We Need to Dump the Word "Illegal"

[sinkingfeeling]

http://www.truthout.org/what-part-illegal-dont-you-understand-we-need-dump59758

But there is a word more commonly used and much more damaging to immigrants and Latinos: illegal. We need to stop using it ourselves, and demand that media outlets retire the word as well.

So what's the lesson for immigration? It's time to stop kidding ourselves. As long as illegal immigrant remains an acceptable term, we lose. We certainly lose so long as our side continues to use the term. The Center for American Progress uses illegal immigrant interchangeably with undocumented immigrant. Contributors to the Huffington Post have no problems with the term. Even the t-shirts and signs protesting Arizona's SB1070 by asking "Do I look illegal?" are acquiescing to a right-wing semantic ploy. It's time we stopped.

What does a media campaign to have mainstream media talk right look like? It starts with a history lesson, to remind media outlets that illegals and illegal immigrant are terms that were created and deliberately propagated by right wing hacks. And it explains that, whether as a noun or as an adjective modifying a person, the terms are inaccurate and un-American: one of the fundamental principles of American jurisprudence is that it is the act that is illegal, not the person.

A campaign to rid us of this flawed term would also point out that the range of terms used to demean and dehumanize people - illegal alien, illegals, aliens - are simply defamatory. They are intended to not only insult, but to vilify. Which is, of course, why it is so brutally effective for the right wing's purposes. By implying criminality where there is none, no further argument is needed by those who wish to maintain the status quo, and no further argument is possible for those who see the need for immigration reform.

There is an opening right now to dramatically change the conversation. Earlier this month, 21-year old student Jessica Colotl caught people's attention after she was shot into deportation proceedings after being stopped for driving without a license. Pleas from her sorority sisters prompted ICE to give Jessica a one-year deferment and release her from detention, which in turn produced howls of protest from anti-immigrant extremists. The Sheriff of Cobb County responded to his constituents - including the owner and patrons of Mulligan's bar - and issued an arrest warrant and sent out a posse of deputies to haul her in. She has become, in the words of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a new face on an old debate.

Jessica and other young people brought here as children, who have no pathway to legalization and are now facing deportation, have disrupted people's cozy, simplistic ideas of what it means to be out of status in this country. That opens the way for new thinking.