ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Computational analysis of 140 years of US political speeches reveals more positive but increasingly polarized framing of immigration.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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12 citing papers in PubMed, 81 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Semantic change in adults is not primarily a generational phenomenon.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Computational analysis of US congressional speeches reveals a shift from evidence to intuition.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Immigrants and their children assimilate into US society and the US economy, both in the past and today.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Measuring vaccination coverage and concerns of vaccine holdouts from web search logs.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The shadow of fear: hate crime victimization and stress after Charlottesville.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Automated stance detection in complex topics and small languages: The challenging case of immigration in polarizing news media.PloS one · 2024Article
- Partisan conflict over content moderation is more than disagreement about facts.Science advances · 2023Article
- A linguistic analysis of dehumanization toward substance use across three decades of news articles.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- Computational analysis of 140 years of US political speeches reveals more positive but increasingly polarized framing of immigration.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
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8 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We classify and analyze 200,000 US congressional speeches and 5,000 presidential communications related to immigration from 1880 to the present. Despite the salience of antiimmigration rhetoric today, we find that political speech about immigration is now much more positive on average than in the past, with the shift largely taking place between World War II and the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965. However, since the late 1970s, political parties have become increasingly polarized in their expressed attitudes toward immigration, such that Republican speeches today are as negative as the average congressional speech was in the 1920s, an era of strict immigration quotas. Using an approach based on contextual embeddings of text, we find that modern Republicans are significantly more likely to use language that is suggestive of metaphors long associated with immigration, such as "animals" and "cargo," and make greater use of frames like "crime" and "legality." The tone of speeches also differs strongly based on which nationalities are mentioned, with a striking similarity between how Mexican immigrants are framed today and how Chinese immigrants were framed during the era of Chinese exclusion in the late 19th century. Overall, despite more favorable attitudes toward immigrants and the formal elimination of race-based restrictions, nationality is still a major factor in how immigrants are spoken of in Congress.
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