Words Really Can Hurt You: The Potential Impacts of Political Rhetoric on Secondary School Students in the San Diego-Tijuana Border Region

This thesis examines the potential impacts of anti-immigrant political rhetoric in the Sweetwater Union High School District in San Diego, California at two points in time, 2016 and 2018. A great number of these students are either themselves born in Mexico or have one or more parents who were. Therefore, these students and their families were the explicit targets of the immigration policy debate of the 2016 election. To explore the extent to which this potentially impacted these students, I divide them into groups based on their own place of birth and that of their parents. Based on survey data gathered as part of the Mexican Migration Field Research Project, I examine various areas of the student experience, including the rates at which bullying occurred. The results suggest that at the same time that anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy increased, students reported more bullying, particularly along the lines of their usage of Spanish, while also reporting an increase in the frequency of political discussions in their homes. Drawing on past historical patterns, I highlight these trends and the need for action to be taken at the school level to improve students’ educational environment, and suggest that these trends might occur on a larger scale elsewhere in the country, given the demographic composition of the district surveyed