ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines how the trope of the “illegal alien” and with it a framework centered around illegality, which has dominated United States immigration discourse since the 1970s, entered the legal and discursive landscape in the first place. To do so, the chapter traces the historical (creation of the U.S. nation, establishment of borders, securitization), the legal (Alien Exclusion Acts), and the discursive (news media, presidential campaigns, public opinion) conditions that made an illegality framework feasible in US immigration discourse in the first place. Secondly, it provides its readers with a critical analysis of dominant tropes at the turn of the millennium, such as “illegal alien” and “illegal immigrant,” and explains why the focus on the good vs. bad immigrant binary, which had emerged in the 1990s, was once again so dominant at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
