Close, or not close: The border issue with Mexico
Posted by Cassandra Huang
The border with Mexico has been an issue that raises lots of debates. This week, Trump White House presses a threat to close the border. We use Social Studio to analyze people’s opinions on Twitter from both Mexico and the US.
We retrieve posts from Mexico in both English and Spanish. There are around 7,100 tweets, and one-third of them are in English. The most mentioned words from Mexican users include “Unidos (United States),” “Mexico,” “Trump,” “ALMO (the initial of Mexican President),” “frontera” (border).
In the sentiment analysis, it is interesting to see the positive trend, and the negative direction crossed between March 27 and 28. What happened? On March 26, Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador called for Spain to apologize for the conquest of the Aztec Empire 500 years ago, and also asked Mexican people to respect the US government before the approval of the border wall budget. However, when President Trump tweeted his negative comment on illegal immigrants from Central America, the negative sentiment came to a peak.
On the other hand, there are much more tweets from the US than from Mexico: 375, 000 posts during the past week, and nearly 99% of them are in English. Besides “Trump,” “Mexico” and “close,” it is interesting to see that “avocados” appears a lot. Also, it is believed that the American people will run out of avocados if the border is closed since a majority amount of avocados in the US are imported from Mexico.
