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I. INTRODUCTION
Words matter. They are a chief tool of conscious, purposeful expression. Poets carefully select words that evoke an image, feeling, or sensory experience. Politicians and their speech-writers craftprose designed to inspire supporters, persuade the undecided, and undermine opponents. Attorneys construct contracts out of words that they hope are inescapably precise and firm in meaning. However, words communicate much more than their user's consciously chosen message. They also communicate much about the user's subconscious perceptions, as well as the subconscious perceptions of the community to which the user belongs. The words we use are evidence of how we think, which, in turn, ultimately determines what we do.1
Because words reveal so much about community perceptions, they are ideal specimens of analysis when exploring societal notions of membership and belonging. By putting words under the microscope, we can examine a community's shared ordering of the world. The study of language is not new to legal academia. In fact, and specifically relevant to my objective, commentators have studied the relationship between the terminology used to describe immigrants and the implicit membership narrative that the terminology carries. Kevin Johnson, for example, has discussed the use of the word "alien" to refer to noncitizens, concluding that the term "greatly influences thinking in the United States about acceptance of immigrants from other countries."2 Keith Cunningham-Parmeter has written about metaphors used to describe immigrants.3 His study of immigration-related Supreme Court cases reveals the Court's metaphorical messages that "immigrants are aliens, immigration is a flood, and immigration is an invasion."4 These metaphors, he argues, have social and legal consequences.5
Like Professor Cunningham-Parmeter, I am interested in examining language usage to expose the hidden meaning in words and, more specifically, human perceptions of immigrants and their acceptance in the community. However, my research differs in several ways. Most significantly, my methodology is different. Rather than analyze particular samples of written or spoken language to detect patterns and currents of hidden meaning within that sample, I look at language in the aggregate. In this paper, I employ a corpus of American English containing over 450 million words of spoken and written language drawn from television, movie, and radio transcripts; newspapers; academic texts; fiction; and popular magazines. Though this methodology is an ineffective way...