June 2026
Change The Narrative, Change The World 2026
Our fourth groundbreaking television research on immigrant representation with USC Norman Lear Center's Media Impact Project is changing storytelling in Hollywood.
Download the full reportAbout the report
Define American, with USC Norman Lear Center’s Media Impact Project, presents our fourth television impact study: Change the Narrative, Change the World: How Hollywood Can Fight for Immigrant Stories on Screen.
For the first time in nine years of this research, we expanded our content analysis beyond immigrant characters to include their U.S.-born children. This methodological shift reflects a fundamental truth about the immigrant experience:
To tell the immigrant story accurately is to tell the whole family’s story.
We looked at the portrayal of 201 characters — 172 immigrants and 29 children of immigrants — across 80 episodes of 62 scripted series airing between July 1, 2023, and June 30, 2025. We also conducted an impact study examining how scenes from a single episode of the Netflix series Mo shaped viewers’ attitudes, emotions, and intentions around immigration and asylum.
The findings? A television landscape with meaningful gains in some areas and persistent, troubling gaps in others.
Key findings
At Define American, we believe that entertainment and pop culture are often the lenses through which we see the world.
While there is much to celebrate in recent shifts on television, there is also more work to be done in Hollywood to fully capture the details and nuance of immigrant communities at large.
23%
of immigrants on TV were Latine.
Representation of Latine immigrant characters on TV has plummeted since 2020, dropping from 50% in 2020 to 34% in 2022 and now 23% – even though in reality, 44% of all U.S. immigrants are Latine.
57%
of immigrant and children of immigrant characters on TV came from streaming networks.
Streaming networks accounted for 57% of all immigrant and children of immigrant characters across 34 shows, compared to 38% on broadcast and just 6% on cable.
1 in 4
immigrant characters with a job was a criminal.
Immigrants and children of immigrants were shown as smugglers, drug dealers, and human traffickers.
62%
of "Mo" viewers said the show increased their understanding of the challenges immigrants and asylees face in the U.S.
Netflix series Mo set the standard for immigrant representation in just two seasons, featuring more immigrant characters than any other show in our sample — 13 immigrants and 2 children of immigrants — and anchored Middle Eastern and North African representation on screen.
Contact the team
Research Inquiries
Sarah E. Lowe
Vice President of Communications and Research
research@defineamerican.com
General Entertainment Team Inquiries
ent@defineamerican.com
Downloads
Immigrant Representation on TV
