Public attitudes toward immigration are an important input into immigration policy. We measure political speech about immigration from 1870 to 2020 by classifying and analyzing 200,000 topical U.S. Congressional speeches and 5,000 Presidential communications. Despite the salience of anti-immigration rhetoric today, the average political speech about immigration is now much more positive than in the past, with the shift largely taking place between WWII 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 tone toward immigration. Republican speeches today are as negative as the average Congressional speech was in the 1920s, an era of strict immigration quotas. Using a novel approach based on contextual embeddings of text, we find that modern Republicans are significantly more likely to use language suggestive of dehumanizing metaphors such as Vermin and Disease, and make greater use of frames like Crime and Legality. Expressed attitudes also differ dramatically by immigrant nationality, with a striking similarity between how Mexican immigrants are framed today and how Chinese immigrants were negatively framed during the era of Chinese exclusion in the late 19th century.
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