Persuasive rhetoric in Barack Obama’s immigration speech: pre- and post-electoral strategies

Abstract

The emerging power of the Latino community has become a recurring reflection for most analyses of the United States of America over the last two decades. However, their presence on the media usually focuses on two factors: the increasing immigration of undocumented workers, mostly from Mexico, and their decisive condition as voters due to their presence in the so-called “swing” States, which provides specific power to the Hispanic population to choose the President, especially when they are as disputed as the 2012 general elections. Barack Obama, whose presidential rhetoric has been extensively studied, decided to change his immigration policies during his campaign and to adapt his speech accordingly. It is our aim to study his rhetoric and figurative language as a means of electoral persuasion by analyzing two of his most representative speeches specifically addressed to a Latino audience: “Remarks by the President at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Annual Conference” (2012) and “Remarks by the President on Comprehensive Immigration Reform” (2013) under those theoretical approaches of the Political Discourse Analysis, the Critical Discourse Analysis and the Corpus Approach to Critical Metaphor Analysis, at the same time based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, so as to perceive how the presidential speech deals with the Hispanic community. The findings analyze the frequent appeals to movement, justice and personal and local references in the form of acknowledgement together with a predominant use of conceptual metaphors on the American dream. His metaphors prove this concept is conceived by him as a path forward to citizenship, and his use of them, so common in Obama’s discourse, makes him devote once again his addresses to Latinos to the uniqueness of the United States, provided by the mosaic of cultural juxtaposition.

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