31 VOL. 72, NO. 1, SPRING 2013 Human Organization, Vol. 72, No. 1, 2013 Copyright © 2013 by the Society for Applied Anthropology 0018-7259/13/010031-13$1.80/1 Introduction D uring the past few years, many states have debated and passed stringent immigration enforcement laws. Starting with Arizona’s Senate Bill (SB) 1070, that became law in July 2011, other states have also enacted similar immigration enforcement laws, especially in the United States South (e.g., Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina). The proponents for immigration enforcement laws argue that United States taxpayer dollars are unfairly spent John (Juan) Luque is Assistant Professor in the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health at Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, Georgia. Angel Bowers and Ahmed Kabore are graduate students in the Col- lege of Public Health. Ric Stewart is an undergraduate student in the Department of Sociology, also at Georgia Southern University. The primary author thanks Lance Gravlee and Amber Wutich for the Text Analysis workshop training through the National Science Foundation- funded Short Courses on Research Methods series in summer 2011 that helped the author develop the methodology and analysis. The authors also thank David Griffth, Martha Rees, Alayne Unterberger, and Heide Castañeda for their comments on an earlier version of the paper that was previously presented on the panel titled: “Arizonafcation of the South: New Laws and Old Divisions across AL, GA, FL, and MS” at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, Baltimore, Maryland, April 30, 2012. Who Will Pick Georgia’s Vidalia Onions? A Text-Driven Content Analysis of Newspaper Coverage on Georgia’s 2011 Immigration Law John S. Luque, Angel Bowers, Ahmed Kabore, and Ric Stewart Media accounts on debates around immigration reform in the United States have framed a range of arguments from supporting tougher immigration enforcement to providing amnesty to the large numbers of unauthorized immigrants currently living in the country. The main objective of this article is to discuss the potential social and economic impacts of the Georgia anti-immigration bill House Bill (HB) 87 as framed by newspaper stories leading up to the bill’s passage in 2011. The second objective is to examine differences in argument framing of the media coverage between major metropolitan newspapers compared to bilingual (English and Spanish) newspapers in Georgia. The third objective is to report on participant observation of political advocacy meetings held in rural Georgia to advise distressed Latino immigrants about the bill’s implications. A content analysis was conducted of four months of newspaper articles from three major metropolitan newspapers and two bilingual newspapers. The metropolitan newspapers were more likely to frame arguments in support of the bill that the federal laws were inadequate to control illegal immigration. The political advocacy meetings framed arguments around the questionable constitutionality of the law and the racial overtones of the legislation (e.g., racial profling). The implications of these immigration debates for Georgia’s current immigration policy are discussed. Key words: immigration reform, immigrants, newspapers, media framing, content analysis on unauthorized immigrants who place a burden on public schools, hospitals, courts and jails, and depress wages. Other main arguments are concerned with protecting United States borders and inaction on the federal level for comprehensive immigration reform. The current enforcement-only approach has not had a signifcant impact on curbing unauthorized im- migration. A report from the Center for American Progress (2010) recommended that legalizing unauthorized workers in the United States and adjusting legal limits on immigra- tion in step with labor demand would potentially provide a stimulus for the United States economy. Critics of the current anti-immigration laws, documented in the newspaper articles examined in this study, argue that an enforcement-only ap- proach spends more taxpayer dollars for jails, clogs up the court system, and adds to attorney costs for defending the states against numerous lawsuits to block unconstitutional provisions of these laws. Illegal immigration is a “hot button” issue that lawmak- ers negotiate to fnd a balance between business pressures to ensure a continuous fow of low-wage, immigrant labor, and voting constituent pressures to create jobs for United States citizens, especially in times of economic uncertainty (Gomberg-Munoz and Nussbaum-Barberena 2011). Debates on immigration reform in the context of the 2012 presidential race revealed that even within the Republican Party, there