Building Up Borders: Political Framing and Anti-Immigration Attitudes in Hungary and the United States

In the Summer of 2015, the European Union was faced with an unprecedented immigration crisis. In response, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán unleashed a vigorous anti-immigration campaign, focusing on the cultural, security, and economic threats that Hungary would be burdened with. This was done through negative political framing, via Orbán’s speech acts, the governing Fidesz-KDNP’s political propaganda, and the government’s control of the media. Furthermore, since 2016, the United States has experienced its own issues with immigration. This topic became and has remained one of the most salient throughout Donald Trump’s three presidential campaigns. Like Orbán, Trump has used negative political framing via speech acts, propaganda, and supportive media. The question of this research is to determine whether Orbán’s negative framing influenced Hungarian society and led to increased anti-immigrant and xenophobic attitudes, or not, along with increased securitization of the state and normalization of border-line rhetoric; this goal remains the same for the section on the United States and Donald Trump. Throughout this research, the data, which is supported by qualitative information and examples, would suggest that anti-immigrant and xenophobic attitudes did increase as a result of both Orbán and Trump’s anti-immigration campaign.