Apr 23 2013
Colorlines: Cesar Chavez’s Son Delivers 70k Signatures Urging New York Times to Drop the I-Word
On Tuesday afternoon dozens of activists gathered in front of the New York Times building urging the newspaper to stop using the word “illegal” to describe undocumented immigrants. Demonstrators were joined by Cesar Chavez’s son, Fernando Chavez, and Jose Antonio Vargas, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and co-founder of Define American, who delivered 70,000 signatures urging the Times to drop the i-word.
Earlier this month, the Associated Press announced they no longer recommend journalists use the term “illegal immigrant” when referring to immigrants in the United States without legal permission. The AP now joins other major journalism outfits that don’t use the term, including ABC News, USA Today, NBC and CNN.
The New York Times however continues to the term “illegal immigrant” and has only announced that they are “reconsidering” how they use the term.
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One Response to “Colorlines: Cesar Chavez’s Son Delivers 70k Signatures Urging New York Times to Drop the I-Word”
How about using “unlawfully present” in place of “illegal” in our terminology?
For both those migrants with papers and those without, the real issue is this: some people care about violations (of laws or other government rules) that enabled the migrants we’re talking about to reside in the country. And those people often don’t care whether the migrant is blameless because someone else (human traffickers, parents of DREAMers, etc) caused the violations.
Some people claim that the term “illegal” is demeaning or pejorative. Even if that could be proven, we could ask: why do those migrants deserve to be spared from that kind of term, given those violations I just mentioned? The migrants usually are willing beneficiaries of those violations, and often will commit more violations in order to stay in the USA.
Activists are demanding that people stop referring to the migrants as “illegal”. Then they should suggest something much more accurate, something that captures the fact that those violations occurred (because the violations are what people care about and are the defining characteristic of the migrants we are talking about). Why should people settle for a misleading term like “undocumented” just to avoid the alleged possibility of stigmatization?
We could say “unauthorized” instead of “illegal”. But then people could just say, “No human being is unauthorized.” So I guess that would solve nothing.
A specific individual should not be described as “illegal” while his/her immigration status is unproven. But the term is often used to refer to a group of people known to exist in the USA (or whichever destination country is being discussed), and the appropriateness of the label for them is debatable.
Saying “no human being is illegal” is a misleading slogan. I believe that few or no participants in the recent immigration debate ever seriously believed that people can be inherently illegal. I doubt that adults considering immigration issues believe the term “illegal immigrant” means that. The term is understood to have a different meaning.
Instead, some people claim that a person’s presence in a particular place, or crossing a particular boundary, at a particular time can be the result of some kind of violation. Other people believe that such a presence is itself some kind of violation. I believe these are the two widely intended meanings of “illegal immigrant”. Unfortunately, it’s not always clear which of those two is meant, but both involve illegality so maybe that doesn’t matter.
It’s true that we don’t describe people in other kinds of situations as illegal. For example, we don’t use “illegal drivers” to refer to those who get speeding tickets, or “illegal employers” to refer to those who knowingly hire employees who lack a legal right to work. But why are these migrants entitled to equality of terminology? The English language has other quirky terminology that we don’t worry about, because we know the intended meaning. We know the approximate intended meaning of this term “illegal”. Must this term have a legalistic degree of precision? Do we really need to get rid of it?
It’s true that “illegal immigrant” is not thoroughly accurate terminology. But why is “undocumented” any better? For some of the migrants we are talking about, there do exist various documents related to their citizenship or residency.