Portraits of emigration: sour milk and honey in the promised land

This article analyzes the moral tones of public emigration stories through an exploratory analysis of newspaper stories published between 1990 and 1993 in a region in Poland with a century-old tradition of out-migration. Media stories are fertile ground for examining values and myths because they negotiate between the micro-level process of individuals constructing meanings and the macro-level process of political economies producing meanings. I identified two sets of contradictory stories: (1) stories about the sending country cast emigrants as either home builders or home wreckers, and (2) stories about the receiving country depicted America as either Horatio Alger's land of possibility or a morally degenerate place where greed corrupts the soul. To explain these contradictions, I compare the institution of migration to (post)modern culture and note that both contribute to social diversity and structural differentiation which lead to value inconsistencies.