The Language of Immigration Coverage: and Media's Role in the Production of Social Illegality.

Recently, several mainstream media organizations have moved away from using "illegal immigrant" in their immigration coverage. While this shift in immigration coverage is positive, seemingly positive language may still be exclusionary, particularly if the content of stories remains the same. We investigate whether newspaper articles that describe immigrants as "illegal" are more negative in content than articles that present immigrants as "undocumented" by analyzing 1,616 newspaper articles and letters to the editor in between 2000 and 2016, a critical period of immigration legislative activity in Arizona.