformation that targets immigrants can cause greater and more pernicious harm to civic responsibility in this country.
