Americans have never been discussing border security more than they are now, according to data from LexisNexis.
There have been around 175,000 recorded usages of the term “border security” in the English language North American press and sources since 2020. Around 65,000, or almost 40%, of those have been this year.
This comes as Americans have repeatedly signaled in polls that immigration is their top concern this election season. Immigration issues are very important in the upcoming election to 61% of voters polled in a Pew Research Center study in early September. A previous Harvard-Harris poll in January showed 35% of voters called immigration the most important issue, The Dallas Express reported.
Although illegal border crossings are reported to be down in 2024 compared to 2023, unemployment has risen in the United States and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell attributed that to immigration.
Other events have likewise conspired to continue to raise the profile of the border security issue.
There is a prevailing narrative in some circles that the perceived lack of federal support going to hurricane victims in ravaged rural North Carolina and elsewhere is because the Biden-Harris Administration spent Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) dollars on illegal immigrants.
The mostly leftwing corporate press have disputed this narrative. Yahoo News recently ran the headline, “FEMA Did Not Spend Emergency Relief Funds to House Illegal Immigrants.” The attendant news article claimed that the allegation was untrue because FEMA has separate funds for illegal aliens and disaster relief.
Irrespective of the truthfulness of that statement, the fact check has not assuaged the public perception that there is more money for illegal aliens than citizens. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House Press Secretary, has tried to make a similar point to the Yahoo article, however, critics are quick to bring up comments she reportedly made in 2022 when she said FEMA resources were available to illegal immigrants.
LexisNexis is a research and data analytics platform that provides access to a vast database of news, legal, and public records. It is widely used by newsmen, legal professionals, researchers, and businesses to retrieve news archives, case law, statutes, legal analysis, academic articles, and other important documents. It can be used to look at nearly every published usage of words or phrases during specific time periods.
The Lexis archive, which dates as far back as 1900, did not indicate any serious discussions of increases in border security until 1997. The frequency of usage of the term took a huge upward spike in 2006, indicating tens of thousands of discussions of the topic that year, and it continued climbing sharply upward until the present date.
Lexis can not search by country. However, it can be filtered by language and continent.
When “English” and “North American” filters are applied, the pool of collected material is narrowed down to the U.S. and Canada. While this could sweep up Canadians discussing the security of their southern border, for example, Canada does not have the border crossing issues that the United States does and its smaller population lends itself to a smaller digital footprint, thus this makes whatever effect Canada has on the search results likely to be minuscule
Moreover, it is certain that the public consciousness is even more focused on immigration-related issues than Lexis can record because it does not save content from social media. It also cannot record when outlets or individuals are likely to be considering a topic but not using the phrase “border security” exactly.
Since the presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, one of the prevailing social media trends has been to make dance videos set to Trump’s phrase about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.”
This content does not appear in the Lexis database. However, these videos have become a daily sight on platforms such as X, Instagram, and TikTok in the succeeding month since the debate.
Trump’s comments were predicated on complaints from Springfield, Ohio, residents who said they had seen Haitian migrants butcher pets and kill park geese for consumption. The latter allegation was supported by reports to police of Haitian immigrants snatching geese from parks and a widely-circulated Reddit image of a man near Columbus Ohio, carrying an apparently dead goose.
While Haitians have been known to enter the United States through both legal and illegal means, this social media trend frequently prompts discussions on platforms about how immigrants enter the country, even if the exact phrase “border security” is not invoked.
