Computational analysis of 140 years of US political speeches reveals more positive but increasingly polarized framing of immigration.

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 signi

SUBMITTER: Card D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9351383 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature