The Politics of the President’s Immigration Rhetoric

• Author: Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha,Eric Gonzalez Juenke
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211042283
• Published date: 01 January 2022
• Date: 01 January 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

2022, Vol. 50(1) 117 –130

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X211042283

American Politics Research

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211042283

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Article

The president is one of the most important immigration

policymakers in the United States, and immigration policy,

given its clear federal scope, is an area where the presi-

dent’s agenda-setting powers and rhetoric matter. However,

presidency scholars have shown that the president’s agenda-

setting powers are systematically constrained by other

political actors and events (see Edwards & Wood, 1999).

Social scientists have explored at length the factors that

drive immigration politics (Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2014;

Haynes et al., 2016; Sampaio, 2015; Silva 2018) and while

the president’s role is critically important in this process

(Beasley, 2004; Sampaio, 2015; Tichenor, 2002), we do not

fully understand when and why presidents give their lim-

ited attention to immigration over time. If presidents are

particularly powerful when it comes to immigration policy,

when do they decide to use the power of their rhetoric to

attempt to influence the immigration policy agenda?

Moreover, what drives the tone of that rhetoric? We focus

on these two questions in this manuscript.

The two most recent presidencies help illustrate the rele-

vance of these questions. Donald Trump entered office after

a campaign of divisive immigration rhetoric that portrayed

immigrants as a drain on the US economy and an affront to

American values. His rhetoric on immigration, specifically

to “restore integrity and the rule of law at our borders,”1

translated into three executive orders designed to limit asy-

lum and construct a 2,000 mile border wall,2 punish so-called

“sanctuary cities” and erode cooperation between local

officials and immigrants,3 and ban travel from several

Muslim-majority nations.4 President Barack Obama also

prioritized immigration policy during his tenure and, like

Trump, promised to secure the border and increase deporta-

tions. In contrast, he intended to liberalize US immigration

policy by prioritizing comprehensive immigration reform,

that is, the DREAM Act, in his second term. He also struck a

much different tone than his successor, maintaining that

“Our history and the facts show that immigrants are a net

plus for our economy and our society.”5

Both of these examples show how two recent presidents

have prioritized immigration policy, while disagreeing on

how to implement reform and how to talk about immigration

in American politics and society. They also illustrate how

two different presidents used their office to lead the national

policy agenda about the appropriate response to immigration

policy, even changing public attitudes about it (Oskooii

et al., 2021). These examples also clarify the general ratio-

nale motivating this paper: what explains the amount of

attention and tone of presidential rhetoric to immigration

issues over time? To answer these questions, we content

1042283APRXXX10.1177/1532673X211042283American Politics ResearchEshbaugh-Soha and Juenke

research-article2021

1University of North Texas, Denton, USA

2Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA

Corresponding Author:

Eric Gonzalez Juenke, Michigan State University, 303 S. Kedzie Hall, East

Lansing, MI 48823, USA.

Email: juenke@msu.edu

The Politics of the President’s

Immigration Rhetoric

Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha1 and Eric Gonzalez Juenke2

Abstract

Although research on immigration politics is extensive, few scholars have systematically connected immigration politics to

the president’s rhetoric over time. This is surprising since all modern presidents have referenced immigration in their public

statements and presidents play a central role in setting the policy agenda. The primary purpose of this paper is to explain the

president’s immigration rhetoric since 1953. Thus, we collect all presidential speeches on immigration through the Obama

Administration, calculating the president’s monthly attention to immigration, and the relative negativity of the president’s

remarks. We theorize that presidents’ motivation to speak about immigration policy is driven by the attention others devote

to immigration policy, and key interventions in the immigration policy debate. Rhetorical tone, we think, is a function of the

changing policy definition of immigration generated by Prop 187 and the Post-911 era. Our results show that the content of

presidential rhetoric on immigration is indeed a product of these factors, providing us with clear evidence as to when the

president devotes public attention to one of the central issues of American politics.

Keywords

presidential rhetoric, presidential politics, immigration politics