How do parties discuss migration policy in legislative speeches? Legislative bodies are an arena for verbal conflicts where the parties vie for their ideological interests but also sharpen new rhetorical figures. Political parties develop policy stances strategically different from those of competing parties and elucidate those stances through legislative debates and public statements. A large body of literature argues that some issues, like migration, fall in a gap between established societal cleavages over which parties do not have robust, issue-specific ownership. More recent research suggests migration may be a part of a new transnational cleavage that pits cosmopolitan sensibilities against nationalist sentiments in a conflict over issue ownership and policy framing. Building off this debate, we hypothesize that parties discuss migration topics by diverting attention to subcomponents of migration policy over which they have established issue ownership. Using machine learning techniques, we test this assertion by measuring the differences in salience and framing of migration-related topics over time in the debates of the lower houses of Canada and the United States-the Canadian House of Commons and the United States' House of Representatives from 1994 to 2016. We find that there are substantive differences in the emphasis on and framing of the migration policy between the two ideological blocks. Democrats in the USA and liberals in Canada emphasize subcomponents of the migration debate which they traditionally own, such as welfare and humanitarian aspects. Both conservative blocks do the same by framing their discussion of migration through a focus on security and legalistic aspect of migration. However, due to strong polarization in the USA, the differences in the emphasis on the issues traditionally owned by the two ideological camps are stronger in the USA than in Canada.