Contaminated Communities

Contaminated Communities: The Metaphor of “Immigrant as Pollutant” in Media Representations of Immigration J. David Cisneros

Popular rhetoric about immigration often operates by constructing metaphoric representations of immigrants that concretize the social “problem” and connote particular solutions. Scholars have identified discursive connections between the rhetoric of immigration and representations of other human problems such as crime or war. This essay identifies another metaphor present in popular media coverage of immigration, particularly visual images of immigrants. The metaphor of “immigrant as pollutant” present in news media discourse on immigration can have serious consequences for societal treatment of immigrants as well as the policies designed to respond to immigration.

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“nation of immigrants,” the United States has never been able to quell the fascination and fear with which it approaches migration. Though the country collectively celebrates the brave souls who populated the nation, America’s inhabitants remain suspicious of the hundreds of thousands of individuals that cross into the country on a yearly basis. Both legal and illegal immigration have been a concern to the government and the public since the birth of the nation.1 Though the degree of popular obsession with immigration rises and falls, there is always an awareness that these strangers potentially bring with them monumental and threatening changes. Concern over immigration is evidenced not only in public discourse but also in the large body of scholarship on the phenomenon of immigration, including an attempt to understand how immigration as “problem” is constructed in mass media.2 To make sense of this complex phenomenon, scholars note, individuals approach immigration through the perspective of metaphor to J. David Cisneros is a doctoral candidate in Speech Communication at the University of Georgia, Athens. The author wishes to thank Vanessa Beasley, Kevin DeLuca, Martin Medhurst, and the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions, encouragement, and guidance. © 2008 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved. Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 11, No. 4, 2008, pp. 569–602 ISSN 1094-8392

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clarify the topic and to connect it with their personal experiences.3 Much of our knowledge about how immigration is represented in media and popular discourse has centered on metaphors such as a crime wave or war as guiding tropes through which the “problem” of immigration is represented. In this essay, I identify another metaphor through which popular media represent immigration. Moreover, I contribute to our understanding of immigration rhetoric by paying careful attention to how visual images construct metaphoric representations of migrants. By comparing the visual and metaphoric images of immigration in recent news coverage to images of pollution from coverage of toxic waste spills, particularly the crisis at Love Canal, I sketch a heretofore underanalyzed metaphor of “immigrant as pollutant” present in the immigration debate. Not only does this essay begin to illustrate another metaphor through which immigration is articulated, it also points to the need for more analysis of the visual rhetoric of immigration. The essay first outlines the importance of metaphor as a representational strategy and the scholarly literature on the metaphoric representations of immigration. Using the discourse of the Love Canal toxic waste controversy of the 1970s as a point of comparison, I turn to recent television news discourse to argue that immigrants are framed visually and metaphorically, using similar representational strategies, as dangerous and destructive pollutants. Finally, I consider the implications of these metaphoric constructions for the social treatment of immigrants and the social policies designed to respond to immigration.

Understanding Metaphor Rhetorical theory and cognitive science teach us that metaphors are more than linguistic ornamentation; they are “significant rhetorical tools that affect political behavior and cognition.”4 Metaphors create conventional understandings by connecting phenomena with familiar cultural assumptions and experiences.5 Not only are they essential cognitive tools, but metaphors participate in creating fundamental understandings of texts and the rhetorical contexts in which they are situated.6 Metaphors are cultural indices with which “Americans build their commonplace understanding[s]” and attitudes.7 Scholars have mapped the historical metaphors used to talk about the immigration “problem” as a means to identify the underlying cultural assumptions of these representations. Mark Ellis and Richard Wright offer examples of metaphors that encapsulate different perspectives on the assimilation of immigrants into American society such as the “melting pot,” the “quilt,” the “kaleidoscope,” or the “salad bowl.” They describe how metaphors of immigration serve as conceptual tools with which scholars build research, society establishes group relationships, and government creates public policy:

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[Metaphors] represent competing views, some more distinct than others, of the consequences of immigration, interethnic contact, and societal coherence. In using metaphors . . . we run the risk of being confined to particular ways of interpreting immigration and demographic trends. As they become entrenched in theoretical discourse, they influence how we formulate our hypotheses about the impacts of immigration and ethnic group behavior—about how different immigrant groups fit into U.S. society.8

As repositories of cultural understandings, metaphors are some of the principal tools with which dominant ideologies and prejudices are represented and reinforced. For example, as George Lakoff and Sam Ferguson note, the framing of immigration discourse in the terms of “illegal aliens,” “border security,” and “amnesty” “focuses entirely on the immigrants and the administrative agencies charged with overseeing immigration law.” This framing is “NOT neutral” but “dehumanizes” immigrants and “pre-empts” a consideration of “broader social and economic concerns” (such as foreign economic policy and international human rights).9 The task, then, is to examine the ways in which conventional understandings of immigration are made concrete through metaphor. Examining these discursive representations can “unmask or demystify” dominant assumptions about immigrants, assumptions that can have potentially deleterious effects on social relations.10 Before discussing these contemporary metaphoric representations or their ideological implications, however, I review the extant literature on metaphors of immigration.

Metaphoric Representations of Migrants The study of metaphoric representations of immigration helps to create a broader understanding of the metaphors employed in public discourse. Some scholars have examined metaphoric clusters that surround particular controversies or proposals; others have focused on creating more broad-based taxonomies. California’s Proposition 187, which restricted undocumented immigrants from accessing social services such as medical care and public education, provides a central focus of the scholarship on metaphoric discourse. Hugh Mehan, for example, identifies metaphors of criminality and social deviance central to the Proposition 187 campaign.11 Kent Ono and John Sloop focus on a different group of metaphors in rhetoric surrounding Proposition 187. The “civic” rhetoric emanating from government and mainstream media sources reinforced dominant assumptions about the danger of “illegal” immigration by focusing on nativist, racist, and xenophobic justifications for immigration restriction. The discourse of the Proposition 187 campaign accomplished this character-

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ization through metaphors of “‘pollution,’ ‘infection,’ and ‘infestation.’”12 These clusters created images of biological invasion or contamination that structured discourse about immigration and fueled the Proposition 187 movement.13 In addition to studying specific immigration controversies, scholars have created overarching taxonomies of metaphoric representations. Though they differ in their scope, most of these studies share similar metaphoric clusters as Mehan and Ono and Sloop. Dorothy Nelkin and Mark Michaels, for example, identified in the public discourse about immigration a pervasive use of biological and eugenics metaphors that were used to portray immigrants as dangers to the “purity” of American society and culture.14 Examining public policy research, Ellis and Wright identified the metaphor of “balkanization,” through threats of societal fracture and ethnic strife, as another way that the “dangers” posed by immigrants are articulated.15 Leo Chavez provided a more systematic and indepth discussion of the representations of immigration by cataloguing the different ways in which immigrants are portrayed in popular media. He examined magazine covers from major publications such as Time and Newsweek, focusing on cover images and titles, to identify the metaphor of “immigrants as invaders” as the driving articulation of immigration in popular discourse.16 Otto Santa Ana provides the most extensive taxonomy of metaphors employed in the coverage of immigration by examining a variety of controversies about immigrants, including Proposition 187, Proposition 209 (which banned preferential treatment by state and public entities), and debates over bilingual education. Unlike other studies, Santa Ana centers his discussion on how metaphors of the nation create organizing logics for multiple, polysemous representations of immigration or immigrants. He finds two overarching metaphors in the bulk of these news stories: When the nation is conceived as a physical body, immigrants are presented either as an infectious disease or as a physical burden. When the nation is conceived as a house, immigrants are represented as criminals, invaders, or dangerous and destructive flood waters.17 The table below outlines the various metaphors of immigrants and immigration identified in the existing literature. Table 1

Immigrants

Immigration

Disease, Infection

Genetic defect

Criminal

Balkanization, Ethnic strife

Infestation Invader Burden Flood

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Metaphoric constructions can be broadly categorized into those metaphors that represent immigrants as a class of people and those metaphors that conceptualize immigration as a phenomenon. Metaphors of immigrants often portray them as objects or threats to society, whether biological, physical, or social. On the other hand, metaphors of immigration concretize the problem through cognitive comparisons to other physical or social ills. Together these studies on the metaphoric representations of immigration provide an important base of knowledge in the study of immigration rhetoric. Despite their contributions, however, these studies have two important limitations. First, many of these studies encounter a methodological shortcoming. Most research on the metaphoric representations of immigration focus solely on the text of stories in newspapers and magazines or transcripts of political speeches. Chavez’s book examines magazine covers and their corresponding stories. Ono and Sloop do recognize how television news images contribute to public understandings of immigrants, yet neither work sufficiently examines the visual components of immigration rhetoric for the cooperative role they play in constructing metaphors of immigration. Attention to the visual elements of immigration rhetoric is important because of the centrality of images in modern public discourse, particularly news discourse.18 As Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites argue, “the widely disseminated visual image provides the public audience with a sense of shared experience that anchors the necessarily impersonal character of public discourse in the motivational ground of social life.”19 Though their discussion centers on iconic photography, Hariman and Lucaites make clear that journalistic images, whether photos or videos, “can underwrite polity by providing resources for thought and feeling that are necessary for constituting people.”20 Visual images create social visions, constitute identities, create publics, and influence individual and group interrelationships. Images are not comprehensive by any means, as they are situated within textual and verbal contexts, yet the importance of analyzing the visual components of news messages is evident in the authenticity and evidentiary status often culturally attributed to news rhetoric. As Cori Dauber notes, Because these images are presented in a context of “authenticity,” they tend to be read not as representation but as evidence. Although our guard may be up when we encounter visual images (even photographic images) presented as advertisement or fiction, we tend not to utilize such defenses while watching or reading the news. Their very design encourages the reader to forget that images are constructed artifacts. . . . If imagery is powerful, it is all the more powerful when presented as “objective.”21

Therefore, since news media are a “cultural product” that construct our “social reality,”22 analyses of metaphoric representations of immigrants in news media

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must examine how visual images either co-construct or challenge dominant discourses of immigration and the social relations that imbricate these discourses.23 The second problem facing much of the work on immigration and metaphor is a problem of scope. As Table 1 illustrates, these studies focus mostly on metaphors of invasion and war, or physical burden and disease, repeating these common metaphoric clusters. This scholarship looks at the ways in which immigration is compared metaphorically to human problems. Important also are the ways in which popular discourse places immigration in a symbolic relationship with nature. As other scholars have argued, terms like “nature,” “environment,” or “wilderness” serve as important argumentative topoi around which portrayals of women or ethnic groups are constructed. 24 These representations tend to serve dominant interests. Popular discourse makes subtle arguments in support of hierarchy and social stratification by deploying “nature” symbolically. Turning to recent discourse on immigration reveals how conceptions of “nature” and “the environment” serve as metaphors to build representations of immigration. Contemporary discourse capitalizes on metaphors like invasion or disease, but it also appeals, both through images and language, to environmental catastrophes such as pollution and waste in making arguments about immigrants. To illustrate this connection, I analyzed television news segments from major news networks CNN and Fox News from September to December of 2005.25 I limited my search to television stories that featured a combination of textual, aural, and visual images of immigration or immigrants. Throughout these four months, as President Bush campaigned for a “comprehensive” immigration policy and Congress debated different proposals for immigration reform, both networks featured immigration in their news coverage.26 Concern over immigration crystallized in late 2005 on the heels of Bush’s visits to Arizona and Texas in late November and the House of Representative’s passage of border security legislation in December. Analyzing this body of discourse provides a perspective on the ways in which immigration is framed and articulated in popular rhetoric. Examining recent media coverage of immigration necessitates a point of comparison and a discursive grounding around which metaphors are constructed. As Kenneth Burke famously notes, “metaphor is a device for seeing something in terms of something else.”27 Since metaphors build conceptual relationships among phenomena, comparing news media coverage of immigration with news media coverage of pollution provides a point of comparison to analyze the metaphoric construction of immigration in relation to pristine nature. Specifically, I draw from coverage of the toxic waste crisis at Love Canal, New York, beginning in the late 1970s, to provide a resource for this discussion of metaphoric constructions of immigration. Thus, before outlining the metaphor

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of immigrant as pollutant, I review representations of toxic pollution, specifically focusing on the crisis at Love Canal, to build topoi around which to analyze the discourse of immigration.

A Point of Comparison: Love Canal and Coverage of Toxic Pollution The crisis at Love Canal in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a monumental event in the history of the environmental movement that led to the development of more stringent environmental regulations. During the 1950s, Hooker Chemical disposed of their industrial waste by burying thousands of drums of toxic chemicals in the Love Canal in northern New York State. After covering the disposal site with dirt and clay, Hooker sold the land to the Niagara Board of Education, which built a new school on the site and around which a town developed. Decades later, in the late 1970s, after prolonged heavy rain chemicals began to seep out of the ground, poisoning water supplies and leaking into homes. After many complaints from residents, “federal and state officials confirmed the presence of eighty-eight chemicals, some in concentrations 250 to 5,000 times higher than acceptable safety levels.”28 Andrew Szasz’s book Ecopopulism traces the responses to this crisis, in media and in the nascent environmental justice movement, through a discussion of the images and the discourse surrounding the incident. The imagery of Love Canal media coverage does not provide a definitive representational analog to immigration rhetoric, but it does provide a source from which to draw elements of visual and discursive framing that can serve as points of comparison for contemporary immigration rhetoric. Szasz notes that the reactions to contamination at Love Canal were “made for television.”29 A host of visual images surrounded the stories of pollution, their dangerous effects, the community’s reaction, and the resulting governmental response. Through an analysis of the newspaper stories, photographs, and television news that surrounded the crisis, Szasz notes that “all the right elements were there” for a sensationalized message of dread, disaster, and disorder: “industrial chemicals, cancer and birth defects, victimization of innocent citizens . . . sinister piles of drums, discolored pools of water, angry community meetings, [and] distraught parents.”30 Even several years later, after the evacuation of many of the residents of Love Canal and after the beginning of a governmental response to the crisis, mass media discourse repeated the limited, highly stereotyped, emotionally charged visual vocabulary of television’s “toxic waste” imagery: haphazard piles of broken, leaking fifty-fivegallon drums; cleanup crews encased in protective safety gear; home after home, boarded up, abandoned; plain folks, mostly women, distraught, angry.31

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As a point of comparison to the discourse of immigration, attention to this description of news coverage of toxic pollution yields three categories of representations: images of the pollutant, images of the pollutant’s impact on the community, and images of the government’s attempts to clean up the problem. The following table summarizes three metaphoric topoi drawn from the news discourse about pollution and toxic waste at Love Canal. Table 2



The Pollutant

The Pollutant’s Effects

Governmental Response

Stationary pollution • Piles of leaky drums Mobile pollution • Seeping pools of chemicals

Disrupted community life • Protesting citizens • Abandoned town Health Effects • Cancer and other illnesses • Birth defects

Praise for individual agents • Disposal of waste Criticism of government response • No support for cleanup

Images of the pollutant displayed both stationary and mobile pollution. Photographs and video of stationary pollution featured images of leaky and dented chemical drums, pools of toxic waste, and contaminated soil and vegetation.32 One particular example, an ABC World News Tonight segment with correspondent Rebecca Chase featured multiple images of haphazard piles of dented and damaged chemical drums.33 Taken from close range, these images left some of the chemical barrels outside of the camera frame, connoting a sense that the problem’s scope was uncertain and potentially unmanageable. The barrels lay in unorganized heaps, some on their sides while others stood on their ends. The sense of disarray in the footage was heightened by the condition of the drums, many of which were cracked or dented. Meanwhile, this abandoned and dangerous waste, apparently on the verge of creating further contamination through leaks or spills, was often situated in open fields, amongst trees, grass, and bushes, or in the yards of suburban houses. Contrasting close shots of barrels of pollution or pools of waste with the scenes of suburban life such as parks or towns created a sense that the pollution at Love Canal was physically disrupting community life and threatening more contamination. Thus, images of the pollutant in coverage of toxic waste crises like Love Canal presented the dangers of stationary, accumulating pollution. Yet Love Canal coverage also portrayed the pollutants as mobile dangers. Pools of dark waste welled toward abandoned houses and streamed across streets. Rivulets of pollution seeped across lawns, contributing to the sense of a dynamic threat that was spreading throughout the town. Rebecca Chase’s report for ABC News included these visual elements as well. Images of leaking barrels and seeping pools of waste showed the chemicals moving, often toward the camera,

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which created a sense that the contamination was about to engulf the viewer. Together, these images of the pollutant, sometimes presented as stationary and sometimes as mobile danger, made vivid the problems at Love Canal, drawing the attention of news media and the outrage of people across the nation.34 In addition to images of the pollutant, images of the pollutants’ effects formed the second representational theme in coverage of toxic waste crises. In the case of Love Canal, both photographs and video “conveyed the total disruption of community, of settled, everyday life,” showing a closed grade school, abandoned streets, and ominous warning signs.35 Pools of toxic sludge and drums of waste took over the public parks and lawns where children once played. Families were forced from their homes into the streets to try to escape the spreading danger. Furthermore, this displacement and disorder led to “angry” “protest” and calls for government action.36 In one particularly powerful image of the pollutants’ effects on Love Canal, a photograph taken and circulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) featured a middle-aged, dark-haired Love Canal woman and two children protesting the government’s inaction.37 The woman, seemingly from the working class by her simple hair style and attire, stood holding a sign above her head while wearing another sign draped over her shoulders. The sign she held above her head featured a white skull and crossbones framed by the words “Love Canal,” and the larger sign on her body read “We’ve got better things to do than sit around and be CONTAMINATED!!” In the left corner of the photograph, two children stood by the woman, staring into the camera with solemn expressions. Evoking echoes of the iconic photograph of Migrant Mother (by Dorothea Lange) in its content and visual framing, this image captured the sense of community disruption and disarray brought on by the pollution at Love Canal. Media also illustrated the health dangers of pollution by featuring victims of cancer and birth defects. Collectively, these images of the pollutants’ effects created a sense that Love Canal was a “public health ‘tragedy’” that demanded intervention by the government.38 Finally, representations of the government’s response formed the third topos of Love Canal media coverage. Even these images reinforced the dangers of the pollutants and the severity of the situation. One particularly powerful example of representations of governmental response was a photograph taken by Joel Richardson for the Washington Post.39 The image featured a full view of three officials from the EPA loading a drum of toxic waste into a truck for disposal. In the photograph, the three men struggle to move the heavy barrel from a lift into the back of the truck without spilling or damaging the drum. Each official holds the barrel with two hands while bending at the waist and knees. Their postures express a degree of care and trepidation that connotes the dangers of the act they are performing. In addition to the officials’ postures, their clothing contributes to the sense of danger. As in much of the other images of

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Love Canal cleanup, each official wears a white hazmat chemical suit, including gloves and a gas mask, as protection from the toxic waste and its fumes. The visual elements of the image contribute to a sense of danger and dread, while the framing and position of the camera, which sits behind and facing the truck and the officials, contribute to a feeling that the viewer is being relieved of the dangerous substance. This particular photograph, featured in the Washington Post, illustrates the rhetorical techniques in representations of the government’s response to Love Canal. As Szasz notes, media coverage hailed the individual efforts of “local, state, and federal officials” who helped dispose of some waste, but it decried the general lack of support from the federal government that purportedly doomed any effort at cleanup.40 These three themes from the coverage of Love Canal illuminate the framing of public dangers and disasters from toxic waste spills. The verbal and visual elements of news media discourse constructed images of the pollutants, images of the pollutants’ effects, and images of the government’s response to the contamination. In what follows, I use these three themes summarized in Table 2 as a point of comparison for the metaphorical constructions in rhetoric about immigration. Moreover, the visual rhetoric of Love Canal discourse, including elements such as visual framing and the positioning of the photographed object, provide a visual vocabulary which I use to analyze the rhetoric of immigration as I examine how the metaphor of immigrant as pollutant is created through the visual and verbal elements of the news media.

Immigrant as Pollutant Analyzing the ways immigration is constructed through the images, texts, and aural messages of news discourse illustrates another way in which immigration is articulated through visual metaphor. I look to reports on immigration from Fox News and CNN from September to December of 2005 to argue that, in addition to being conceived as a crime wave or invasion, immigration is framed metaphorically as a dangerous pollutant. This metaphoric construction of immigrant as pollutant can be unpacked by considering the images of undocumented immigrants, the images of the dangers posed by these immigrants, and the images of the government’s response. Images of the Undocumented Immigrant Popular media coverage of public issues such as immigration both respond to and help guide governmental agendas and popular opinions. In the case of pollution crises like Love Canal, news coverage conveyed the danger of contamination through piles of broken, leaky drums, and images of the pollutants

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themselves in dark, ominous pools of waste. One clear example of this visual framing was the footage of dented and damaged toxic waste barrels from the ABC news report. Representations of immigration on major cable news networks like Fox News and CNN often portrayed undocumented immigrants through similar visual techniques, creating an impression that immigrants were collecting like piles of potentially dangerous waste or were approaching the viewer as mobile pollutants. Images of large, unorganized groups of immigrants mirror the images of stationary pollution from the coverage of Love Canal in their visual framing and content. These visual constructions create an impression of immigrants as both stationary and mobile pollution. In Fox News’s prime time debate show Hannity & Colmes, for example, hosts Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes interviewed Chris Burgard and Jay T. Rockwell, directors of the documentary The Month of October, on their experiences filming at the U.S.–Mexico border. As Hannity asks the two men questions about the “shocking new footage . . . [that] exposes problems on our borders in a way we’ve never seen before,” images from the documentary flash on the screen.41 Here the cooperation of the visual and verbal content is key to the metaphorical representations of immigrants. While Hannity warns of the impending dangers of immigration threatening the nation, the camera illustrates his concern by focusing on a group of Mexicans sitting under a tree, apparently resting from the grueling trip across the desert-border of Arizona. Taken from close range, the video clip shows the immigrants sitting together in the shade. While some individuals at the edges of the frame lay down, other immigrants in the middle of the frame sit huddled together, back to back, to keep from laying on the rocky soil. Like the images of Love Canal reported by Rebecca Chase, this immigration footage shows the immigrants in a disorganized and huddled heap, in sharp contrast to the peaceful desert environment that they are physically disrupting. Similarly, in an earlier interview with Chris Simcox, codirector of the Arizona Minuteman Project (a citizen group working independently to patrol the Arizona border), images show Mexican immigrants, mostly men, huddled together. Collectively the large size of the group of immigrants and their position in a chaotic mass connote a threat to the ordered, peaceful, and pristine desert wilderness.42 A CNN report by Candy Crowley from November 29 concerns President Bush’s immigration plan and the Republican Party’s response. Crowley makes the metaphoric framing of immigrant as pollutant more concrete. She notes the magnitude of the immigration problem, putting it at “ten to eleven million illegal immigrants living and working in the U.S.”43 Republican representative Tom Tancredo, interviewed in the report, talks about the need for increased border security. Meanwhile, images of large groups of Latinos/as—presumably immigrants—mill around in a parking lot waiting for work. In these images,

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too, immigrants stand in disorganized groups on street corners and sidewalks. Some stand with their backs to the camera, while others face it; nonetheless, the immigrants literally take up physical space, presenting a psychological disruption to the peace and serenity of community life. “We are at a point in this nation’s history,” Tancredo notes, “where we cannot afford to keep our borders porous in order to provide employers with cheap labor.”44 The video images of huddled groups of immigrants function as evidence for Tancredo’s claim about the problems of a “porous” border. This footage of large, unorganized groups of immigrants on street corners, parking lots, or borderlands captures “a sense of large-scale immigration.”45 The content of this visual rhetoric conveys a sense that the mere presence of immigrants creates a danger and a threat, much like the standing drums of toxic waste in the photos of Love Canal. The visual framing of the images of immigrants also draws on popular discourse of pollution such as the rhetoric surrounding Love Canal. In the rhetoric both of pollution and of immigration, there is no doubt about the characteristics of the threat, and the placement of the camera is one important parallel between these two visual rhetorics. Images of toxic waste barrels at Love Canal were taken from close range, showing the barrels were clearly damaged and thus posing the threat of leakage. Similarly, close-range images of immigration clearly show ethnic and economic class markers that reinforce popular concerns about immigration.46 In much of this footage, markers of ethnic and racial difference distinguish the migrants as different and potentially unruly. The Fox News report on Hannity & Colmes, for example, focuses on an unorganized group of border crossers. News discourse from CNN, such as that from Candy Crowley, reports the magnitude of the immigration problem, featuring images of unorganized groups of immigrants milling on street corners and sidewalks. Like the barrels in images of Love Canal, the immigrants are portrayed as unorganized, idle, and aimless—connoting a sense of accumulating danger. Whether sitting under trees or collecting on street corners, these images disrupt a sense of order and safety by portraying immigrants as ticking time bombs of cultural and economic contamination situated throughout our cities. Using similar techniques as the news media coverage of pollution, immigrants are portrayed visually in news media rhetoric as stationary pollutants contaminating communities and the environment. Yet, like the seeping, oozing, and pooled toxic waste of Love Canal, immigrants are also portrayed as mobile threats. Not only are these dangers accumulated on street corners and intersections, immigrants are continually shown moving through the desert and across the border, conveying a sense of an approaching danger and a growing problem. Crowley’s CNN report of November 29, for example, begins with video of two Hispanic men easily scaling a fence that is nine or ten feet tall, then cuts to two different Hispanic men running across a street, apparently fleeing.47 In

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both clips the camera is positioned on the American side of the border, while immigrants scale or duck fences to sneak toward the viewer. Another CNN report by Casey Wian shows a Hispanic man leaning on a section of border fence; the fence is of such poor quality, though, that the man can look over the barbed wire fence into the United States, as he sits with his arms folded.48 In both Wian and Crowley’s reports one hears about the need to “crack down” on illegal crossings into the country; both reports, as well as other similar pieces, provide images of immigrants moving across the porous border followed by a discussion of proposals for a large fence that will finally shut out “illegals.”49 Fox News coverage of immigration features similar visual representations of immigrants as mobile threats. In the Hannity & Colmes interview of November 14 with the makers of The Month of October, Jay T. Rockwell notes that “it’s terrorists coming across” the border, highlighting the need to “close the back door on terrorism.” Meanwhile, footage of a line of people walking toward the camera and then off frame dominates the screen.50 Shot at night with a night-vision lens, the video shows few details about the immigrants other than a wide shot of their path of movement across the frame and toward the camera. Particular features of the immigrants are indistinguishable in such adverse lighting conditions. Instead, the night vision lens gives the immigrant bodies a strange neon green luminosity; they blend together, and the footage creates an impression of an ominous and oncoming stream of toxic green pollution. In fact, these immigrants pose an arguably greater threat to the country than toxic waste because they are not only mobile but also purposeful.51 A special report from November 8 on The O’Reilly Factor follows the same pattern, showing immigrant men and some women walking through the desert in groups and making their way across the border into the United States. Here the camera’s focus is on groups of Mexicans walking along the border fence, looking for an opening through which to cross. As the immigrants duck in and out of holes in the border fence, Representative Duncan Hunter describes the “no man’s land” of the border, an area through which immigrants stream across from Mexico in thousands or are smuggled across like dangerous and secret substances. 52 These examples illustrate the ways in which immigration is constructed as a mobile, toxic threat. The directionality of the videos and their visual composition contribute to their metaphoric meaning by drawing on similarities with pollution coverage. Immigrants are shown moving toward the camera; their movement is “directed towards the observer’s eye,” which connotes that the immigrants are “coming at” the viewer.53 This conveys a sense that the immigrants are invading our space and posing an immediate threat. The pollutant is on the move and will soon reach and contaminate the viewer. Like the pools of toxic waste that creep toward the camera in images of Love Canal, immigrants are moving closer to the camera, presenting an ever-greater threat. There is

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also an intelligence in the immigrants that makes the threat of contamination even greater. They jump over or duck under fences that are supposed to protect boundaries. The accumulation of these representations of seepage through the “porous” border portrays immigrants as being like those pools of toxic waste in Love Canal. Sometimes the connection is more subtle, created by impressions of immigrants as stationary threats polluting peaceful parks or sidewalks. Other times the metaphor of pollution becomes more explicit, as when images taken at night create the impression that immigration is a stream of contamination seeping through holes in the border. In many of these examples, however, immigrants are presented as “an undifferentiated mass quantity” that must be controlled to prevent contamination.54 Besides the directionality of immigrants in this visual rhetoric, the framing of these images of immigrants also draws on elements of pollution rhetoric. Representations of both stationary and mobile immigrants are framed so that the immigrants trail off of the screen in one or both directions. Whether closeups or long shots, many of these videos exclude part of the group from the frame. Like the barrels of pollution and the pools of waste in Love Canal, the immigrants spill out of the frame, thus connoting that “the flow of immigrants does not have a definitive end in sight.”55 The size and scope of the stationary pollutants are unknown, and their lack of supervision or purposive action may connote danger to some viewers. As in the images of drums of waste or toxic pools of sludge, the viewer cannot determine the extent or spread of the pollutant. Similarly, images of moving migrants mirror visuals of Love Canal that show pollution welling toward the camera, so close that it is moving out of the frame. These images suggest the magnitude of immigration and offer up some uncertainty about how far the problem extends; the “flow” of immigrants appears to go on forever. Showing immigrants hopping fences, walking through the desert, or crossing over and under barriers provides fuel for the metaphor of the immigrant as mobile waste. Showing them moving in the direction of the camera heightens the threat by making it appear that they are coming closer to the viewer. These representations portray immigrants as a hazard, as moving bodies of dangerous material. While immigrants are portrayed metaphorically as a dangerous pollutant that is seeping through the borders and collecting on street corners, they are also often represented as criminals or as invaders.56 The argument here is not that these images have a singular or preferred meaning, but that “immigrant as pollutant” is another metaphor in the network of metaphoric framings underlying popular rhetoric about immigration. Images of immigrants form the first theme of this metaphor, but the framing of “immigrant as pollutant” is bolstered by portraying the immigrants as stationary or mobile threats that contaminate or pollute American communities. Thus, news coverage also

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constructs images of immigration’s consequences, which form the second dimension of the metaphor. The Dangers of Illegal Immigration The media coverage of Love Canal portrayed the threat in clear terms, illustrating the pollutant through images of scattered drums of chemicals or pools of hazardous waste. It also provided a clear picture of the danger posed by these chemicals to the community at large. First, focusing on social damage, images of Love Canal conveyed the “disruption” pollutants had on the ordinary life of the community.57 Abandoned schools, empty street corners, and angry protesters conveyed a sense of chaos and disarray. Second, images of the impact of toxic waste in Love Canal portrayed the devastating health effects these pollutants had on ordinary people. Creating an emotional and personal connection with the victims magnified and concretized the problem and intensified the call for a governmental response.58 Dangers of immigration are portrayed in similar ways through representations of disrupted community life and through images of the physical and social ills brought on by immigration. According to network news coverage, immigration, like toxic waste, poses a threat to the peace and harmony of American communities. One important parallel to the visual rhetoric of pollution is the physical identities of immigration’s victims. In Fox’s show Hannity & Colmes, while the hosts talk to James Gilchrist and Chris Simcox, codirectors of the Arizona Minuteman Project, images of protesters standing in the desert holding signs are shown on the screen. One sign reads “STOP illegal invasion,” while another identifies the “Californians for Secure Borders.”59 An adolescent of 14 or 15 years is carrying a sign and protesting the influx of illegal immigrants into the country while standing next to an older woman, presumably his mother. Images of the protestors, many of them women and children, mirror the pictures of Love Canal residents’ protests circulated in news media. In this footage, as in images from Love Canal, we see women and children driven from their homes into the streets to protest the dangers. Images of immigration’s dangers convey that the problem has grown so great that ordinary people are driven into the desert borderlands to bring awareness to their plight. Images of immigration’s consequences often feature middle-aged and elderly men and women, who either protest or patrol the border with binoculars and two-way radios. The diverse makeup of these groups connotes the extent of the problem of immigration. During the report on the Arizona minutemen on Hannity & Colmes, organizer Chris Simcox praises the efforts of these ordinary “citizen patrols” who, “spread out along a 23-mile stretch of desert,” have “protected” Arizona from over “260 illegal immigrants” over the course of several

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weeks. Meanwhile the screen shows video of these volunteers patrolling hills or standing guard.60 Minutemen stand next to cars or on top of recreational vehicles, looking through binoculars into the distant desert. In one segment, several men stand with their backs to the border, while in the foreground a welldressed, middle-aged woman surveys the horizon for border breaches. Her clothes distinguish her from the other volunteers and seem to mark a higher social and economic status; she wears black pants and a green sweater, with a flower pattern scarf wrapped around her neck. Likewise, other images of minutemen in the Fox News report portray all kinds of people, from “soccer moms” to “old ladies,” mobilized by the threat of immigration to use “cell phones and lawn chairs” to keep the border intact.61 According to Simcox, the volunteers in Arizona alone—people willing to help control a problem that the government fails to address—exceed 1,000 in number and come from all over the country. Though their efforts are supposedly successful, both volunteers and protestors point to the need for swift and decisive action by the government to stem the tide of “contamination.” As Simcox argues: This area has been neglected, and the citizens here have had enough. In fact, they’re coming out of their homes now, pleading with us not to leave, because for the first time in years, they’ve been able to sleep through the night, and they have peace and quiet.62

Like the images of Love Canal, the coverage of these anti-immigration efforts points to the “total disruption of community, of settled, everyday life.”63 In place of images of abandoned streets or school yards, coverage of immigration features individuals driven out into the desert to protest about the problem of immigration and to take matters into their own hands. The danger is so great that women, children, and the elderly have left their homes and joined the ranks of those patrolling the border, protecting their communities from contamination. Besides the identity of immigration’s victims, another important element in the metaphoric construction of “the dangers of immigration” is the visual framing of the images. Videos of protestors and amateur border watchers are filmed in close proximity so that their age, sex, and ethnicity are evident. Mostly, these are middle-class whites of varied ages, from young adults to the elderly. Videos of protestors and minutemen feature every age, from middleaged mothers, young children, and the elderly, gathered together to address the growing “problem” of immigration. Thus, the diversity of volunteers’ age and gender implies that the effects of immigration have reached so far that those groups of people traditionally relegated to the private sphere (such as children and women) can justifiably come out into the public. On the other hand, the uniformity of their ethnicity subtly speaks to the racial fears underlying the

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concerns over immigration. The camera often sits behind the volunteers, creating identification with the minutemen as they patrol the border. Meanwhile the camera faces protestors, much like the photograph of a Love Canal mother protesting government inaction. Portraying the “victims” of immigration in such vivid proximity brings the viewer into the image and makes the disruption and distortion of ordinary life seem ever more palpable.64 News media representations of immigration mirror the ways in which media coverage of Love Canal portrayed the dangers of toxic waste pollution. Toxic waste poisons communities and brings them to a standstill, while immigration supposedly paralyzes communities across the United States both economically and socially. The threats of immigration are represented through ordinary people forced from their homes, protesting and calling for more governmental attention; lives are brought to a halt and people are forced to fight their own battles to protect their communities from pollution. Yet like the framing of pollution discourse, the dangers of immigration are also expressed in more menacing terms through concrete stories and emotional appeals. Szasz notes that later coverage of Love Canal focused on “interviews with distraught citizens” as their “emotional core.”65 Centering coverage on the stories of individuals helped to establish a connection with the victims of Love Canal and convey the human impact of the crisis. Ultimately this personal connection was used to heighten the lack of governmental cleanup of the pollution. Here the discourse of immigration differs from the rhetoric of the Love Canal crisis. Inasmuch as it is difficult to trace the particular, individual impacts of illegal immigration, the coverage of immigration in popular media often focuses on the systemic, large-scale social ills that illegal immigration supposedly brings. The concrete dangers of immigration are usually traced to heightened crime, economic burden, and the threat of terrorism. Many of the stories during the time period analyzed featured images of immigrants in crowded jails being detained and processed by police officers and border officials.66 Nevertheless, in the context of metaphoric framings of immigrants as stationary and mobile pollution, metaphoric meanings of pollution and contamination are activated. Immigrants collect on street corners supposedly contaminating our way of life and our culture. According to reports by Fox News and CNN, immigrants can pollute society by taking jobs and contributing to crime and delinquency. In addition to images of crime and terrorism, there is also a subtle environmental dimension to these images of immigration. For example, several reports show video of trash and debris left in the desert by moving groups of immigrants. Whether a can of Fiesta cola or a pile of tattered clothes, these images convey a literal sense of pollution that accompanies the metaphorical pollution of culture and lifestyle these immigrants supposedly bring. Often

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news coverage shows these physical traces of pollution through extremely close shots, contributing to a sense that the contamination left in the wake of immigration is palpable. These images of immigration’s consequences add to the general sense of disarray, disorder, and defilement conveyed by discourses of immigration’s dangers. Not only are images of crime and terrorism used to connote the dangers of unchecked illegal immigration, they also provide avenues for media to call for particular governmental actions to address these problems. Images of the governmental response to immigration form the third dimension of the metaphor immigrant as pollutant. Representations of the Governmental Response Like the discourse of the toxic waste crisis at Love Canal, visual rhetoric of immigration portrays immigrants as dangerous pollutants who pose devastating consequences for communities. And, like the toxic waste at Love Canal, immigration is a pollutant whose spread can be contained and cleansed. The call for “cleanup” of immigration forms the third representational dimension of the metaphor of immigrant as pollutant. In the context of Love Canal, Szasz notes that the shocking images of life in Love Canal “might have been less frightening if . . . government regulators had been shown to be competent to protect public health.” Instead of receiving a picture of a responsive and concerned government, viewers “got just the opposite impression.”67 Through images such as the photograph of EPA officials loading a barrel of toxic waste into a truck for disposal, officials were often portrayed doing their individual part to help the citizens of Love Canal. In general, however, the government’s response was “grossly inadequate” and “infinitesimal in comparison to the size of the problem.”68 Individual images of governmental officials disposing of waste only heightened the need for comprehensive action by the government. “Without a larger enforcement staff,” one reporter noted, “few expect that the new law will quickly clean up the toxic waste problem.”69 Representations of immigration in popular discourse follow a similar format in portraying the government’s role in regulating and controlling the pollutant. News media praise the individual contributions of law enforcement officials while criticizing the overall governmental response. For example, while Hannity and Colmes celebrate the success of the Arizona minutemen on their program, organizer Chris Simcox explicitly addresses the failure of the government to do its job. “We’ve created a model that works,” he argues, “a model that border control cannot implement because they don’t have the resources to do this.” The border patrol, though well intentioned, “just do not have the personnel to watch [the border] continuously 24 hours a day like we’ve . . . been doing here for the last 18 days.”70

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Other reports on immigration mirror Simcox’s view of government border officials; the verbal and visual messages construct a picture of governmental negligence and inadequacy in the face of an ominous problem. In another episode of Hannity & Colmes airing on October 4, as images of border agents putting Mexicans in handcuffs and pushing them into large vans are shown on the screen, the caption “Border Patrol Agents Intercept Illegal Immigrants” takes up the bottom third of the screen. The camera sits behind the border official while he pushes the immigrant into the back of a truck for deportation. Meanwhile, Hannity emphasizes that these immigrants were arrested “less than a quarter of a mile from the border.”71 Throughout the interview with Luis Cabrera, a Mexican government official, clips show immigrants with their hands placed on U.S. government vans and their feet spread as they are searched by police. Other footage from this same show features immigrants standing in a straight line with their hands behind their heads in the presence of border officials. “It’s happening by the hundreds every night in this area,” Hannity warns, “it’s happening all along the border.”72 During Bill O’Reilly’s November 8 interview of Rep. Duncan Hunter, the camera focuses on a Mexican man in a police station being booked by a police officer. While the officer fingerprints and jails the immigrant, a caption informs the viewer that approximately 480,000 illegal immigrants cross the border each year and that three-quarters of California’s tuberculosis cases “occur among immigrants.” Rep. Hunter talks about the need for more government assistance to prevent illegal immigration. “You need fences. You need roads. You need light, and you need the people to man them, the great people of the border patrol”; “we can do it,” says Hunter, but we need more help and attention from the government.73 In a CNN report from November 28, video footage of INS officials making arrests and patrolling the border are shown on the screen, while reporter Casey Wian demands increased funds and support from the federal government to combat immigration.74 Another report from November 29 identifies the need to “control the border and crack down inside the country” to prevent more illegal entry.75 While the image content offers multiple interpretations of the immigrant threat, the visual framing of this footage contributes to the dehumanization of the immigrant. Immigrants are portrayed as pollutants that the government must clean up. Like the government agents in the Love Canal coverage, INS and border patrol officials are generally praised; their efforts to protect the borders, apprehend illegal immigrants, and send them back over the border are lauded. Most of the journalists’ and advocates’ criticisms fall squarely on the government for failing to fund and support these brave agents who are trying to protect the nation. The visual and verbal image-text creates an argument for more governmental accountability by showing pictures of border violations

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and apprehensions while making claims about the magnitude of the problem and the lack of enforcement. Whereas the content of this discourse creates an image of governmental incompetence and negligence, the framing of the government agents, ordinary citizens, and immigrants in these images also contributes to the metaphor of immigrant as pollutant. One important visual element of these images of the governmental response to immigration is the position of the camera in much of the news media coverage. Shots of the officials’ interactions with immigrants are taken at close range and from angles that associate the viewer with the government agent. Most of these images are taken at close range, highlighting the differences between the immigrants and the officers. The hierarchy between the two is reified through their positioning in the images. For example, immigrants are restrained or interrogated, which connotes their status as physical dangers, deviants, and criminals. Like the photos of government officials dealing with drums of waste, the border patrol is usually moving immigrants into vans to ship them back across the border. Love Canal images of governmental officials transporting drums of waste show the EPA agents wearing chemical-proof suits and gas masks as they struggle to load the drum of toxic waste onto the truck and away from Love Canal. Similarly, the border officials in Fox News and CNN reports wrestle the illegal immigrants into the back of vans that will carry them first into custody and then across the border. Both sets of images portray the immediate danger posed by these “pollutants” through the agents’ protective uniforms. The EPA agents in Love Canal coverage often wore protective suits that shielded them from the hazardous effects of the chemicals. Border patrol officials also wear protective gear in the visual rhetoric of immigration—in the form of police uniforms and weapons—that convey legal authority and a sense of danger inherent in their jobs. One particular example is the Fox News interview with Chris Simcox from Hannity & Colmes titled “Sean Hannity Visits the Minutemen Volunteers in Arizona.” Here video footage shows images of border officials apprehending immigrants. The border official’s firearm and nightstick are visible on his belt, assuring the viewer that this job is very dangerous.76 The position of the camera and the framing of the shots are important as well. Very few images of immigrants being apprehended by border officials show the immigrants’ faces. In the Fox News footage too, video of the arrest is taken entirely from behind the officers. The viewer sees the officer handcuff, search, and push the immigrant into the back of a van. The immigrant remains faceless and nameless; there are no particularities shown for the individual being arrested other than his ethnic and legal status, thus transforming the immigrant into a dangerous substance being taken into custody.77 This framing puts the viewer on the side of the border patrol official, creating identification with government agents. These images convey no human connection to the immigrant just as they convey no

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connection to the drum of waste being shipped away; they are both objects to be discarded. Since the camera sits behind the officer, the immigrant/object is being taken away from the viewer. Visually and psychologically, the audience is relieved of the burden of its presence by the border patrol agent. Similar to scenes in which viewers saw EPA officials struggling carefully to dispose of dangerous barrels of waste, news media rhetoric of immigration reminds the viewer that these immigrants carry disease and pose threats to the brave border officials who struggle to remove them. Immigrants are carefully but forcefully wrestled into the back of trucks or vans to be shipped away. They are portrayed as dangerous substances that must be dealt with quickly to assure everyone’s safety. Immigrants are lined up, organized, searched, and removed. The officers wear protective gear, and the immigrants are marked as racial others. When the positioning of immigrant and border official in these images is coupled with the aural and textual messages that convey a need for funding to complete these “cleanup” efforts, the image-text makes a powerful appeal for more government support of efforts to combat illegal immigration.78 Instead of featuring successful government efforts, the stories focus on limited attempts that are “grossly inadequate” and fail to address the problem of illegal immigration. “Without a larger enforcement staff,” they argue, there can be few expectations that the problem can be quickly addressed.79 The three topoi discussed above—images of immigrants, images of the dangers of immigration, and images of the government’s response—mirror the visual rhetoric of Love Canal and other pollution crises in their visual framing and composition. The framing of the images, their content, and their textual and aural messages cooperate to construct a metaphoric framing for immigration. Table 3 outlines the metaphor of immigrant as pollutant as constructed in this news coverage. As with the coverage of Love Canal, the representations of immigrants portray them as both stationary pollutants gathered on street corners and as mobile waste moving across the border. The dangers of immigration are visualized through images of disrupted community life, including protesters and dislocated families. Images of the social contamination brought by immigration, such as crime or poverty, further concretize the danger. Finally, discourse about the government’s response praises individual efforts by valiant government agents to combat the spread of immigration while decrying the overall governmental response to the border crisis. News media discourse, particularly visual rhetoric, works to frame immigrants as dangerous pollutants that threaten the American community. This metaphoric representation is not without consequences for the ways immigration is understood and approached. I now consider the implications of the metaphor immigrant as pollutant.

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The Immigrant Stationary pollutant • Disorganized groups • Immigrants resting along the border Mobile waste • Immigrants crossing the border • Approaching groups

The Dangers of Immigration Disrupted community life • Protesting citizens • Individuals “forced” from their homes • Citizen border enforcement Social effects • Crime • Poverty • Pollution/Litter

Governmental Response Praise for individual agents • Capture of immigrants • Deportations Criticism of government efforts • No funding for Border Patrol • Refusal to build a fence

Immigration, Ideology, and the Politics of Metaphor Representations of illegal immigration in popular media, from television shows to news photographs, provide a complex view of the immigrant “problem.” Scholars have identified a variety of metaphors that serve as conceptual tools by which we understand immigration and its effect on our society. Some of these metaphors are the immigrant as invader, as criminal, and as disease, yet the preceding analysis of recent news media discourse about immigration illustrates another metaphor by which media articulate this controversy: immigrant as pollutant. Constructions of immigration as a danger have a complex history. Lisa Flores, for example, describes the narratives of fear deployed about immigrants in the 1930s. She argues that these narratives of danger portrayed immigrants through common themes: Large populations of people with little knowledge of or interest in America arrived. These groups, unlike earlier western European immigrants, were likely to be the dregs of society. Illiterate, diseased, or morally suspect, these southern and eastern Europeans threatened to pollute and dilute the homogenous stock of America.80

Similar images and narratives inform the rhetoric of immigration throughout history.81 Strikingly, “the ease with which these constructions appear,” states Flores, “suggests that they have become deeply embedded within the cultural commonsense.”82 As Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte notes, television news has become a modern medium through which ethnic minorities, including immigrants, are discursively constructed as dangers and threats.83 The preceding analysis of contemporary news media discourse illustrates that these same dominant logics continue to permeate rhetoric about immigra-

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tion.84 What, then, are the consequences of these constructions, and how does the metaphor of immigrant as pollutant differ from other metaphoric understandings of immigration? Constructing immigration as a social danger provides an opportunity to define the other and solidify the self. As Mary Douglas outlines, discourses of danger construct difference as a means of constituting shared national and cultural identity.85 Metaphoric representations are a crucial component of this identity construction. Examining this prevalent metaphoric representation of immigrant as pollutant, then, provides an opportunity to critique dominant logics by exploring the ideological implications of contemporary immigration rhetoric.86 The metaphor of immigrant as pollutant articulated in popular discourse is significant for the ways in which it constructs immigrants, through racial and xenophobic stereotypes, as objects, aberrations, and dangers. This discourse propagates overly simplistic understandings of immigration that suggest equally simplistic solutions. Metaphors serve as terminological filters on reality. Our observations and actions “are but implications of the particular terminology in terms of which observations are made.”87 The ways in which news media images and textual fragments construct immigration as a danger is problematic, for they inform society’s relationship to immigrants and they influence the direction of public policy on immigration. Analysis of the metaphor of immigrant as pollutant uncovers how popular discourse of immigration contributes to understandings of immigrants as individuals and notions of immigration as a social phenomenon. The discursive construction of the other as a threat, in the words of David Campbell, “naturalize[s] the self (as normal, healthy, civilized, or something equally positive) by estranging the other (as pathological, sick, barbaric, or something equally negative).”88 Images of immigrants as dangerous and destructive pollutants dehumanize immigrants by constructing them as threatening substances, denying them agency and reinforcing common stereotypes. Immigrants’ primary identity is marked by their racial difference and illegal migrant status. Their brown bodies are portrayed as dirty and dangerous because of their ethnicity.89 Their legal status as outsiders is marked by their sneaking and seeping through borders as well as their apprehension by law enforcement officials.90 Even as this metaphoric articulation divides immigrants from mainstream America, “immigration as pollution” also serves a unifying function, bringing together disparate groups of Americans under the banner of protecting the sanctity and integrity of the nation. People of all ages and economic backgrounds are on the front lines protesting and working together to stop the influx of illegal immigration. The metaphor of pollution normalizes American identity, an identity based on racial and cultural “purity.” The construction

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of self and other through the metaphor of immigrant as pollutant makes this normalized American identity visible while painting immigrants as contaminants. Alan Nadel notes that “the container and the contained” are “each in themselves fluid and not discrete entities.”91 As such their identities must be redrawn and reaffirmed through narratives and discourses of contamination and cleanup. The metaphor of immigrant as pollutant present in media discourse pushes immigrants to the periphery—threats to be feared and problems to be dealt with—to draw a border between differing identities. These images of contamination license popular stereotypes and “institutional discrimination.”92 As Donald Macedo writes, the result is often that both documented and undocumented immigrants materially experience the loss of their dignity, the denial of their humanity, and, in many cases, outright violence. . . . Language such as “border rats,” “wetbacks,” “aliens,” “illegals,” “welfare queens,” and “non-White hordes,” used by the popular press not only dehumanizes other cultural beings, but also serves to justify the violence perpetrated against subordinated groups.93

The identities of self and other constructed by the metaphoric representations of immigrants as pollutants encourage social relationships that, as Macedo notes, materially affect immigrants and non-immigrants alike. Every selection is also a “reflection” and “deflection” of reality; thus metaphors of immigration close off other possibilities for understanding immigration.94 The “metaphorical plot” becomes so standard that other explanations or alternatives begin to seem “unrealistic or ridiculous.”95 Popular media portray immigrants as threats that must be isolated and removed rather than as subjects with concrete human stories. Likewise, immigration is portrayed as an encroaching danger that precludes consideration of immigration as a natural effect of a shrinking global society. Considerations of the reasons underlying migration or the potentially positive contributions of immigrants are often ignored in the face of the metaphoric language of danger and threat. Instead, news media discourses often portray immigrants as toxic substances polluting the country. Migration is depicted as a kinetic seepage of another area’s social problem into America. These narratives of contamination and pollution create a moral order. Mary Douglas explains this organizing function of pollution metaphors: ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created.96

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These metaphoric understandings of the immigration “problem” create conceptual and societal hierarchies that lend themselves to particular solutions. The best option to deal with the mobile threat presented in news media discourse is to corral and quarantine the pollutants. The process of rounding up and deporting immigrants seems the “natural” solution, just as cleaning up and disposing of the toxic waste of Love Canal seemed the only logical option. Metaphors of pollution and contamination are also evident in popular narratives concerning the need to secure the border with a fence. In this case, the metaphoric understanding of immigrants as dangerous waste is not only evident in recent news media discourse but influences government initiatives and legislative debate on immigration reform, as well. For example, the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which called for the building of a 700-mile border fence along areas of the U.S.– Mexico border, arguably draws on an understanding of immigrants as invaders or pollutants that must be restrained behind a barrier. Plans for extended fences as well as stricter border patrols and more stringent deportation efforts continue to constitute debate about immigration reform.97 As a terminological filter, the metaphor of immigrant as pollutant in popular news discourse reifies popular stereotypes of immigrants and strengthens institutional responses that deal with immigrants as threats to be contained and eliminated. Of course the metaphor of immigrant as pollutant is not the only metaphor at work in this media coverage. Immigrants are also portrayed as invaders, criminals, diseases, infestations, physical burdens, and destructive flood waters. Immigration as a phenomenon is presented through the metaphors of genetic defect or societal balkanization. Yet the environmental metaphor of pollution plays an important role in the rhetoric of immigration. Pristine nature, with the threat posed to it by toxic chemicals, is deployed discursively as a repository for metaphoric understandings of immigrants. These metaphors work together, “weav[ing] a congruent web of marginalization and aspersion.”98 Representations of immigration implicitly make a connection to images of pollution, waste, and contamination that form part of popular consciousness and historical memory. Comparing news images of pollution from toxic waste crises such as Love Canal to recent news media images of immigration uncovers another metaphor by which immigration and its effects are articulated to mass audiences. The ways in which these images position the viewer in relation to the immigrants, and the contexts into which the immigrants are placed, can create a connection that helps explain and interpret the message for its viewers. Furthermore, these images operate rhetorically alongside verbal and textual calls for the “cleaning” of immigrants and the sealing of the border from further contamination. Exposing these forms of representation and their ideological assumptions can be an important step in weakening their conceptual

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hold and constructing more open metaphors for understanding the people who cross the border every day.

Notes

1. Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life, 2nd ed. (New York: Perennial, 2002). Some scholars have objected to the use of the term “immigrant” to refer to migrants coming into the United States. Recognizing the xenophobic assumptions that often underlie the use of the term, I will use it in this essay because the discourse I analyze conceives of immigrants from the perspective of the landed U.S. citizen. See Daniels, Coming to America, 3–4.



2. The scholarship on popular discourse about immigration is extensive and diverse. It features studies of representations surrounding particular controversies and larger surveys of immigration discourse. For example, see Anne Demo, “Sovereignty Discourse and Contemporary Immigration Politics,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 291–311; Hugh Mehan, “The Discourse of the Illegal Immigration Debate: A Case Study in the Politics of Representation,” Discourse & Society 8 (1997): 249–70; Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California’s Proposition 187 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).



3. Otto Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002).



4. Francis A. Beer and Christ’l De Landtsheer, eds., Metaphorical World Politics (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004), 6.



5. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). For more discussion of the cognitive function of metaphor, see also Rosamund Moon and Murray Knowles, Introducing Metaphor (New York: Routledge, 2006), 3–5; Robert L. Ivie, “Metaphor and the Rhetorical Invention of Cold War ‘Idealists,’” Communication Monographs 54 (1987): 166–68. Scholars have used the framework of metaphor to ground theoretical and critical studies of discourse. For some examples, see William A. Ausmus, “Pragmatic Uses of Metaphor: Models and Metaphor in the Nuclear Winter Scenario,” Communication Monographs 65 (1998): 67–82; John E. Fritch and Karla K. Leeper, “Poetic Logic: The Metaphoric Form as a Foundation for a Theory of Tropological Argument,” Argumentation and Advocacy 29 (1993): 186–94; Michael C. Leff, “Topical Invention and Metaphoric Interaction,” Southern States Communication Journal 48 (1983): 214–29; Michael Osborn, “Archetypal Metaphor in Rhetoric: The Light-Dark Family,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 53 (1967): 115–26.



6. Josef Stern, Metaphor in Context (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).



7. Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising, 8–9.



8. Mark Ellis and Richard Wright, “The Balkanization Metaphor in the Analysis of U.S. Immigration,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88 (1998): 688.



9. George Lakoff and Sam Ferguson, “The Framing of Immigration,” The Rockridge Institute, http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/research/rockridge/immigration (accessed October 28, 2006). See also Ono and Sloop, Shifting Borders, ch. 5.

10. Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 91. 11. Mehan, “Discourse,” 251.

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12. Ono and Sloop, Shifting Borders, 28. Ono and Sloop’s book provides a thorough discussion of the many discursive strategies by which conventional logics of immigration, which disempower immigrants, are entrenched through media and public debate. Moreover, Ono and Sloop uncover more subversive vernacular discourses that, by virtue of their incommensurability with dominant logics, challenge dominant assumptions about immigrants in popular discourse. The relevance of Ono and Sloop’s work to the current study lies in its catalogue of metaphoric representations of immigrants in the coverage of Proposition 187. 13. Ono and Sloop, Shifting Borders, 156. 14. Dorothy Nelkin and Mark Michaels, “Biological Categories and Border Controls: The Revival of Eugenics in Anti-Immigration Rhetoric,” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 18, no. 5/6 (1998): 35. 15. Ellis and Wright, “Balkanization,” 688. 16. Leo R. Chavez, Covering Immigration: Popular Images and the Politics of the Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 17. Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising. See also Otto Santa Ana, Juan Moran, and Cynthia Sanchez, “Awash under a Brown Tide: Immigration Metaphors in California Public and Print Media Discourse,” Aztlán 23 (1998): 137–76. 18. Scholarship on visual rhetoric has increasingly become a mainstay of rhetorical criticism as more and more critics turn to analyzing images and other “visual artifacts” for their persuasive and constitutive elements. Yet as Cara Finnegan and Jiyeon Kang note, “it is no longer useful to simply ‘add images and stir.’” Scholars need to move beyond justifying the study of images to begin theorizing “how images and vision operate” and how visual modes of rhetoric interact with other rhetorical elements like the verbal or aural. Cara A. Finnegan and Jiyeon Kang, “‘Sighting’ the Public: Iconoclasm and Public Sphere Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 379. For further discussion of the importance of the study of visual rhetoric as well as examples of visual rhetorical criticism, see Kevin Michael DeLuca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (New York: Guilford Press, 1999); Kevin M. DeLuca and Anne Teresa Demo, “Imagining Nature: Watkins, Yosemite, and the Birth of Environmentalism,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 17 (2000): 241–26; Cara A. Finnegan, “The Naturalistic Enthymeme and Visual Argument: Photographic Representation in the ‘Skull Controversy,’” Argumentation and Advocacy 37 (2001): 133–49; Sonja Foss, “A Rhetorical Schema for the Evaluation of Visual Imagery,” Communication Studies 45 (1994): 213–24; Christine Harold and Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Behold the Corpse: Violent Images and the Case of Emmett Till,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8 (2005): 263–86. In this paper I follow Finnegan and Kang’s call and examine how visual rhetoric creates images of immigrants that influence contemporary immigration debates. 19. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Performing Civic Identity: The Iconic Photograph of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 365. 20. Hariman and Lucaites, “Performing Civic Identity,” 366. 21. Cori E. Dauber, “The Shots Seen ’Round the World: The Impact of the Images of Mogadishu on American Military Operations,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 4 (2001): 654. For further discussion of the myth of objectivity and naturalism tied to photographs and visual images, see Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 32–51; Finnegan, “The Naturalistic Enthymeme and Visual Argument.” 22. Margaret Morse, “News as Performance: The Image as Event,” in The Television Studies Reader, ed. Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill (New York: Routledge, 2004), 222. For further

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Rhetoric & Public Affairs discussion of the ideological elements of news media discourse, see Shawn J. Parry-Giles, “Mediating Hillary Rodham Clinton: Television News Practices and Image-Making in the Postmodern Age,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 17 (2000): 205–26; Mimi White, “Ideological Analysis and Television,” in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed. Robert C. Allen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 161–202.

23. My approach to address this visual deficiency is not to examine the visual images of news media discourse in isolation. The focus on the visual alone is also deficient because it fails to recognize the relationship among the visual, the textual, and the aural parts of the message, an approach that is necessary to understand the construction of contemporary media discourse. Cara Finnegan notes in her discussion of the “image-text” the need to look at how the visual “taps into, shapes, and contests” the verbal and aural messages of the text to illustrate how these relationships negotiate meaning. Cara A. Finnegan, “Recognizing Lincoln: Image Vernaculars in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8 (2005): 35. See also Cara A. Finnegan, “Social Engineering, Visual Politics, and the New Deal: FSA Photography in Survey Graphic,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 3 (2000): 333–62. For an example of this comprehensive approach toward metaphoric representations, see Martin J. Medhurst, “The Rhetorical Structure of Oliver Stone’s JFK,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10 (1993): 128–43. 24. Concepts like “nature” and “wilderness” are often used in popular arguments to frame minorities or women in certain symbolic relationships with dominant culture. Conceptions of women as closer to nature or more emotional and empathetic in contrast to rational and self-willed men serve to underpin patriarchal gender roles. See, for example, Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), 67–87. Similarly, ethnic and cultural minorities like Native Americans have faced racism and subjugation through a supposed closeness to a virgin and pliable nature. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in The Great New Wilderness Debate, eds. J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 471–99. These are just a few examples of the myriad ways in which terms like “nature” are deployed to make racist, sexist, or xenophobic arguments, pointing to the need for examining the ways in which “nature,” and its attendant concepts, is deployed rhetorically. 25. My focus was on television segments aired on Fox News and CNN that were later available on their websites (n=16, 8 from each network). I chose to search for the texts on the networks’ respective websites to obtain the most comprehensive body of broadcasts possible; I was able to analyze reports airing at a variety of times over a stretch of several months. I searched these websites for all news stories that contained the words “immigrant,” “immigration,” “immigrate,” or “border.” I narrowed these results by topic—by eliminating stories that were not explicitly about immigration and border issues (visa laws or taxes, for example), and by format—by focusing on those messages that contained images and video clips (not only discursive information). 26. News coverage of immigration in mainstream media evolved as the controversy over immigration reform developed throughout 2005. Popular concern over growing numbers of undocumented immigrants and the Bush administration’s call for immigration reform policy culminated in several months of intense debate through September and October. As part of President Bush’s Homeland Security appropriation bill, signed in October, the government contributed over $5 billion for security and surveillance technology for border checkpoints. Arguing that “to defend this country, we’ve got to enforce our borders,” Bush

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called for further action by Congress to craft a “comprehensive immigration reform program,” including border enforcement, a guest worker program, and provisions for undocumented immigrants already in the country. See George W. Bush, “Remarks on Signing the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations,” October 18, 2005, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 41 (2005): 1555, 1557. Responding to congressional debate on immigration reform, Bush toured Arizona and Texas in November, speaking to border security officials in each state and continuing a push for action on immigration. Congressional debate resulted in the passage of HR 4437 in December of 2005, providing a clear end point for this analysis. The controversy continues, however, with a debate between competing Senate and House proposals as well as the passage of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, calling for a 700-mile border fence. “Secure Fence Act of 2006,” (PL 109–367, October 26, 2006), available from THOMAS (Library of Congress), http://thomas.loc.gov (accessed December 14, 2006). 27. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (1945; rpt., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 503. 28. Andrew Szasz, Ecopopulism: Toxic Waste and the Movement for Environmental Justice. Vol. 1, Social Movements, Protest, and Contention (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 42. 29. Szasz, Ecopopulism, 41. 30. Szasz, Ecopopulism, 41. 31. Szasz, Ecopopulism, 50. 32. For a particularly thorough explanation of the visual elements in news media discourse on the Love Canal crisis, see Szasz, Ecopopulism, ch. 3. Szasz provides a comprehensive table of all images (both photograph and video) from news coverage of Love Canal (49). I describe several examples from the discourse on Love Canal in more detail to outline some of the rhetorical elements of these images. 33. Rebecca Chase, ABC World News Tonight, ABC, November 20, 1980. For a photographic example, see the photo by Bill Snead from the Washington Post available in Christine Russell, “Placing Risk Between Panic and Apathy: A New Industry Emerges,” APF Reporter 11, Alicia Patterson Foundation, http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF1101/Russell/Russell.html (accessed November 8, 2006). 34. For the impact of media coverage on public opinion, see Szasz, Ecopopulism, 50–56. 35. Szasz, Ecopopulism, 44. 36. Szasz, Ecopopulism, 44. 37. Image available on the EPA webpage. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Continuing the Promise of Earth Day,” in Superfund 20th Anniversary Report (Washington, D.C.: Environmental Protection Agency, 2000), 3, http://www.epa.gov/superfund/20years/20yrpt1. pdf (accessed November 8, 2005). Several television news reports featured similar visual images including Walter Cronkite, CBS Evening News, CBS, May 21, 1980. 38. Szasz, Ecopopulism, 52. 39. The photograph is available in Russell, “Placing Risk Between Panic and Apathy.” 40. Szasz, Ecopopulism, 48. 41. “Shocking New Video of Illegal Immigrants Crossing the Border,” Hannity & Colmes, Fox News Network, November 14, 2005, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,175481,00.html (accessed November 21, 2005).

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42. “Just How Dangerous Is It to Cross the Border Illegally?” Hannity & Colmes, Fox News Network, October 18, 2005, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,172598,00.html (accessed November 21, 2005). See also Anita Vogel, “Is Illegal Immigration Grounds for State of Emergency?” Fox News Channel, October 18, 2005, http://www.foxnews.com/story/ 0,2933,172531,00.html (accessed October 21, 2006). 43. Candy Crowley, “GOP Struggles with Immigration,” Cable News Network, November 29, 2005. 44. Crowley, “GOP Struggles with Immigration.” 45. Chavez, Covering Immigration, 69. 46. Close-ups can often provide a sense of honesty and veracity to the images being shown in video coverage as close-up shots are associated with a curious, penetrating gaze. These closeups also magnify the evidentiary status of images by conveying a sense of journalistic integrity. See Parry-Giles, “Mediating Hillary Rodham Clinton,” 215–16. 47. This video sequence of immigrants jumping over a fence and running through the streets quickly became a stock component of immigration coverage on CNN. See Louise Schiavone, “Broken Borders,” Cable News Network, October 14, 2005. As scholars such as Shawn ParryGiles have noted, news networks often recycle visual images and sequences, repurposing and recontextualizing them to fit into later stories. Parry-Giles, “Mediating Hillary Rodham Clinton,” 212–13. 48. Casey Wian, “Bush on Border Issues,” Cable News Network, November 28, 2005. 49. This imagery of border seepage and pollution abounds. Another interesting example features a shot of the Rio Grande from the American bank of the river. On the other side a group of Mexican men sit and crouch idly in the shade. The camera angle is wide, which prevents identifying many of their particular features, but the men stare across the river at the camera as if caught in the act of breaking the law. As with these other images, they sit pooled and waiting for the camera crews to leave so that they can resume their trek across the border. Schiavone, “Broken Borders.” 50. “Shocking New Video.” 51. “We don’t want people walkin’ across the border here and blowing something up,” argues one minuteman volunteer at the Canadian border. Concern over border crossings grew to such heights that minutemen groups began to patrol the Canada–U.S. border for potential illegal crossings, even though such crossings are very rare. Dan Springer, “Locals Fret Over Minutemen Patrol,” Fox News Channel, October 19, 2005, http://www.foxnews.com/ story/0,2933,172803,00.html (accessed October 21, 2006). 52. “Rep. Duncan Hunter on Border Security,” The O’Reilly Factor, Fox News Network, November 8, 2005, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,175030,00.html (accessed October 21, 2006). See also Vogel, “Is Illegal Immigration Grounds for State of Emergency?” 53. Chavez, Covering Immigration, 54. 54. Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising, 76. 55. Chavez, Covering Immigration, 69. For another example, see Elaine Quijano, “Bush on Immigration,” Cable News Network, November 29, 2005. 56. Condit et al. argue that a discussion of the metaphors within a text must take note of the polysemy of metaphoric representations. Depending on the linguistic and situational context of the rhetoric, different meanings and intersections of metaphors can be “activated” or obscured. Thus, it is important to note that multiple metaphors are at work in this discourse. I cannot offer a singular metaphoric interpretation but only point to a metaphor that has

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been heretofore underexamined by critics. Celeste M. Condit et al., “Recipes of Blueprints for Our Genes? How Contexts Selectively Activate the Multiple Meanings of Metaphors,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 303–26. 57. Szasz, Ecopopulism, 44. 58. Szasz, Ecopopulism, 43–48. 59. “Sean Hannity Visits the Minutemen Volunteers in Arizona,” Hannity & Colmes, Fox News Network, April 19, 2005, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,153908,00.html (accessed November 21, 2005). Though this segment of Hannity & Colmes was initially aired before the specific time period of my investigation in this essay, the video footage of protestors and minutemen was replayed later in the year. See supra note 47. This illustrates, arguably, that some of the representational themes described in this essay are evident in other news media discourse as well. 60. “Sean Hannity Visits the Minutemen Volunteers in Arizona”; Schiavone, “Broken Borders.” 61. Springer, “Locals Fret Over Minutemen Patrol.” 62. “Sean Hannity Visits the Minutemen Volunteers in Arizona.” 63. Szasz, Ecopopulism, 44. 64. See Parry-Giles, “Mediating Hillary Rodham Clinton,” 212. 65. Szasz, Ecopopulism, 46. 66. Kristine Roman, “Immigration Pressures,” Lou Dobbs Tonight, Cable News Network, October 7, 2005; Casey Wian, “Bush on Border Issues.” 67. Szasz, Ecopopulism, 47. 68. Szasz, Ecopopulism, 48. 69. Szasz, Ecopopulism, 48. 70. “Sean Hannity Visits the Minutemen Volunteers in Arizona.” 71. “What Role Can Mexico Play in Preventing Illegal Immigration?” Hannity & Colmes, Fox News Network, October 4, 2005, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,171202,00.html (accessed November 21, 2005). 72. “What Role Can Mexico Play.” 73. “Immigration Woes: Is the U.S. Doing Enough?” Hannity & Colmes, Fox News Network, October 5, 2005, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,171327,00.html (accessed November 21, 2005). 74. Wian, “Bush on Border Issues.” 75. Crowley, “GOP Struggles with Immigration.” Also Roman, “Immigration Pressures” and Vogel, “Is Illegal Immigration Grounds for State of Emergency?” among others. 76. See “Sean Hannity Visits the Minutemen Volunteers in Arizona.” These representational patterns are evident in other videos as well; see Roman, “Immigration Pressures”; Schiavone, “Broken Borders.” 77. Importantly, the only detail of the immigrant that is obviously recognizable is his or her ethnicity. Subsequently, it is this ethnic status that differentiates the immigrant from the officer and makes him or her a threat. See Mehan, “Discourse,” for further discussion of the ethnic element of the metaphor. 78. Other examples include Kristine Roman, “Broken Borders: Visa Overstays,” Lou Dobbs Tonight, Cable News Network, October 25, 2005; Wian, “Bush on Border Issues.” 79. Szasz, Ecopopulism, 48.

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80. Lisa A. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 368. 81. For further work on historical representations of immigrants, see for example Leroy G. Dorsey and Rachel M. Harlow, “‘We Want Americans Pure and Simple’: Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6 (2003): 55–78; Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.–Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge, 2002). 82. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders,” 381. 83. Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte, “Exploring (and Exploding) the U.S. Media Prism,” Media Studies Journal 8 (1994): 163–75. 84. Ono and Sloop define dominant logics as the “logics of judgment” “that work within the most commonly accepted (and institutionally supported) understandings of what is just or unjust, good or bad” (Shifting Borders, 14). They argue that these dominant logics demand critical attention because they form the overarching understandings and discursive patterns of social issues. 85. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1984). 86. I draw my understanding of the ideology of discourse from the work of scholars such as Philip Wander, Raymie McKerrow, Kent Ono, and John Sloop. I consider the ideological implications of discourse to be the ways in which it works to serve dominant interests and construct dominant interpretations. As Wander notes, “ideological criticism joined with rhetorical theory is prepared to critique rhetoric legitimizing actions, policies, and silences relevant to the great issues of our time.” Philip C. Wander, “The Third Persona: An Ideological Turn in Rhetorical Theory,” Central States Speech Journal 35 (1984): 199. See also McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric.” 87. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 46. 88. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 101. 89. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders,” 381. For a discussion of the racial politics of immigration, see Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). For further discussion of the racial elements of Latino/a identity, see Bernadette Marie Calafell, “Disrupting the Dichotomy: ‘Yo Soy Chicana/o?’ in the New Latina/o South,” Communication Review 7 (2004): 175–204. 90. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 229. 91. Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 297. 92. Donaldo Macedo, “The Colonialism of the English Only Movement,” Educational Researcher 29 (2000): 15. 93. Macedo, “The Colonialism of the English Only Movement,” 15. 94. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 45. 95. Riikka Kuusisto, “Heroic Tale, Game, and Business Deal? Western Metaphors in Action in Kosovo,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 53. Examples of metaphoric representations creating mainstream interpretations of situations or events abound. See Robert L. Ivie, “Literalizing the Metaphor of Soviet Savagery: President Truman’s Plain Style,” Southern

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Speech Communication Journal 51 (1986): 91–105; Ivie, “Metaphor and the Rhetorical Invention of Cold War ‘Idealists,’” 165–82. 96. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 5. 97. One example of this move toward stricter “barriers” and more “cleanup” is House of Representatives Bill 4437, colloquially called the “Sensenbrenner Bill” for its sponsor in the House of Representatives, James Sensenbrenner (R-WI). The House passed HR 4437 on December 16, 2005. In its original form, the Sensenbrenner Bill authorized a number of stricter initiatives to control undocumented immigration. Among many changes, it called for the building of a larger fence along the U.S.–Mexico border, mandated immediate deportation of undocumented immigrants by ending the policy of “catch and release,” and classified both undocumented entry and the aiding of undocumented immigrants as felonies. “Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005” (HR 4437, December 16, 2005), available from THOMAS (Library of Congress), http://thomas.loc.gov (accessed December 14, 2006). The Sensenbrenner Bill was split up into individual proposals, one of which was the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which passed Congress on December 14. 98. Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising, 284.