Illegal immigrant: Is it time we dropped the I-word?

In India we don’t bother much about the political niceties of words like “illegal immigrant”. That was clear during the Bodo-Muslim violence in Assam last year. The words “illegal immigration” and “illegal immigrant” were used indiscriminately by politicians on all sides of the debate. After touring refugee camps in Assam, LK Advani said “Introspection must lead to the identification of the root cause which is the issue of illegal immigration from Bangladesh”? He also said “Illegal Bangladeshi immigrants have embarked on a large-scale grab of the land of indigenous communities.” Illegal immigration? Or illegal immigrant? What’s the difference? No one noticed really. [caption id=“attachment_693034” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Just immigrants? Reuters[/caption] There is an important difference according to AP. Its style guide has finally dropped the phrase “illegal immigrant.” It’s basically agreed with what Drop The I-word activists had been arguing for years. Actions are illegal. People are not. The U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act defines an immigrant as someone who has been “lawfully admitted into the country” anyway. “So ‘legal immigrant’ is a redundant concept and ‘illegal immigrant’ is oxymoronic,” says Jonathan Rosa, assistant professor of linguistic anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. It is in fact a political term. It was first commonly used by the Nazis to describe Jews fleeing Germany into Palestine without authorization. Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel told journalist Maria Hinojosa:

Because once you label a people ‘illegal,’ that is exactly what the Nazis did to Jews.’ You do not label a people ‘illegal.’ They have committed an illegal act. .. They are living in this country without permission. But they are not an illegal people.

Calling someone illegal tacitly green signals racial profiling and worse because it carries within it an unspoken assumption of lesser rights. For many this is a distinction without a difference. The common refrain on the other side of the issue is “What part of illegal don’t you understand?” AP’s style change is a sign that it sees the times are changing. Mitt Romney stuck to “illegals” and suggested they “self-deport” and found his Latino support stuck at 27% to Obama’s 71%. Republican Senator Marco Rubio may or may not be serious about immigration reform but he tends to use the word “undocumented.” But here’s the problem. AP says “undocumented” is not correct because the person in question might have plenty of documents, just not the ones relevant to residency. And that’s where this debate ties itself up into knots. AP tells you what not to do. But it cannot tell you what to do instead. The LA Times sums up the dilemma thus:

So we don’t know yet how many news outfits will want to find their own alternatives to “illegal immigrant,” or switch to one of AP’s suggested but wordier substitute phrases, such as “a person entering a country illegally” or “a person entering without legal permission.”

These are not exactly Twitter-friendly suggestions. What all this simply points to is the fact that the whole issue is complex and convoluted and defies easy solution – whether it’s the open-the-borders sort or deport-them-all kind. There is no one-size-fits all fix for the problem and no portmanteau phrase for those at its centre. Does it matter? Or is this a peculiarly American hang-up with nomenclature and language? One must remember this is a country that doesn’t think it odd at all that it calls green card holders Permanent Resident Aliens as if they had all landed from Mars. AP has recently wrestled with other naming issues – should couples in same-sex marriages or civil unions be called partners or husband/wife, for example. The LA Times reminds its readers “The state of California used to stamp the word “illegitimate” in red ink on the birth certificate of a child of an unwed mother, until wiser heads realized that, whatever the arguments about the benefit of two parents versus one, society was stigmatizing a child for something the child had no control over.” Anyway where there’s an “unwed mother”, there’s probably an “unwed father” (or at least wed-to-a-different woman father) but he never has to bear the stigma of that label. Labels do matter. That’s why in India we have debated about the use of words like Harijan, untouchable, Dalit and dumped some and embraced others. But at the end of the day what you are called does not mean much if you are still stuck at the bottom of the ladder. As columnist Ruben Navarette points out changing labels does not change ground realities.

Besides, this whole debate over the “I-word” is a distraction from issues that really matter. It puts a bright light on the hypocrisy of liberals who are tough on words but soft on an administration that has been like a plague set loose on Latino immigrants in the United States.

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In a sense, India is lucky. Because it is not caught up in the parsing of language on this issue like America is, the words “illegal immigrant” carries no extra sting than “illegal immigration.” So a Nitin Gadkari can say “The Assam violence is a conflict between people of Indian origin and illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.” And a Tarun Gogoi can oppose him and say “The incidents in Assam are not the handiwork of illegal immigrants. I can prove that.” But if we don’t think about the impact of words, we also run the risk of not noticing the slippery slide. Responding to AP’s style guide change as “political correctness on steroids” the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC says it will start using the term “illegal invaders” instead. In India, we are almost there. Praveen Togadia, the VHP leader is on record as saying “All over India there are three crore Bangladeshi Muslim infiltrators. They need to be deported on a war footing.”