The long struggle over what to call ‘undocumented immigrants’ or, as Trump said in his order, ‘illegal aliens’ – Washington Post
When speaking to a conference of police chiefs in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 8, President Trump told them to report "who the illegal immigrant gang members are...you're local. You know the illegals, you know them by their first name, you know them by their nicknames." (The Washington Post)
As a candidate and now as president, Donald Trump has made copious use of the term illegal to describe people who enter the United States without the proper paperwork or stay here longer thantheir papers allow.
On the campaign trail, he regularly blustered about illegal aliens.As president-elect, he scolded Germany about taking in all these illegals from the Middle East. Now in the White House, his controversialtravel ban orders federal agencies to swiftly send illegal aliens back to their home countries.
Trump deployed the term again on Wednesday, telling a conference of police chiefs to turn illegal immigrant gang members over to federal authorities. You know the illegals, he said.
Language like that makesimmigrant advocates cringe. In recent years, therehas been a push to change the vocabulary surrounding immigration to avoid the term illegal. The main idea is that itsnot a crime for a noncitizen to stay in the country without authorization, but a civil offense. Advocates frequently invoke the quote no human being is illegal from Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. They propose using undocumented or unauthorized instead.
The effort has gained steam. In 2013, the Associated Press dropped illegal immigrant from its stylebook, saying illegal should be used to describe actions, not people. Other publications followed suit, including USA Today. In a similar move, California Gov. Jerry Brown in 2015 scrubbed alien from the states labor code. More recently, the Library of Congress announcedin March 2016 thatit would seek to remove illegal alien from its subject headings.
(The Washington Posts stylebook says illegal immigrant is accurate and acceptable,but notes that some find it offensive. The Post does not refer to people as illegal aliens or illegals, per its guidelines.)
It comes as zero surprise that a man defined by his contempt for political correctness wouldnt use a more polite term to describe the people he has vowed todeport en masse. Indeed, Trump may very well use terms such as illegals deliberately to needle hisopponents.
It wouldnt have gotten him in any trouble in 1970.
At the time, the offending word was wetback. For decades, it was used to describe Mexicans living in the United States, and it wasnt unusual to see it in newspaper articles and popular literature. In 1954, the U.S. government even titleda mass deportation effort Operation Wetback.By the 1960s, it was increasingly regarded as an ethnic slur, butmajor publications were still using it in stories and headlines.
In 1970, after the Los Angeles Times ran an editorial using the term wetback, a group of Chicano law students from UCLA proposed an alternative, as KPCC has reported.
We are still faced with insensitive and racist terms, such as wetback, to refer to Mexican nationals who have entered the country illegally, the students wrote in a letter to the editor. We are now educating the public to use terms like illegal aliens or illegal entrants.
Its not clear how successful the students were in that particular case. Butover the next 20 years, illegal alien, or some variation of it, became commonplace, according to University of Berkeley sociologist Edwin Ackerman, who has studied the terms use in media. Ackerman said the change wasspurred by the civil rights movementsattempts to make racist language less acceptable.
Thats partly why the language of illegality starts to pick up, he told NPR in 2015,because it has this supposed neutrality to it.
By the 1990s, however, illegal alien had fallen out of favor. As Ackerman told NPR, It allows you to speak of a certain group of people, and everybody knows what particular group of people that is, without having to recourse to any sort of racist language.
In the past decade, debate over theuse of illegal alien has played out ingovernment. Federal agencies make wide use of the term. So do federal courts. The phrase has appeared in numerous Supreme Court decisions, though theres no requirement that jurists use it in immigration cases.
Some judges and legal scholars have argued in favor of illegal alien. An appeals court decision on one of President Barack Obamas immigration executive actions defended the term, citing a popular legal dictionary that rejected alternatives such as undocumented immigrant as needless euphemisms and near-gobbledygook. Because undocumented suggests unaccounted for, the meaning could be obscured, reads the passage in the Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage. Illegal alien is not an opprobrious epithet: it describes one present in a country in violation of the immigration laws, the passage says.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor disagrees. In 2009, she became the first judge on the high court to opt for the term undocumented immigrant inan opinion, as Adam Liptak of the New York Times noted. She explained her perspective on the issue in later interviews, saying illegal alien creates the perception that immigrants are all criminals and criminals in a negative sense of drug addicts, thieves, and murderers.
A 2012 immigrationdecision in the Supreme Court drew praise from advocates for omittingillegal immigrants and illegal aliensaltogether, except when quoting other sources. As a general rule, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy noted in the majority opinion, it is not a crime for a removable alien to remain present in the United States. CNN contributor Charles Garcia saidthe courts nonjudgmental language reflected a more humanistic approach to reforming U.S. immigration policy.
With an epiclegal challenge to Trumpstravel ban underway, the high court will again have the opportunity to parse the language of illegality. Given its recent rulings, the court is likely to choose its words carefully.
The president, meanwhile, has made his preference clear.
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The long struggle over what to call 'undocumented immigrants' or, as Trump said in his order, 'illegal aliens' - Washington Post