Rhetoric in the American Immigration Debate

According to Aristotle, a speaker could frame any debate using three approaches: an appeal to logic, an appeal from credibility, or an appeal to emotions. All speakers and writers use the tripartite approach to rhetoric in varying degrees and ultimately the audience judges their effectiveness in the context presented. In America, few topics are as hotly debated as that of undocumented migration, and it can be difficult to pick through the partisan and often vitriolic rhetoric in order to come to a rational conclusion. Politicians frame the debate using elements of the American mythos. While the evidence they present to back their conclusions may be factual, it necessarily omits the full truth in order to present a partisan political front. As such, politicians predominantly rely on the reader or listener’s emotional satisfaction. And even the most scrupulous journalists—meant to impart objective fact to the public—are not free from personal bias, making the discourse even more convoluted. In analyzing three prominent voices in the immigration debate, US president Obama, journalist Sonia Nazario, and Arizona congressman J.D. Hayworth, we can evaluate the effectiveness of the different rhetorical approaches by whether or not they reach their intended audiences. Nazario fulfills her journalistic raison d’être by succeeding at objectivity, while Obama and Hayworth as politicians succeed by lying by omission in speeches and in writing in order to pursue policy goals and appease supporters.

Sonia Nazario, herself an immigrant, was aware of the acrimonious debate on undocumented migration through her work as a prominent Los Angeles journalist. The issue was brought to a head when her housekeeper’s son arrived unannounced from Guatemal...

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...ted skein of immigration policy in America by words alone. Despite that after careful analysis we the readers can more fully understand an issue and potentially come to expanded schemas, we are left with the conclusion that social issues are rarely easy to answer. In our history, rhetoric has been transformative. The power of a well-worded speech or essay to suddenly shift the direction of discourse is very real. Though we were not there, we remember Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream”, and John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” because they were coups of emotion, logic, and ethos. But sometimes such moments never come in a debate. Rhetoric is not always revolutionary; it can also be petty, insubstantial, or merely ignored. Although logic demands answers and emotion is sated by tidy conclusions, they are rarely forthcoming.