In a world in which people are often forced to leave their countries of origin due to armed conflicts, persecution, large-scale human rights violations, economic hardship or natural disasters, public media holds a unique opportunity to serve immigrants — a key thread of the United States’ social fabric — by offering culturally relevant information, content, and engagement initiatives tailored to their needs and viewpoints.
Immigration is a topic often associated with Hispanic communities because they represent the largest foreign-born population in the U.S, Immigrant communities include many other diverse nationalities, ethnicities, cultures, and languages, so it is critical to tailor content and engagement efforts accordingly.
Public media stations also need to be aware that many immigrant communities have been misrepresented or underrepresented in mainstream media, which has often focused only on people who are in the United States without legal status. That leads to skepticism and distrust. Building trust requires consistent, accurate, and culturally competent reporting while ensuring immigrant voices are reflected both in editorial decisions and newsroom leadership.
Obstacles and challenges
There are several key matters that newsroom staff will confront when trying to reach out to immigrant communities.
Diversity
The United States has long been home to more foreign-born populations than any other country worldwide, and its immigrant population reached 47.8 million in 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Status
According to data analyzed by the Migration Policy Institute, nearly three-quarters of all immigrants in the U.S. are legally present, and almost half are naturalized citizens.
“As many as 3.8 million unauthorized immigrants, who numbered 13.7 million as of mid-2023, hold a liminal status offering protection from deportation and work authorization,” MPI estimates. These humanitarian protections include programs such as Temporary Protected Status or TPS, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA and parole, among others. Note that many of these protections can be challenged or withdrawn by the Executive branch, as happened with the second Trump administration, which can greatly increase the number of people in this country with no legal status.
While that figure of 3.8 million is widely used, both DHS and academic experts agree that there is no hard figure. According to the DHS, “there is no nationally representative survey or census that includes information on the legal status of foreign-born residents.”
Workforce and Economy
According to a U.S. Census report published in 2024, Immigrant-led households tend to have lower incomes: Median foreign-born household income was about $73,360 in 2023, compared to $81,700 for households headed by the U.S. born population.
While representing about 14 percent of the total population, immigrants accounted for 18 percent of the civilian labor force in 2023, according to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“The median usual weekly earnings of foreign-born full-time wage and salary workers were $987 in 2023, compared with $1,140 for their native-born counterparts,” says the report.
In 2023, foreign-born workers were more likely than native-born workers to be employed in service industries such as natural resources, construction, and maintenance as welll as production, transportation, and material moving occupations. Foreign-born workers were less likely than native-born workers to be employed in management, professional, and related occupations and in sales and office occupations.
Core competencies for newsrooms
There are many ways that public media can serve immigrant communities. However, it is important for your organization to commit to what you have the bandwidth to do and can sustain. Launching initiatives and not maintaining them long-term can be counter-productive since communities can feel disappointed if they see an outreach attempt later abandoned. It is preferable to thoroughly analyze the engagement initiatives that can be carried out and only undertake those that can be sustained over time. Some competencies you should consider central to your success include:
Staffing and time
Know your staff, their available work hours to do the job you envision, and how much time you can intentionally make for them to complete engagement initiatives.
Building a staff team that reflects the immigrant communities you want to serve is also key to ensuring meaningful engagement with them. Some foreign-born citizens are more willing to talk to journalists from their country of origin, said Kathreen “Kit” Harrison, co-founder and editor of Amjambo Africa!, a newsroom that serves communities from Africa in Maine.
If you want your staff to succeed, ensure they have decision-making power in the editorial process and are not just participants. From deciding which communities to go into to how much time to dedicate to engagement or the storytelling format, ensure the engagement team feels supported and empowered.
When deploying immigrant staff to the communities, keep in mind their legal status to work in this country. Are they are permanent residents, asylum seekers or migrated under work visas? Their legal status could be vulnerable to law enforcement.
If you don’t have the appropriate staff, consult with people from the communities to ensure accurate reporting and cultural competency.
Get to know immigrant backgrounds
It is essential to understand their backgrounds and circumstances, especially in times of marked vulnerability for many immigrant communities. Viewing immigrants simply from a language perspective does not allow you to know them and their needs holistically.
Understand what it entails to be an immigrant. Being an immigrant does not mean arriving in a new country and going on with life as usual. Some of the most significant barriers immigrants face — especially when they just arrive — that can affect your engagement initiatives and how to approach them are:
Fluency: Immigrants with limited English proficiency face significant challenges accessing information, signing up for events and providing input or feedback to organizations, including newsrooms.
Familiarity: A lack of understanding and connection to institutions and structures such as healthcare, education and public media systems — that could be seen as very complex and different compared to the ones in their countries — can lead to challenges in accessing them equitably.
Fear: For many immigrants, these unfamiliarities may lead to fear and anxiety about making mistakes or facing even legal consequences if they do something wrong — discouraging them from engaging with public media and other institutions to avoid potential conflicts.
Fragmentation: Having relatives separated across borders, even thousands of miles away, can make immigrants endure significant loss of community, feel deeply fragmented or split between one culture and another and suffer loneliness and even isolation. Seeking ways to balance their roots with their new environment demands a constant adjustment and exhausting process that may limit their availability to participate in engagement initiatives.
Fracture: One of the biggest sources of disconnection between newsooms and immigrant communities is the low levels or lack of trust these communities could have due to the scarcity of safety nets like the ones they had in their countries of origin. Getting them to trust you and being able to follow up on their needs can be a challenge.
The Survey of Immigrants, conducted by KFF in partnership with the Los Angeles Times during the spring of 2023, shows that a majority of immigrants say their financial situation (78%), educational opportunities (79%), employment situation (75%), and safety (65%) are better as a result of moving to the U.S. Despite improving in different aspects, “many immigrants report facing serious challenges, including high levels of workplace and other discrimination, difficulties making ends meet, and confusion and fears related to U.S. immigration laws and policies.”
Community partners
Partnering with local nonprofits that serve immigrant communities and co-hosting events and listening sessions with those groups will give you insights into coverage needs and interests.
Ask immigrants in your community if there are specific organizations that help and support them. Remember to ask about faith-based institutions, such as mosques, churches, temples and houses of worship. These are organizations that immigrant communities tend to know and trust. Lean into these organizations, which often have staff from the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of those they serve and ask for their assistance if needed.
These relationships provide a sounding board for your public media organization to understand how your ideas resonate and to hear more about what community leaders feel they need from coverage and content.
Make the events a safe and collaborative process with the communities. Host inclusive and balanced community gatherings — review the generation, race, gender, background, affiliation, location, etc., of the people invited to the initiatives. Curate the event environment to make people comfortable — plan initiatives and sessions around traditions, music, arts, and food. Bring people together around these universal ways of expression to engage with them. Schedule events by taking into account immigrants’ work hours, childcare needs, habits and traditions.
Ask about the cultural nuances when communicating with these communities. Test your content ideas and ask for feedback.
Translations
Translating stories is a public service and a form of intentional engagement. Before you translate anything, research to learn what stories would be most useful to the immigrant community you’re trying to reach. Learn about immigrant, refugee and non-English speaking populations in your community and find a way to provide translations of important stories and information. In Indianapolis, Side Effects Public Media partnered with Indiana University to offer translations in Hakha Lai for Burmese readers because reporters knew the city had a large Burmese population.
If you decide that non-English language stories are a key component of your news offering, remember that you also need to think deeply about which stories to translate.
Keep in mind that for your audiences to relate to and engage with your coverage, your newsroom will also have to thoroughly edit translated stories by adding or deleting specific content or information originally published in English that might not make sense when translated into another language. For instance, in a story published in English, it may be necessary to explain a genre of native music, the instruments played, etc. But when translating that story into the language of the community that owns that musical genre, that information is redundant and can be interpreted as patronizing.
Evaluate your translation work with community partners and translators. Include them in conversations about how to reach community members effectively.
Other editing components include working on link-building in their languages to help communities easily access additional information, improve the story’s SEO and repurpose and distribute previous content. Remember to include metadata in immigrants’ languages for accessibility and optimization.
Consider, too, whether translation is needed or if your newsroom needs to cover stories differently to serve culturally diverse audiences better.
New types of content and platforms
Provide immigrant communities with news and information about issues that are important to them, as well as programming that highlights their traditions, culture and history. You might prefer to go digital or broadcast, but leverage your community partners to find out what interests and is relevant to these communities and what platforms they use. Chinese communities in New York, for instance, are very active in WeChat. In contrast, Caribbean communities prefer Nextdoor, according to a study conducted by Documented, an independent, non-profit newsroom dedicated to reporting with and for immigrant communities in New York City.
Key tips for reaching immigrant audiences
Set objectives
Establishing clear and measurable objectives is a crucial step in effectively engaging with immigrant audiences. Begin by identifying what success looks like for your news organization when it comes to serving them. Are you aiming to increase readership or viewership by a specific percentage within a particular time frame? Do you want to enhance trust and credibility among immigrant audiences, or are you focused on increasing engagement with your social media platforms? Defining specific outcomes will provide a framework for measuring progress and adjusting your strategy as needed.
Consider the unique needs and preferences of the immigrant community you want to serve when setting goals. Immigrant audiences are diverse in terms of language, culture, and media consumption habits. Are you targeting immigrants without legal status exclusively, or do you aim to reach others as well? Understanding these nuances will help you define realistic and sensitive goals that align with their lived experiences.
Listen
Public media organizations can better serve immigrants and build strong relationships with these community members by understanding the key issues they face.
Immerse in the immigrant community, learn from them and listen to internal and external stakeholders. Seek input from immigrant staff members, local community leaders, experts and trusted organizations. Their insights can help you identify gaps in coverage, uncover potential barriers to engagement, and shape goals that reflect the community’s actual needs. Visit shops, parks and places where the communities live. Ask how you can help them and answer questions from their base. Explain your role and the work you do. And ask over and over again: How can we serve you?
Editorial tone
Humanize immigration stories and avoid sensationalism and language that criminalizes individuals without legal status. Remember that immigration processes are administrative processes, not criminal ones.
Provide context and balance in your stories and engagement initiatives by providing broader historical, political, and economic contexts. Remember to include background information on policy changes, global migration trends, and the root causes of displacement to give a fuller picture.
Try to bring calm to the community in times of fear and anxiety related to immigration processes. Focus on dismantling myths and misinformation if possible.
Do not make assumptions
Being the most well-known and widely consumed station in your coverage area doesn’t mean immigrant communities are familiar with you. Don’t assume they know about your station, where to find you, or how to access your content. While you may be a trusted source for others in the community, you could still be unknown to immigrant audiences. Proactive outreach and tailored engagement are key to bridging this gap.
Another topic to consider is not to assume the immigration status of children or families. Many children in immigrant families may be U.S. citizens, even if their parents and relatives are not. Reporting with accuracy and sensitivity is essential to building trust.
Educate your audience
Include explanatory elements in coverage to combat misinformation and harmful narratives about immigrants. Many Americans are unfamiliar with immigration procedures and what can be done to regularize the immigration status of individuals. Make clear how difficult it is to migrate to the U.S. permanently, as there are only four paths – family-based, employment-based diversity immigration visa program and humanitarian relief programs – to legal migration in the country. Also, remember that more immigrants are in the U.S. without documents because of visa overstays rather than illegal border crossings. Help your audience understand the facts in context.
Use proper language
Language influences people’s views and can fuel the flames of fear and fervor related to immigration. Have conversations about style within your newsroom about the terms you should use when covering stories and organizing engagement initiatives tailored for immigrant communities.
In January 2025, NPR launched new guidelines on how to refer to immigrant communities, such as using the term “illegal immigration” and not “illegal immigrants” or avoiding terminology that talks about natural phenomena — for example, a “flood” of immigrants or “waves” of immigrants.
Ensure accuracy and neutrality by using precise terminology and distinguishing between “refugee,” “asylum seeker,” and “displaced person” based on their immigration status. Remember that most immigrants are in the U.S. legally.
Avoid superlative words such as “unprecedented,” “most ever,” ‘least ever” or “first time in modern history” as they might be not accurate.
Interview the right sources
When searching for lawyers as part of your engagement initiatives or coverage, ensure they have significant experience working on immigration in the field. Avoid interviewing or inviting corporate immigration or criminal lawyers about border issues as they might have a different experience from those dealing with deportation and adjustment of status cases.
Co-create
Avoid parachuting into communities and develop collaborative projects where their members have a key role in the editorial and production process. Offer community members training on journalism if possible.
Make content relevant and useful to immigrant communities — offer value that answers questions and/or addresses needs. Ensure you understand which platforms this community uses to get their news and information and tailor your content to those platforms. Provide bilingual surveys as an option to reach as many people as possible. Publish on social media and consider creating highlights to group content in their own languages.
Dialogue
Keep an open dialogue with your audience and staff. Listen to feedback and make improvements.
Additional Resources
- How Innovative News Outlets are Meeting the Needs of Immigrant Communities
- Organizing engagement initiatives and covering immigration under Trump 2.0
- Covering immigration stories in 2025: Expert insights and reporting advice
- How to constructively critique your coverage through the lens of race and ethnicity
- Telling immigrants’ stories: nonprofit newsrooms balance navigating political threats with the need to inform
- How El Tímpano is engaging immigrants in civic science
- Check the State Refugee Coordinator to determine if any refugee-serving agencies are in your coverage area.
From our stations
Stations have detailed their work around content and audience engagement for immigrant communities. Learn from their experiences and adapt their lessons to your community:
- A National Survey On Immigration Led Me To A Rural Iowa Town Changed By Immigrants
- How a listening-focused reporting process shaped season 2 of KUNC’s ‘The Colorado Dream’ on the Black immigrant experience
- This Georgia Town Has Welcomed Thousands Of Refugees. Hear What Residents Have To Sa
- Engaging Filipino Communities in Juneau, Alaska with KTOO
