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SPEAK OUT: 'Undocumented' or 'Illegal'?
The phrase you choose can cast aspersions and draw allegiances at its mere utterance.
Opponents of the Maryland "Dream Act" collect petition signatures at the Hometown Holidays celebration in Rockville over Memorial Day weekend.
Sebastian Montes
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Amid the raging invective focused on the nation’s efforts to deal with unlawful immigration, a war of words wages in the undercurrent—a subtle struggle over the language used to define the discussion.
Are the millions of people in the United States who are not here lawfully “illegal” or are they “undocumented”?
The question is not mere semantics, activists and experts say: Choosing one over the other exposes allegiances and stokes the embers of animosity.
Take for example the ballots that await Maryland voters in this November’s election. Question 4—the referendum on Maryland’s version of the “Dream Act”—will ask whether the state should allow “undocumented immigrants” to be eligible for in-state tuition.
Which term do you prefer, and why? Tell us in comments or vote in our poll.
Immigrant advocates tend to abhor “illegal” as a racially charged epithet that dehumanizes the people it's applied to.
Their opponents deride “undocumented” as politically correct pandering, and most of the nation’s media outlets dismiss it as a euphemism that portrays a person’s lack of legal status as a mere afterthought, as if to diminish the severity of having sneaked across the border or overstayed a visa.
In newspeak, “illegal immigrant” is ostensibly the norm, per decree of the Associated Press Stylebook, the standard-bearer for newspaper reporters and editors.
Last year’s update to the AP Stylebook retained “illegal immigrant” despite continued pleas from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and other groups, reported Poynter.org.
AP’s reasoning?
“Undocumented suggests that the issue is more about paperwork than one’s legal right to be in a country,” AP’s David Minthorn told Poynter.
Immigrant activists are pushing back with the national Drop the I-Word campaign, which pressures media outlets to stop using the purportedly pejorative terms.
The U.S. Supreme Court rekindled the debate this summer by dodging it altogether: “Undocumented” and “illegal” were both conspicuously missing from the court’s June 25 ruling to uphold the core of Arizona’s controversial immigration law. The justices opted instead for “unlawful” and “unauthorized” as modifiers of the legalistic descriptor “alien.”
The court’s linguistic leapfrogging set off a polemical uproar as pundits pushed the primacy of one term over the other. A pair of op-eds on CNN.com neatly encapsulated the debate.
In the first, Charles Garcia saw the Supreme Court’s omission of “illegal” as the onset of a “humanistic approach” to eventual immigration reform and bluntly declared “illegal” to be nothing short of a racial slur.
“If you don't pay your taxes, are you an illegal? What if you get a speeding ticket? A murder conviction? No. You're still not an illegal. Even alleged terrorists and child molesters aren't labeled illegals,” Garcia wrote.
The rebuttal by Ruben Navarrette argued that “undocumented” is both inaccurate and absurd, while “illegal immigrant” is the more factual.
“The phrase is accurate. It's the shoe that fits. It's reality. And, as is often the case with reality, it's hard for some people to accept,” Navarrette wrote.
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EBurger
11:04 am on Thursday, August 30, 2012
If they are undocumented, then they are illegal. But actually, all of these terms are incorrect........The Gov has declared them "New Americans"
Brian
12:26 pm on Thursday, August 30, 2012
How could they possibly be anything but illegal? Not opposed to immigration - just follow our laws and do it lawfully.
Kathy
12:39 pm on Thursday, August 30, 2012
People cannot be illegal, only actions can be illegal. Their presence here is illegal, because they are undocumented.
wigglwagon
9:23 am on Friday, August 31, 2012
You are trying to split hairs. "only actions can be illegal." Immigration is an action. Those who engage in the action of 'immigration' are immigrants. To be more precise, you can use the adjective "legal' to describe that action. By your own description, refusing to follow the legal path makes that action, 'illegal immigration.' Any way you try to spin it, those who engage in 'illegal immigration' are therefore 'illegal immigrants.'
Buck Harmon
9:37 am on Saturday, September 1, 2012
We are all human beings ...period, Kathy is correct. The terms, or labels if you will only describe action..nothing about splitting hairs to it.
wigglwagon
10:04 pm on Sunday, September 2, 2012
Kathy is not correct. Any way you try to spin it, they are in violation of the laws. They are sorry excuses for human beings because they do not give a hoot about whomever is in their way. They could not care less about the citizen and legal resident families that they force into unemployment and poverty by under bidding them for jobs.
Buck Harmon
10:16 pm on Sunday, September 2, 2012
You are of course, entitled to your own limiting opinion on this issue. I won't try to wiggle around it.......especially while you're wagon your tail..
David J Iacono
12:57 pm on Thursday, August 30, 2012
According to the Republican party platform, if they are unborn, they are legal and should be prtected at all costs. If born, they are illegal and should be cut off any assistance necessary for survival.
EBurger
1:39 pm on Thursday, August 30, 2012
Wow, can you stretch that comparison any longer.
John
6:27 pm on Thursday, August 30, 2012
How about if they just go back to their own country as an option instead of taking jobs from Americans by working for lower wages?
Kathy
7:58 pm on Thursday, August 30, 2012
We have lost far more jobs from companies moving overseas to get products produced for lower wages then we have from illegal immigrants coming here and working for lower wages. Where are all the high paid manufacturing jobs? The auto industry jobs? The jobs answering phones, customer service jobs, IT jobs, banking jobs, even the preparation of your tax returns in some cases--all those jobs moved overseas. Where is the outrage against the companies who laid off thousands of American workers to raise stock prices and profits?
wigglwagon
9:29 am on Friday, August 31, 2012
Kathy, why wouldn't it make sense to eliminate both methods that businesses use to drive down wages and benefits for workers? It is time to abolish both 'free trade' and 'illegal immigration.'
Kathy
1:54 pm on Friday, August 31, 2012
Wigglwagon--ideally, the government would fight this on both fronts, but all I hear from candidates is about immigrants, not about corporate relocation. I'm not sure that we want to eliminate "free trade," after all businesses have a right to operate where they wish. But if we placed higher import duties on goods coming in that were produced overseas, or provided that companies who have say 80% or more of their workforce in the US pay a lower corporate tax rate (since the US corporate tax rate is pretty high), that would provide an incentive to stay here or have goods manufactured here. We should take the profit out of goods manufactured overseas at low wages.
I noticed that we don't have rich people anymore, we only have "job creators." Fine. How about a lower tax rate for every person who owns a business that creates a certain number of new jobs? If someone is just reaping profits from their investments or downsizing jobs, they can pay the rates we had under Regan or Clinton. If they are truly "job creators" they can keep the Bush tax cut rates.
wigglwagon
2:59 pm on Friday, August 31, 2012
Owning a business does not create jobs. The one and only one thing that creates jobs is demand. After the great failure of the 20's, the Democratic Party spent 50 years fighting to protect workers from the insatiable greed of employers. That is when workers prospered and when we built this great economy. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party has spent the last 30 years in lock step with the Republican Party helping business use illegal immigration, free trade, and deregulation to drive down wages and destroy BENEFITS for American workers. That is all that is wrong with our economy. They have destroyed the exceptional demand that was provided by a well paid work force. Contrary to what the Gipper preached, supply is worthless without demand. The greatest innovators and entrepreneurs and producers and so called job creators are all abject failures without customers who have money to spend.
There is no shortage of American workers with talent, ambition, education, and a willingness to work hard but there is one heck of a shortage of customers with good paying jobs. Further inflation of the labor supply just makes life harder for all workers, legal and illegal.
From the Burg
2:26 pm on Thursday, August 30, 2012
On one hand I don't want to limit opportunity for a child who is trying to better his/her education, but on the other hand it feels like we are rewarding an unlawful act by the parents.
In simple terms the question to me is: Do the ends justify the means? Put another way, if the parents came here for all of the opportunity that the US offers them and their family, they are doing so through an illegal act since there is a legal process to become a US citizen or obtain temporary status. The child absolutely did not have say in whether he/she came to the US, but the parents stand to provide benefit to their child by committing the illegal act.
If a child is hungry and the parents steal food from a convenience store to feed the child, do the ends justify the means? Let's say police track down the parents after they steal the food right when the child is about to eat the food. Should the officials just allow the kids to eat the stolen food just b/c the child is hungry? Maybe it's a bad example, and someone will say I'm cold-hearted or whatever. All I want is people to play by the rules, and it's not playing by the rules to provide an in-state tuition rate to a child who would not be here if it were not for his/her parents NOT playing by the rules.
Buck Harmon
9:50 am on Saturday, September 1, 2012
There are too many rules and laws in this nation...that's half the problem, most of them are bad rules or laws that can not be fairly, or equally enforced, and they cost tons of money ( mostly taxpayer) to even attempt the enforcement.
Human beings that are willing to do anything to protect and provide a better lifestyle for their children should be commended, not condemned, there are enough American parents that don't seem to care about their children right in your own neighborhood. Deal with those problems before going after the parents that care enough to do anything for their children. Animals and wild beasts mark their territory, have we learned from them ?
Taxed More
3:38 pm on Thursday, August 30, 2012
When somebody breaks the laws - it is "illegal"!
Buck Harmon
9:51 am on Saturday, September 1, 2012
The law in many cases is illegal....how should we deal with that?
tiptop
12:33 pm on Friday, August 31, 2012
Illegal is illegal.
SOUTHWESTMINSTER
3:20 pm on Friday, August 31, 2012
Enforce the rules that are already in place.
Buck Harmon
9:52 am on Saturday, September 1, 2012
Costs too much....ain't gonna happen...pipe dream..
SOUTHWESTMINSTER
12:21 pm on Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Kinda like the "War on Drugs"
Friedhard
8:38 pm on Sunday, September 2, 2012
Its longer but I prefer "a person in the country illegally". There are many who would see that as PC, but it might help oppose the vitriolic dehumanization by the ones who scapegoat them for everything from the cost of health care to moldy bread. Relax on the ethnic cleansing agenda.
Just a guy
10:05 am on Tuesday, September 4, 2012
I really don't see a whole lot of American citizens lining up for day labor, landscaping, lettuce or fruit picking jobs... It's not like there are lines of Mexican or Latino engineers pushing Americans down the economic wage pile... If you deported all the illegal workers, I bet lettuce picked by Americans would be $10 a head.
Look, most of the people that come here are just looking for a better life, a job, a better opportunity for their kids... Almost all of them would prefer to be tax paying, law abiding people. With the changes to the immigration laws since the 1970's that's not possible.
If you want to fight illegal immigration, help the poor countries better themselves. If they could find jobs at home, they won't come here. But since they are here, why not try to make them productive and law abiding?