Search

We examine the tone of the president's immigration policy speeches as a function of the political context, policy characteristics, and individual presidents in two ways. First, we describe the tone of the president's immigration rhetoric using DICTION software and its five global categories of tone. Second, we hypothesize that commonality and optimism, two categories of tone expressive of immigration policy, will co‐vary by political context, policy characteristics of immigration, and a president's approach to rhetoric. To test our expectations, we collected presidential mentions of immigration since 1953 from the Public Papers of the Presidents. Key variables, like the president's honeymoon and the post‐9/11 era, increase a president's commonality tone, and the president's approval ratings encourage greater optimism. Individual presidents also shape presidential rhetoric, indicating the importance of presidential style to immigration tone, especially for optimism. We conclude with implications of our work for the systematic study of presidential tone and the prospects for comprehensive immigration reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author examines the morality of U.S. policy in the aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) in 1999, using criteria for evaluating the morality of the U.S. president’s policy proposed by Joseph Nye (Joseph S. Nye Jr.). The aggression against FRY is controversial, particularly its a priori determined moral character and the designation of humanitarian intervention. Our main goal is to demonstrate the unsustainability of the assessment of the moral justification of the aggression precisely according to his criteria. Therefore, our hypothetical starting point is that if morality is present in the foreign policy of the U.S. president, the criteria by which Joseph Nye evaluates each president will also show whether the policy that is directly related to the aggression against FRY is also moral. After explaining the theoretical-methodological approach, and presenting the attitudes towards morality of the most important theories of international relations, the paper presents an analysis of the morality of aggression conducted on the basis of intentions, means, and consequences. In relation to this, we examined the deontological and consequentialist sustainability of the morality of aggression according to the proposed criteria and questions. It was concluded that there is no ethical justification for aggression, unless achieving political interests is valued as morally acceptable in the spirit of consequentialist ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]