English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies ISSN 2640-9836 (Print) ISSN 2640-9844 (Online) Vol. 7, No. 4, 2025 www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls 124 Original Paper ADiscourse-Historical Analysis of the Immigration Topic in Trump's Campaign Rally Speeches Diemei Yang1 1 Xinjiang University, Urumqi, China Received: June 11, 2025 Accepted: August 11, 2025 Online Published: August 29, 2025 doi:10.22158/eltls.v7n4p124 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/eltls.v7n4p124 Abstract This paper employs a discourse-historical analysis method to examine Trump's speech discourse during his campaign rallies, with a focus on exploring his discourse strategies on the topic of immigration and their socio-cultural origins. The study reveals that Trump constructs an immigration discourse framework centered around law, national security, and economic interests through naming strategies, predicative strategies, and perspectivization strategies in his speeches. He emphasizes the threat posed by illegal immigrants to employment and security, utilizing direct and indirect quotations to enhance the authority and emotional impact of his discourse. The research presented in this paper not only uncovers the ideological foundation of Trump's immigration policies but also provides a new perspective for understanding the interactive relationship between political discourse and socio-historical context. Keywords DHA, immigration discourse, Trump’s campaign rally speeches 1. Introduction The immigration issue in the United States has always been a major concern for the US government. Throughout its history, US immigration policy has undergone cyclical shifts from openness to restriction, reflecting the social, economic, and political needs of’ different periods. As a political discourse, immigration discourse has a certain constructive effect on real society and plays a crucial role in the government's political implementation (Wu & Niu, 2018, p. 48). Trump has consistently made immigration policy a core issue in his campaign strategy. Discourse historical analysis, a major school of critical discourse analysis, focuses on the political sphere,emphasizing the sociohistorical context of political discourse and tracing the diachronic evolution of discursive events (Yang & Fu, 2018, p. 78). It aims to reveal the ideology underlying linguistic structure and provides a theoretical www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 7, No. 4, 2025 Published by SCHOLINK INC. 125 framework for political discourse analysis. This paper uses Trump's campaign rally speeches as research material and establishes a target corpus. Using discourse historical analysis, this paper analyzes the speech corpus using a target corpus to explore the immigration policy and sociocultural causes of Trump's discourse. The discourse history analysis method was proposed by Ruth Wodak and her team. The discourse history analysis method emphasizes placing discourse within a historical dimension to examine discourse strategy research. There are five common discourse strategies in discourse construction, namely the naming strategy, the predicate strategy, the argumentation strategy, the perspective strategy and the reinforcement and weakening strategy (Wodak & Meyer, 2009). There have been a large number of articles at home and abroad that use DHA for discourse analysis. For instance, Liang et al. (2024) adopted the discurse-historical analysis method to study the discourse strategies for the identity construction of left-behind children in China as reported in China Daily. Overall, discourse analysis research based on DHA is extensive and in-depth. This article explores the strategies used by Trump in his campaign rally speeches to construct the topic of immigration, analyzes the relationship between immigration discourse and social history, and has certain research value. 2. Method 2.1 Research Design This study employs the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to investigate how Donald Trump constructs the topic of immigration in his campaign rally speeches. The research is divided into three stages: corpus compilation, analytical procedure, and socio-historical contextualization. The corpus-driven stage combines quantitative keyword extraction with qualitative close reading; the analytical procedure applies DHA’s naming, predication, and perspectivization strategies; the socio-historical stage links linguistic patterns to contemporary U.S. economic anxieties, cultural identity debates, and partisan polarization. The overarching goal is to uncover the ideological underpinnings of Trump’s immigration discourse and to demonstrate how these linguistic choices resonate with specific socio-historical conditions between 2021 and 2024. 2.2 Corpus Compilation and Processing A self-built corpus of 85 campaign rally speeches delivered by Donald Trump between 5 January 2021 and 5 November 2024 was compiled. The raw texts (423,712 tokens after cleaning) were downloaded from the U.S. Presidential Program archive and deduplicated semi-automatically; irrelevant passages (e.g., opening music transcripts) were removed manually. The corpus was POS-tagged and lemmatized in KH Coder 3; a reference corpus of 2.1 million words of U.S. political speeches (2016–2020) served for key-key-word extraction (log-likelihood ≥ 15.13, p < 0.001). High-frequency lexical items were then concordanced to recover cotextual units (sentence to paragraph level) for subsequent discourse-strategy analysis. www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 7, No. 4, 2025 Published by SCHOLINK INC. 126 3. Result This article uses "Trump" and "campaign rally speeches" as search terms to collect the corpus of Trump's campaign rally speeches released by the US Presidential Program from January 5, 2021 to November 5, 2024. We have manually excluded repetitive and irrelevant materials, and ultimately obtained 85 corpora, totaling 423,712 words, to establish a small corpus. Table 1. The top 10 High-frequency verbs, Nouns and Adjectives around Immigration Vocabulary word immigrant 1 illegal(adj.) 2 suspect (v.) 3 accused (v.) 4 attack(v.) 5 released(v.) 6 deported(v.) 7 gang (n.) 8 criminals(n.) 9 visa(n.) 10 rapist(n.) rocket ship immigration integrity hotelluxury cop suspect cell employment police York New student Laken City Riley dozen Tren Nursing immigrant illegal visa special Video -rsb- weather hot heinous fifth recentoverrun screening ideological vetting strict gut wrenching levelturn attack burden crush lawyer represent commit murder convict accuse clip fentanyl flood suspect order deny implement place hate screen Subgraph: 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Frequency: 20 40 60 Figure 1. Network of Collinear Expressions on the Topic of "Immigration" 4. Discussion The following is an analysis from three aspects based on the research questions. ① At the macro level, determine the sub-theme analysis of constructing the immigrant discourse in Trump's campaign rally www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 7, No. 4, 2025 Published by SCHOLINK INC. 127 speech; ② Analyze the discourse strategies of immigrant language texts at the micro level; ③ How to interpret and attribute the analysis results at the micro level in the social context. 4.1 Topic Analysis Based on the analytical dimension of the discurse-historical analysis method, this paper first determines the sub-thematic words related to the immigration topic in Trump's campaign rally speeches. This section uses the web-like collinear language function of the corpus. 4.1Topic Analysis Based on the analytical dimension of the discurse-historical analysis method, this paper first determines the sub-thematic words related to the immigration topic in Trump's campaign rally speeches. This section uses the web-like collinear language function of the corpus Through classification, Trump emphasized law, national security and economic interests. The sub-themes related to immigration in Trump's campaign rally speech include law and policy, security issues, and employment and the economy, etc. As shown in Example 1, Trump indicated that the influx of illegal immigrants has taken away the jobs of local residents. He proposed to vigorously restrict and prevent illegal immigrants to ensure the employment of the American people. [1]People that have worked there, and worked there well for years, are now being told they no longer have a job because they have illegal immigrants coming in and taking their job. 4.2 Strategy Analysis This section explores how the three discourse strategies of naming, description and perspectionalization have influenced Trump's construction of the "immigration" topic in his campaign speeches. 4.2.1 Naming Strategy This study uses the KWIC index to analyze the key words in the context. It is found that the words "barrier", "border" and "immigrant" have a relatively high correlation in the corpus. When Trump talks about immigration issues, he often uses the above words for substitution. Meanwhile, Trump used naming strategies to construct both domestic and foreign groups. In his campaign rally speech, he grouped the US government and the American people into an inner group, enhancing the general public's identification with the US government. But in his speech, Trump used "illegal immigrants", "murder" and "convict" to refer to immigrants, excluding immigrant groups from members of the inner group. 4.2.2 Describe the Strategy The descriptive strategy refers to the language approach that endows social actors, objects, phenomena, events and processes with characteristics and attributes. The top 10 high-frequency verbs and adjectives around the topic of immigration were screened using the corpus, as shown in Table 1. As shown in Table 1, the frequency of deported and accused around the immigration vocabulary indicates that trump 's immigration policy will intensify the deportation of immigrants. As in example [2], Trump also referred to immigrants as rapists, considering them a threat to national security and social order. Immigrants also took away job opportunities from Americans and increased the burden on social welfare, etc. 1 www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 7, No. 4, 2025 Published by SCHOLINK INC. 128 [2] In August, Texas Police arrested a serial illegal immigrant rapist who had been deported five times. 4.2.3 Perspective Strategy A common language tool in the perspective strategy is to quote others' remarks during the process of discourse construction to express one's views on things. [3] Rachel was brutally raped and murdered by an illegal alien who was let into the United States by the ridiculous open borders policy of Kamala. In Example [3], Trump directly quoted the story of Patty, the family member of the victim. Such direct citation could evoke the audience's sympathy and draw their attention to immigration policies. 4.3 Analysis of Social and Cultural Causes Discourse emerges from historical contexts; without historical contexts as a reference, true interpretation cannot be achieved. A critical science must pay attention to the historical background of language and social communication (Xin, 2005, p. 3). For a long time, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party have had obvious differences in their positions on the topic of immigration. The Republican Party usually advocates strengthening border security and restricting illegal immigration. The Democratic Party usually supports more lenient immigration policies and advocates providing more protection and opportunities for illegal immigrants. The formation of the immigrant discourse in Trump's campaign rally speeches was influenced by multiple social and cultural factors. One of them is the widespread economic competition and employment pressure in American society. Many Americans are worried that illegal immigrants will take away their job opportunities. Trump, by emphasizing the threat of immigration to employment, echoed this social anxiety and fear, thereby gaining the support of some voters. Secondly, cultural identity and nationalism. In Trump's remarks on immigration, there is a reflection of some Americans' yearning for cultural homogeneity and their rejection of cultural diversity. They are worried that the influx of a large number of immigrants will change the traditional culture and values of the United States, thereby threatening their own cultural identity. Acknowledgement I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Zhu for his insightful guidance and constructive feedback throughout every stage of this research. I am also indebted to the anonymous reviewers whose detailed comments helped refine both the theoretical framing and the methodological rigor of thisoder platform and for the financial support granted under the Un paper. Special thanks go to the College of Foreign Languages, Xinjiang University, for providing access to the KH Civersity’s Graduate Innovation Fund (Grant No. XJU2024-SKYY-017). References Liang, L. L., Wang, H. L., & Zhang, W. S. (2024). Decoding paradoxical identities: The disco urse construction of left-behind children in news reports. Discourse & Communication, 18 0 www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 7, No. 4, 2025 Published by SCHOLINK INC. 129 (4), 535-556. Wodak, R., & Meyer, M. (2009). Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage Public ations. Baker, P. (2006). Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London ＆ New York: Continuum. Gao, X. L., Huang, Y. Q. (2024). Analysis of U.S. Defense Discourse from the Perspective of Dish-Historical Analysis: A Case Study of the 2022 U.S. Defense Strategy Report. Foreign Language Research, 41(04), 44-49. Wu, J. G., & Niu, Z. J. (2018). Analysis of the Legitimization of Political Discourse from the Perspective of Approximation Theory: A Case Study of Trump's Immigration Policy. Chine se Foreign Languages. Xin, B. (2005). Critical Linguistics: Theory and Application. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Langu age Education Press. Yang, Mi., & Fu, X. L. (2018). The Process and Value of Corpus-based "Historical Discourse Analysis" (DHA): A Case Study of the Discourse Construction of Hillary Clinton's Emailgate in Mainstream American Media. Journal of Shanghai International Studies Unive rsity, 2018(02),77-85. Abstract This paper employs a discourse-historical analysis Keywords Table 1. The top 10 High-frequency verbs, Nouns an Figure 1. Network of Collinear Expressions on the References