Attitudes of the United States’ Presidents Towards Immigration

George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump

Authors

  • Ayman Al Sharafat

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13135/1592-4467/8513

Keywords:

immigration, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, Barack Obama

Abstract

The year 2001 marked a turning point in the attitudes of the United States Presidents towards immigration. In order to chart these changes in attitude, this study will analyze official documents from the administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. The documents will be examined to see how immigrants and immigration are described by the three Presidents, and how they differ in their views. To examine immigration policy issues which appeared on the presidential agenda, the searchable “Public Papers” archive of The American Presidency Project (http://www. presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/) are used by John Woolley and Gerhard Peters. To clarify the Presidents’ attitudes toward immigration, James Q. Wilson’s classification of policy model are used. Wilson supposes that attitudes and policies have distributional consequences. The results indicate that Presidents Bush and Obama showed similar attitudes towards immigration. They emphasized the concentrated benefits and concentrated costs of immigration. On the other hand, the attitude of President Trump towards immigration is distinct from that of the previous two administrations. He downplays the benefits of immigration all over the United States and throughout its history, and concentrates on its costs.

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Published

2019-09-01

Issue

Vol. 30 (2019): Mobilities and Citizenship: Rethinking Migrations, Individual and Collective Civil Rights, and Their Representations

Section

Special Section

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