Indigestible food, conquering hordes, and waste materials: Metaphors of immigrants and the early immigration restriction debate

A prime example of metaphor use is to denigrate marginalized populations as a means of supporting adverse social policies against group members. This article de-scribes the use of organism, object, natural catastrophe/war and animal metaphors in the immigration restriction debate of the early 1900s. In addition to describing lin-guistic metaphors that served to dehumanize immigrants or portray them as a threat to social functioning, more global conceptual metaphors will also be discussed. As President George W. Bush discovered shortly after he referred to the “war on terrorism ” as a “crusade, ” metaphors and other rhetoric can have a great amount of importance in the policy arena. Whether describing social problems, the proposed response to them, or even the players and groups involved, even a single word can be a potent vehicle for enhancing or diminishing support for one’s position (Lakoff, 1995). It is not merely coincidental that political debate is often peppered with such picturesque terminology. As Donald Schön (1979) noted, problem set-ting, or the formation of how social problems are perceived, may be a more impor-tant policy issue than problem solving, and problems are framed in large part through the employment of metaphors (p. 255). To quote Krohn (1987), “those who attempt to defend questionable word choices by claiming ‘it’s only semantics’ fail to understand that much more is involved than mere vocalization ” (p. 142). This article describes metaphoric themes that were employed during the immi-gration restriction debate of early 20th century. This debate led to the most sweep