Political elites are increasingly framing the debate on immigration as a matter of right and wrong. We know little, however, about the attitudinal effects of moralised elite discourse. In this paper, I investigate the consequences of employing morally charged elite rhetoric on public opinion through an original vignette experiment administered to a nationally representative sample in the UK (N = 2000). Relying on the Moral Foundations Dictionary (Graham et al. 2009), I analyse the effects of morally charged rhetoric on self-reported immigration attitudes, perceived issue salience and moral conviction. I find that exposure to moralised rhetoric has no direct effect on self-reported immigration attitudes: individuals do not update their immigration attitudes after being exposed to moralised elite discourse on immigration. Exposure to moralised rhetoric, however, has a significant effect on moral conviction about the issue of immigration, even when controlling for issue salience. This finding carries important implications. Recent studies suggest that immigration attitudes are largely stable and resilient to change (Kustov 2021; Lancaster 2022; Mader and Schoen 2019), implying that political elites exert a limited direct effect on attitudes. In this paper, I show that political elites can nonetheless exert significant influence on public opinion by moralising the issue of immigration.