A Century of Immigration Rhetoric in the UK Parliament

Migration is a defining phenomenon of our time, around which heightened political rhetoric creates the impression of unprecedented political conflict. In the UK, this perception coincides with major political developments, such as the Brexit referendum and the rise of anti-immigration politics in recent decades. We apply quantitative text analysis techniques to the Hansard collection of spoken contributions in the House of Commons to examine how political elites have discussed immigration over the past century. We find that the Labour Party has consistently expressed more positive sentiment towards immigration compared to the Conservative party since the early 1960s, and that these positions further diverged in the early 1980s. The last 15 years have seen more negative rhetoric across all major parties, with immigration discussed among Conservative and Reform UK MPs in the most negative terms since 1923. We discuss possible future research avenues, supported by suggestive findings on the increasing moralization of the immigration debate and growing negativity towards asylum.