The Discursive Erasure of Asylum: Tracking Semantic Change in U.S. News Coverage (1920-2020)

• In Event: Migration Policies

Abstract

The legal and institutional infrastructure of asylum in the United States has been systematically dismantled over recent decades, culminating in a series of sweeping executive actions in early 2025 that suspended border processing and revoked protection status for over 1.6 million individuals. While scholars have documented the policy mechanisms through which asylum is being materially restricted, less attention has been paid to the discursive conditions that make such restrictions politically viable. This study argues that the "death of asylum" in policy is preceded and enabled by the death of asylum as a conceptually distinct category in public discourse. Using a corpus of 11,900 New York Times article titles spanning 1920 to 2020, we employ diachronic word embeddings to track how the semantic meaning of "asylum" has transformed across a century of American news coverage. We find that asylum discourse has been persistently and consistently negative in emotional tone throughout the century, with a notable intensification during the 1990s coinciding with major restrictionist legislation. Beginning in the 1980s, asylum undergoes a dramatic semantic convergence with general immigration discourse, losing the conceptual distinctiveness that marks it as a fundamentally different legal and humanitarian category. Analysis of semantic framing along a threat-versus-protection dimension reveals additional complexity, with mid-century Cold War politics producing a temporary spike toward threat framing that warrants further investigation. Together, these findings suggest a century-long process of discursive erasure in which asylum is gradually stripped of its humanitarian meaning, absorbed into enforcement-oriented immigration rhetoric, and repositioned in ways that make restrictive policies increasingly thinkable. We discuss implications for the relationship between media discourse, public attitudes, and the political viability of asylum restriction.

Authors

• Bertha Alicia Bermúdez Tapia, New Mexico State University

• Heather Harper, New Mexico State University