The Politics of the President’s Immigration Rhetoric

• In Event: Presidential Rhetoric and Public Policy

Abstract

Even before he secured his party’s nomination—or became the 45th President of the United States—Donald Trump prioritized immigration. His hardline positions against immigration, whether considered legal or illegal, suggested a shift in presidential rhetoric from the more practical immigration policy positions of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Moreover, his divisive rhetoric appears to be specific to the partisan politics of the Trump Administration. But is it? This paper offers a comprehensive look at the presidents’ immigration rhetoric to see how and to what extent Trump’s rhetoric on immigration differs from his predecessors.

More generally, given the president’s role as chief legislator, top agenda-setter, and leader of public opinion and new coverage, how often presidents talk about immigration—and how they talk about it—is essential to explaining the immigration debate, as well as the formulation and adoption of immigration policies over time. Although much recent research that examines the presidency and immigration policy has centered on the evolution of presidential rhetoric post-9/11, immigration policy is not new to the president’s agenda. Indeed, all modern presidents (beginning with Dwight Eisenhower) have referenced immigration in their public statements.

To explain the president’s immigration rhetoric, we have collected a comprehensive dataset of all presidential immigration rhetoric since 1953. To account for the varied nature of immigration policy over the years, we selected a series of era-specific keywords (e.g., naturalization, deportation, immigrant, migrant, immigration, among others) to identify presidential sentences that reference immigration policy. We then analyze these sentences for content, identifying the topics that presidents mention, the amount of their attention to immigration issues, and the tone of that commentary. We hypothesize that a variety of factors specific to immigration policy and of general importance to presidential rhetoric best explain changes in immigration rhetoric over time.

Authors

• Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha, University of North Texas

• Eric Gonzalez Juenke, Michigan State University