Alien as Alienating: Constructing US Legal Terminology and Its Impact

• In Event: The Legal Construction of Time and Terminology in US Migration Policy

Abstract

In his 2021 immigration reform bill, Biden proposed removing the term “alien” from Title 8 of US Code to describe people who are not citizens or nationals of the United States. This would have represented a significant rhetorical break in the US legal system, where immigrants have long been constructed as “aliens,” dating back to the Nationality Act of 1790, and more recently as “illegal aliens” in instructions from the Trump administration to DOJ prosecutors. Over the last decade, efforts concerned with dehumanizing depictions of immigrants, which scholars find to be frequent, found success in encouraging some in the media to change its use of the word “illegal,” but only more recently has attention to the term “alien” emerged seriously in the legal arena. While some Supreme Court justices have shifted their language in response to scrutiny over the term, other judges have now vocally taken up its defense, as Republican leadership continues to deploy the term to serve its anti-immigrant politics.

In this paper, we consider the rhetorical construction of immigrants in the legal system and the implications both inside the courtroom and with the public more broadly. To answer questions about how the use of this term has evolved and how the public responds to its use, we collect both observational and experimental data. First, we examine a collection of court documents, including state and federal cases, and amicus curiae briefs to the Supreme Court and media coverage of the issue to observe trends and reactions to language usage. We find that although both conservative and liberal Supreme Court justices have changed their language, conservative media backlash has targeted only liberal justices, revealing interesting dynamics in polarization. Second, we conduct a survey experiment to present respondents with an array of terms (“illegal alien,” “undocumented migrant,” “noncitizen,” etc.) to see how the public feels about the use of these terms in headlines about immigration court decisions and if their use changes how they feel about various immigration reforms and the Court. We hypothesize that as respondents read the experimental treatments, their approval of the use of the term “alien” and reforms will depend on their partisan attachments, but other cross-cutting demographics may alter these results. The work speaks broadly to the persistent challenges and backlashes for re-imagining the portrayal of immigrants in an inclusive democracy.

Authors

• Emily Farris, Texas Christian University

• Matthew D Montgomery, Texas Christian University