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Alien Language: Immigration Metaphors And The Jurisprudence Of Otherness , Keith Cunningham-Parmeter

Fordham Law Review

Metaphors tell the story of immigration law. Throughout its immigration jurisprudence, the U.S. Supreme Court has employed rich metaphoric language to describe immigrants attacking nations and aliens flooding communities. This Article applies research in cognitive linguistics to critically evaluate the metaphoric construction of immigrants in the law. Three conceptual metaphors dominate legal texts: immigrants are aliens, immigration is a flood, and immigration is an invasion. In order to gauge the prevalence of these metaphors, the Article engages in a textual analysis of modern Supreme Court opinions and presents original empirical data on the incidence of alienage terminology in federal court …