Introduction

“Thousands of Indian Women Find Their American Dreams in Jeopardy.” Headlines like this one, from a 2018 New York Times article, reflect not only the human stakes of skilled labor visa programs but also the effect of media narratives on public perceptions of immigration. Over time, the portrayal of skilled labor migration in the media has evolved, mirroring changes in political priorities, economic conditions, and societal attitudes. While there are many types of skilled labor and other employment-based visas, the H-1B program specifically offers a valuable lens to explore how media narratives respond to—and influence—policy decisions and public discourse, as it is the most heavily discussed.

Our previous research revealed that U.S. visa issuance for skilled workers has steadily increased over time, even amid political and economic fluctuations. This finding raised the following new questions about the role of media in framing public understanding of this trend and its implications:

  1. How has the volume of media coverage on H-1B visas changed over time? By examining the quantity of articles published over the years, we aim to identify patterns in media attention and how these fluctuations correspond to significant political events, legislative changes, and economic conditions.

  2. How has the sentiment towards H-1B visas in media coverage evolved across presidential administrations? Understanding shifts in sentiment provides a window into how different administrations’ policies and rhetoric influenced public discourse on skilled labor migration.

  3. Which bigrams are the most consistent and widespread across years, and how have they changed over time By investigating the most frequently occurring word pairs (key bigrams) in these articles, this question uncovers dominant themes and recurring narratives, offering deeper insights into the framing of H-1B visa discussions.

To explore these questions, this study uses three influential outlets — The New York Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and USA Today — to examine how media narratives surrounding H-1B visas have evolved from 1997 to 2022. By analyzing trends in coverage, sentiment, and language, we aim go beyond quantitative analysis to explore the nuances of how journalism has both reflected and influenced the broader discourse on skilled labor migration. Through this lens, we seek to understand how media coverage has served as a barometer for societal attitudes and political priorities during pivotal moments in U.S. immigration history.

Background

Created by the Immigration Act of 1990, the H-1B visa program allows U.S. employers to hire highly skilled foreign professionals for specialty occupations that require advanced knowledge and at least a bachelor’s degree. Visas are awarded to employers on a first-come, first-served basis, with applications accepted each year beginning in April. If the number of applications exceeds an annual cap set by Congress during the first five business days of April, visas are awarded through a lottery system.

As displayed by the area graph above the program’s trajectory has been shaped by a combination of economic forces and political considerations. For instance, lobbying by the high-tech industry in the late 1990s led to a temporary increase in the visa cap, with the American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act raising the annual limit to 195,000 between 2001 and 2003. However, following the 2008 recession, when protecting domestic jobs became a key legislative priority, the cap reverted to 65,000. These fluctuations underscore the program’s sensitivity to labor market conditions and broader economic trends.

Supporters of the H-1B visa highlight its role in fostering innovation, economic growth, and global competitiveness. H-1B workers are often linked to technological advancements, patents, and entrepreneurial activities that drive critical sectors such as technology, healthcare, and academia. Proponents argue that these workers help address labor shortages in high-demand fields, allowing the U.S. to remain a global leader in innovation.

Conversely, critics raise concerns about potential wage suppression and increased competition for domestic workers. They argue that poorly designed policies could disproportionately benefit corporations, potentially undermining equitable labor market outcomes. These contrasting viewpoints highlight the ongoing debate over balancing the need for international talent with the protection of domestic labor interests.

One previous study published by The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) used Artificial Intelligence to analyze 200,000 US congressional speeches and 5,000 presidential communications related to immigration over the past 140 years. It identified both a trend toward more positive attitudes since World War II and an increase in political polarization, with Democrats maintaining support and Republicans adopting more hostile rhetoric. While this study offers valuable context on broader immigration discourse, we aim to to provide a more narrowed analysis on the legal immigration of skilled labor through the H-1B visa program, exploring how this issue is framed and debated in political and media narratives. This distinct approach examines the broader economic narratives tied to immigration policy and its impact on innovation.

Methodology

Data Sources

This project examines news coverage of U.S. work visa programs, specifically skilled labor visas (H-1B), by analyzing articles published between January 1, 1997, and December 31, 2022, in The New York Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and USA Today.

To construct our dataset, we used Nexis Uni to filter and extract relevant articles. The following parameters were applied to ensure the data set accurately reflects the desired coverage of H-1B visas:

Parameter Description
Keywords “U.S. visa”, “H1-B”
Source Type Newspapers
Source Location North America, United States
Language English
Timeline January 1, 1997 – December 31, 2022
Source Names The New York Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, USA Today

The filtered articles were categorized by news source and saved into text files. These three text files were then read into R, where we were separated into individual documents and categorized by the year they were published for further analysis.

This organization allows us to track trends and sentiment shifts over time, facilitating the examination of the relationship between media coverage, policy changes, and political events.

Limitations

A key limitation of this methodology is that Nexis Uni lacks an API for automated data extraction, requiring all articles to be manually searched, selected, and downloaded. With over 650 articles across the three data sets, human error could have led to some relevant documents being overlooked or irrelevant ones included. To address this, we carefully defined our search parameters and conducted multiple rounds of manual checks to ensure the dataset was as accurate and relevant as possible. While this process helped minimize errors, the possibility of some inconsistencies remains. Nevertheless, we believe the dataset effectively captures the essential trends in H-1B visa coverage.

Additionally, Lexis Uni imposes a daily download limit and does not include all major U.S. news sources, such as The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Given these restrictions and the project’s time constraints, we were unable to select every available source. To minimize bias, we chose a publication from each coast and a national outlet to ensure a diverse representation of coverage.

Exploratory Analysis

How has the volume of media coverage on H-1B visas changed over time?

The graph illustrating the “Article Count per Year from 1997-2022” reveals a notable spike in media coverage around 2015, with a significant increase in articles from The New York Times. This surge likely corresponds to high-profile discussions on immigration reforms during the Obama administration. Although the European migration crisis of 2015 primarily involved refugees and not H-1B visa issues, its widespread media coverage could have influenced broader immigration policy debates in the U.S., indirectly affecting H-1B discourse. Additionally, this peak may align with major technological and economic developments, particularly in regions like Silicon Valley, which saw heightened demand for H-1B visa holders due to rapid growth in tech industries. There is also a minor spike at 2020 likely because the Covid-19 pandemic affected H1B issuance. The overall upward trend in later years suggests a growing media focus on H-1B visas, reflecting an increasing public and political interest in the nuances of skilled labor migration, with The New York Times showing a consistently higher volume of articles, indicating its editorial focus on these issues.

Both the “H-1B Usage Over Time” and the first graph exhibit a significant peak around 2015, which indicates a period of heightened media coverage and discussion around H-1B visas. The “H-1B Usage Over Time” graph shows other notable spikes, such as around 2001 and again sharply in 2020.The first peak might relate to the dot-com bubble burst and subsequent regulatory changes affecting tech employment. The sharp spike in 2020 might be tied to discussions or changes in policies during the Trump administration, which aggressively pushed for H-1B visa restrictions as part of broader immigration reforms.Both graphs suggest an increasing trend in the attention given to H-1B visas towards the late 2010s, followed by a minor decline. This suggests a growing importance placed on the issue in national and economic discourse, especially relevant to tech and specialized industries relying on skilled foreign labor.

Mentions of Bush and Obama show relatively moderate and steady lines, with no significant spikes throughout their terms. This suggests a consistent level of media focus during their administrations, possibly reflecting a period of stable policies or fewer controversial changes affecting the issues being tracked.

The sharp spikes in mentions of Trump, particularly around 2017 and again in 2020, are striking. These could correlate with major policy announcements or controversial decisions during his administration, which was marked by significant shifts in U.S. immigration policy, including changes to H-1B visa regulations.

There is a notable increase in mentions of Biden starting from 2020, which likely corresponds to the election period and his subsequent policy changes. This uptick might be associated with expectations and reactions to his administration’s approach to reversing some of Trump’s policies, indicating a renewed focus on how new policies would impact immigration and other pertinent issues.

How has the sentiment towards H-1B visas in media coverage evolved across presidential administrations?

To understand how sentiment towards H-1B visas has evolved across presidential administrations, we conducted a comprehensive sentiment analysis of media coverage using two well-established lexicon libraries: the Bing Liu sentiment lexicon and the National Research Council (NRC) Emotion Lexicon. The Bing lexicon categorizes words into positive or negative sentiments, offering a straightforward way to measure the general tone of the coverage. In contrast, the NRC Emotion Lexicon provides a more nuanced perspective by associating words with eight primary emotions (such as joy, anger, and fear) in addition to positive and negative sentiments. By leveraging these tools, we analyzed the sentiment trends over time, capturing both overarching positivity or negativity and the emotional undertones of the media narrative during different presidential administrations.

Beginning with the Bing Library, we calculated an overall annual sentiment score by aggregating the sentiment scores of individual documents for each year. To ensure the results accurately reflected yearly sentiment trends, we accounted for variations in the number of documents per year by weighting each year’s aggregated score by the total number of documents analyzed in that year. This approach also helped mitigate the influence of outliers, providing a more reliable measure of the prevailing sentiment in media coverage for each year.

This sentiment analysis, as shown in the line graph above, revealed a historic volatility in media coverage surrounding H-1B visas over the past two decades, with sentiment oscillating between positive and negative. These shifts often align with periods of economic uncertainty, where public opinion appears to be influenced by labor market conditions and evolving immigration policies. More notably, the magnitude of these sentiment swings has intensified in the past ten years, which may be a result of the increasing polarization of public discourse on immigration and workforce-related issues. As debates surrounding H-1B visas have become more politically charged, media narratives have mirrored this heightened divisiveness, further amplifying the emotional and ideological intensity of the discourse.

Given this general trend, we further refined our analysis by utilizing the National Research Council (NRC) Emotion Lexicon to examine specific emotional shifts in media coverage across different presidential administrations. To more effectively compare the usage of positive emotions with negative emotions, we assigned negative values to the emotions categorized as negative (such as anger, fear, and sadness). This allowed us to clearly distinguish between positive and negative emotional tones, enabling a more accurate analysis of the emotional dynamics in media discourse surrounding H-1B visas.

Similar to the Bing sentiment analysis, this secondary analysis reveals a consistent trend of emotions becoming more extreme over time, with the usage of emotional language increasing across media coverage. Interestingly, however, there is a noticeable shift toward more positive emotions overall, as the values of positive emotions consistently outweigh those of negative emotions. This suggests that while the emotional intensity of media coverage has escalated, the overall tone has shifted toward a more optimistic or favorable portrayal, even as discourse surrounding H-1B visas remains charged and fluctuating.

Which bigrams are the most consistent and widespread across years, and how have they changed over time

The bar plot showing the top bigrams by frequency presents the most commonly used bigrams across the entire dataset. Phrases such as “passport visa,” “foreign worker,” and “American workers” appear prominently, which further supports the notion that these are key topics consistently discussed in relation to H-1B visas. The frequency of these bigrams emphasizes their central role in framing the discourse on visa issues, labor markets, and immigration policies. This could reflect the recurring narrative in articles, where these terms represent the main themes of the ongoing debates about the visa system and its effects on both the foreign and domestic workforce. However, some unrelated bigrams or outliers show up in the data, which may be because of errors in processing the text or changes in the context of the articles. These outliers may not be as relevant to the H-1B visa topic, but focusing on the main bigrams helps get rid of the noise

The plot visualizes the top bigrams (pairs of consecutive words) for each year in our dataset, allowing for the identification of trends in language and topic evolution over time. By comparing the frequency of specific bigrams across years, we can observe shifts in terminology and emerging trends, reflecting societal or topical changes. For instance, a growing frequency of certain bigrams could indicate rising interest in specific issues, while others might show long-standing relevance. The analysis reveals both consistent and changing language usage, with certain bigrams remaining prominent over time, while new phrases emerge in recent years. Additionally, variations in bigram frequency may reflect shifts in focus, such as surges in coverage of particular events or declines in certain topics. Overall, the plot provides insights into the main themes and language changes within the articles, highlighting the evolving discourse and offering a basis for further research into emerging trends or underrepresented areas.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the study of media coverage on H-1B visas from 1997 to 2022, through outlets such as The New York Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and USA Today, reveals significant fluctuations in coverage that correspond with major political and economic events. The increase in articles around 2015 and 2020, for example, indicates how journalism has not only reflected but also influenced public and political discourse during periods of substantial policy shifts and global crises.

The sentiment analysis performed as part of this study enhances our understanding of the nuances in media narratives, showing how sentiment towards H-1B visas has shifted across different presidential administrations. This analysis has revealed that periods of economic uncertainty and policy change often coincide with more volatile media sentiment, influencing public perception and policy debates.

By examining these trends and sentiments, the study aims to go beyond quantitative analysis to explore how journalism reflects and impacts the broader discourse on skilled labor migration. Media coverage, thus, serves not only as a barometer for societal attitudes and political priorities but also as a crucial player in shaping these perspectives.

This in-depth look at media narratives provides stakeholders in policy, industry, and the workforce with a comprehensive view of the complexities of H-1B visa discourse, highlighting its implications for the global economy and offering insights into how journalism has both mirrored and catalyzed pivotal moments in U.S. immigration history.

Works Cited