THE PRESIDENT'S INTENT: Preliminary findings of a Critical Discourse Analysis of Trump's speeches and tweets from the date of his candidacy to mid-September 2017

An anthology: Language and the Making of Trump World

To our great shame as a nation and at enormous personal loss for hundreds of thousands of families, we suffer the actions of the 45th President. He is a master of mass media manipulation who grabbed and holds the nation’s attention. His very real actions against immigrants are immoral and destructive. In this chapter we will describe the discourse the President uses to villainize immigrants in order to seize and maintain political power.

My article aims at showing how Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address has many rhetorical features of authoritarianism, reflecting a worldview that social order is fragile and under attack. By inflating threat both inside and outside the nation, he has turned power and strength into national values. This analysis is meant to show the process through which the president constructs threats in order to make the use of force and the requirement of loyalty and obedience more acceptable. This is not only done through the use of specific conceptual metaphors (such as the war metaphor with words like “defend,” “attack,” “protect,” or the container-metaphor) but also though the display of heroic victims that have been confronted with these various threats. These many heroes help build the emotional energy that contributes to the acceptance of increased presidential power.

During a post-election TV interview that aired mid-November 2016, then President-Elect Donald Trump claimed that there are millions of so-called “criminal aliens” living in the United States: “What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate.” This claim is a blatant misrepresentation of the facts. A recent report by the Migration Policy Institute suggests that just over 800,000 (or 7 percent) of the 11 million undocumented individuals in the United States have criminal records. Of this population, 300,000 individuals are felony offenders and 390,000 are serious misdemeanor offenders — tallies which exclude more than 93 percent of the resident undocumented population (Rosenblum 2015, 22-24).[1] Moreover, the Congressional Research Service found that 140,000 undocumented migrants — or slightly more than 1 percent of the undocumented population — are currently serving time in prison in the United States (Kandel 2016). The facts, therefore, are closer to what Doris Meissner, former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Commissioner, argues: that the number of “criminal aliens” arrested as a percentage of all fugitive immigration cases is “modest” (Meissner et al. 2013, 102-03). The facts notwithstanding, President Trump’s fictional tally is important to consider because it conveys an intent to produce at least this many people who — through discourse and policy — can be criminalized and incarcerated or deported as “criminal aliens.” In this article, we critically review the literature on immigrant criminalization and trace the specific laws that first linked and then solidified the association between undocumented immigrants and criminality. To move beyond a legal, abstract context, we also draw on our quantitative and qualitative research to underscore ways immigrants experience criminalization in their family, school, and work lives. The first half of our analysis is focused on immigrant criminalization from the late 1980s through the Obama administration, with an emphasis on immigration enforcement practices first engineered in the 1990s. Most significant, we argue, are the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). The second section of our analysis explores the social impacts of immigrant criminalization, as people’s experiences bring the consequences of immigrant criminalization most clearly into focus. We approach our analysis of the production of criminality of immigrants through the lens of legal violence (Menjivar and Abrego 2012), a concept designed to understand the immediate and long-term harmful effects that the immigration regime makes possible. Instead of narrowly focusing only on the physical injury of intentional acts to cause harm, this concept broadens the lens to include less visible sources of violence that reside in institutions and structures and without identifiable perpetrators or incidents to be tabulated. This violence comes from structures, laws, institutions, and practices that, similar to acts of physical violence, leave indelible marks on individuals and produce social suffering. In examining the effects of today’s ramped up immigration enforcement, we turn to this concept to capture the violence that this regime produces in the lives of immigrants. Immigrant criminalization has underpinned US immigration policy over the last several decades. The year 1996, in particular, was a signal year in the process of criminalizing immigrants. Having 20 years to trace the connections, it becomes evident that the policies of 1996 used the term “criminal alien” as a strategic sleight of hand. These laws established the concept of “criminal alienhood” that has slowly but purposefully redefined what it means to be unauthorized in the United States such that criminality and unauthorized status are too often considered synonymous (Ewing, Martínez, and Rumbaut 2015). Policies that followed in the 2000s, moreover, cast an increasingly wider net which continually re-determined who could be classified as a “criminal alien,” such that the term is now a mostly incoherent grab bag. Simultaneously and in contrast, the practices that produce “criminal aliens” are coherent insofar as they condition immigrant life in the United States in now predictable ways. This solidity allows us to turn in our conclusion to some thoughts about the likely future of US immigration policy and practice under President Trump. [1] These numbers are based on the assumption that “unauthorized immigrants and lawful noncitizens commit crimes at similar rates” (Rosenblum 2015, 22). However, there is research that provides good support that criminality among the undocumented is lower than for the foreign-born population overall (Rumbaut 2009; Ewing, Martínez, and Rumbaut 2015).

under review

We systematically gather and analyze the 45th president’s public discourse to formally describe his narrative about unauthorized immigrants. We definitely demonstrate that he publicly articulates racist statements about immigrants and Latinos in general. Beyond a formal statement, we offer partial explanations based on cognitive science and history why his public discourse resonates so well with a sizeable portion of the US electorate. We developed this report to resist his administration’s efforts to rescind DACA, because we believe his executive action is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution, even though we believe that the Supreme Court is likely to ignore the public discourse of the nation’s highest elected official, thus separating his public discourse as president from his presidential actions.

Donald Trump campaigned on seven major issues, two of which involved migration, viz, have the US build and Mexico pay for a wall on the 2,000 mile Mexico-US border and deport the 11 million unauthorized foreigners in the US. Trump also promised to reverse President Obama's executive orders that provide temporary legal status to some unauthorized foreigners, and to " put American workers first " in migration policy making. After winning the November 2016 election, Trump modified some of his positions, announcing that deportation efforts would be focused on two million unauthorized foreigners that Trump says were convicted of US crimes.

This paper is on promises on immigration, deportations.

The 2016 presidential campaign and the election of Donald Trump has amplified divisive anti-immigrant sentiment and has further positioned “Mexicans as enemy.” Trump’s “Build That Wall!” declarative has stoked nativist ire through manufactured narratives that rarely, if ever, consider the United States government’s role in the increase of undocumented immigrants residing in our country. In this essay, the author connects the current administration’s anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican proposals to historical legislation that, cloaked under the guise of “national security” or a return to “American values,” has aimed to maintain White hegemony. Additionally, the author examines anti-Mexican narratives that aim to criminalize Mexican immigrants’ behaviors to justify imperialistic and unjust policies that further serve dominant-White political elites and their constituents.

From the U.S. point of view, who is the builder of the fence, there can be identified two main premises in the debate. First, ‘the economic and social impact of the immigrants crossing the US-Mexico border is negative’. Second, ‘the border fence is an effective deterrent preventing immigrants from crossing the border’. Therefore, following Modus Ponens, the valid deductive form of arguments, ‘the border fence should exist and should be expanded to increase the security and prevent the number of immigrants.’ The validity of both premises will be evaluated respectively. The negative economic impact can be confirmed if immigrants (1) take away jobs from native US citizens; (2) do not pay taxes, or pay less than the social benefits they receive; (3) brings down trade and (4) push down wages. Negative social impact can be confirmed if (5) the increase in immigration leads to rise in crime or the spread of the narcotic addicts by smuggling in illegal weapons or drugs.

Franciscan Connections , 2018

Using a recent UCLA study on Trump's metaphors, this article exposes the administration's attitude toward immigrant and refugee children. Building on UCLA's analytics, this paper offers a Franciscan alternative: transformative myths of inclusion, goodness and beauty.