The Tone of Presidential Immigration Rhetoric

• In Event: Presidential Leadership and the Makings of Public Policy

Abstract

Even before Donald Trump vilified immigrants when he announced his intention to seek the Republican nomination for president, immigration policy had been a dominant issue on the national agenda. At least since Dwight Eisenhower’s administration, presidents have talked about immigration primarily to facilitate legislative policy, executive action, or lead public opinion on immigration policy in its many forms. Just as presidents have talked more frequently about immigration since the Clinton administration (as other papers in this larger project show), the tone that presidents have used surely has also changed as the policy and political environments have evolved.

This paper has two primary goals. First, I intend to describe the tone of the president’s immigration rhetoric by quantifying the level of negativity (using Lexicoder) and optimism (using DICTION) over time. Second, I also seek to explain fluctuations in tone over time by theorizing that polarization and party control of the presidency affect both negativity and optimism of presidential rhetoric on immigration. To do this, I have collected a comprehensive dataset of all presidential mentions of immigration since 1953, by searching for era-specific key words related to immigration (e.g., immigration, naturalization, deportation, immigrant, undocumented) in the Public Papers of the Presidents. The data reveal significant fluctuations in the tone of presidential rhetoric over time, suggesting, however, that tone alone is insufficient to explain the president’s success in leading the immigration policy agenda. This paper has the added benefit of speaking to the pluralism theme of the conference, in that this paper will appeal to not only scholars of the presidency, but also those in the field of Communications and those who study immigration policy.

Author

• Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha, University of North Texas