“Illegal” Eagles
The Lawrence Downes column about the denigration inherent in the “illegal immigrant” tag, cited here on Oct. 28, prompted several letters in today’s NYTimes. Almost all of the writers rejected Downes’ argument (which I support), and the tone of the letter-writers struck me by the focus on a rather puritanical legalism. (Forgive me for denigrating the Puritans.) One typical excerpt:
“The word ‘illegal’ is not a dirty word. It is to the point and honest, as it spells out the obvious difference in this case between those who are here lawfully and those who are not. To suggest that it is a ‘code word for racial and ethnic hatred’ is disingenuous at best and only adds fuel to the fire. It has been used over and over in an attempt to stifle honest discussion on this topic as well as on a range of others. We need an honest debate. Let’s keep the question of race out of it.”
Debating “illegal immigration” without realizing the racial and ethnic implications strikes me a disingenuous.
Sure it does. But your position comes very close to saying that anyone who holds a contrary view is racist. I reject that as well. It’s like saying we are not entitled to view immigration policy like anything else — tax policy, enviornmental policy. Instead, we have to ratchet up the stakes so that dispassionate conversation is impossible. And that, of course, helps those who don’t want a dispassionate conversation to begin with, whatever side of the issue they are on.
Fair point, Barbara…But I’d note that I wouldn’t espouse that contrary view, nor, I think, does Downes. It’s not true that anyone who talks about “illegal immigants” is practicing racial politics. But I do think the overlap between the public policy issue and personal biases is quite large. And too many of the populists, like Lou Dobbs, try to hide behind innocent “policy-speak” that can be a front for our baser motives.
Look, illegal immigrant is a shorthand way of saying something (people who are in the country without having the proper documentation required by law and who are working contrary to basic employment laws). Why don’t you say that every time you talk about immigration rules, which, after all, are only a problem if you happen to be in that situation. So you are using a shorthand too.
I find that the best way to deal with the arguments of someone you think is proceeding from an ulterior, discreditable motive is to address their actual arguments directly through contrary arguments. This way, at the very least, you don’t insult them about their unconscious motives, which, after all, you could be wrong about. Even a demagogue can occasionally have a reasoned basis for his or her arguments.
My point is to be attentive to words and the power of language. We may use terms and phrases that seem perfectly innocuous to us, but they can profoundly wound those they refer to. Moreover, I think Downes (as well as the CNS story) makes an interesting–and persuasive–case that the term “illegal immigrant” is the wrong one.
It is part of the character of our political discourse in the United States that we use words not only for their meaning, but for their emotional impact. When someone is called a “Nazi”, they don’t usually mean that that person is a member of the German National Socialist Worker’s Party or even that that person is a member of some national socialist (as a technical description) movement.
While the word illegal is technically accurate in the context of undocumented worker it is also part of an emotional argument by the Right that goes “these people are VIOLATING THE LAW!”, lumping them in with other lawbreakers of the felonious variety. The intent here is to stack an argument as well, of course, by putting their opponents in the position of defending “lawbreakers”.
But the point is, words used in political discourse these days almost always have some sort of emotional baggage attached to them. A discussion that talks about illegal immigrants is not going to be some sort of technical policy discussion, nor is it meant to be, no matter how many people claim that it is merely “to the point and honest”.
I certainly agree with the spirit of unagidon’s comment: that people try to gain the upper hand in a policy debate by using emotionally stacked political language, such as “pro-life.”
On the other hand, “illegal immigrants” is close enough as a form of shorthand to the actual issue that I don’t immediately assume the person using it is trying to make an emotional argument. Just as I try not to assume that a person who calls themself pro-life carries the most extreme views on abortion. I try to figure out what they mean and I might even suggest that they use a different label, but I think it’s basically counterproductive to focus so much on the language that they use to the exclusion of the points they’re trying to make.
And yes, I see the Downes and Gibson position largely as a means of discrediting arguments they disagree with by trying to demonize the speaker. Works both ways.
“On the other hand, “illegal immigrants” is close enough as a form of shorthand to the actual issue that I don’t immediately assume the person using it is trying to make an emotional argument.”
Except I am not sure that these workers are immigrating. They may well want to go back. When they say that want some sort of normal status, they may mean that they don’t want to go back until they earn enough money to. I lived and worked in Japan for a couple of years once (yes, legally). I knew several people who were working there on expired visas and in one case had been there for several years. None of us was an “immigrant”. So it seems to me that the use of illegal in this context stacks the deck in a certain sort of way, because in point of fact the kind of program we need will depend a great deal on who is coming and why.
I’m only going to defend the term illegal immigrant for so long, because I don’t use it. But saying “they’re not really immigrants” is not a way to move the debate forward. Language is organic, okay? People who try to make it clinical (“immigrant is only someone with long term plans to stay as opposed to the more general term of ‘migrant,” which refers to a person who, generally, is moving in a long-term way without the clear expectation of staying.” And really, they are “undocumented aliens,” that is, people who weren’t born here and don’t have proper documentation.”)
I get into the same debate with my daughters who chastise me for using “American Indian” instead of “Native American.” I point out that we are, all of us in our family, “native Americans” and therefore suggest that we use the following:
Pre-colombian indigenous people of the western hemisphere.
Wanna bet how often they used that term in preference to the much less accurate but toally comprehensible “Native American”?
Ugh. Nothing like not reading before submitting. I meant to say: I find people who make language clinical to be usually elitist and trying to avoid the point or impose a viewpoint, all traits motivations that rankle more than enlighten.
No, I’m not trying to make the language clinical. I prefer “undocumented aliens” myself. I just think that part of the emotional load that “illegal immigrants” carries is an onus that goes “if they are lawbreakers, how can we give them citizenship”.
While I didn’t like Bush’s guest worker program for its specifics, how much of the undocumented worker problem would be solved with some sort of equitable guest worker program? How much of the immigrant problem would then be left to a better set of laws involving legal immigration? That’s the sort of thing I am aiming at. The illegal immigrant thing seems to me to imply that there is one problem and people who do this usually then go on (in my experience) to claim there is one solution (usually a bad one).
Regardiong Barbara’s debate with her dauighter about “Native American,” I have read that the term Native American is actually a government (Census, perhaps?) creation that has little appeal to actual American Indians who prefer the term Indian (what they really wish to be called is Sioux, Apache, Blackfoot, etc., their actual tribal name rather than being lumped together in some larger group–but if you won’t call them that, than they’d rather be called Indians than Native Americans …)
Regarding Unagidon’s suggestion that illigal immigrants aren’t really immigrants … I suspect that if they really did go home in large enough numbers to render the term “immigrant” inaccurate, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Instead, they do remain, in part because their children do get to automatically become US citizens simply if they’re born on this side of the border (something that must change if we are ever to solve this problem–the US is just about the only major society on earth that grants such birth-based citizenship even to those whose parents were illegally in this country, and it is a right that has been mightily abused)
“Regarding Unagidon’s suggestion that illigal immigrants aren’t really immigrants … I suspect that if they really did go home in large enough numbers to render the term “immigrant” inaccurate, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Instead, they do remain, in part because their children do get to automatically become US citizens simply if they’re born on this side of the border (something that must change if we are ever to solve this problem–the US is just about the only major society on earth that grants such birth-based citizenship even to those whose parents were illegally in this country, and it is a right that has been mightily abused.”
Maybe. Or maybe if we had a non-exploitative guest worker program, they would come over, work, go home, come back, work, etc. They can’t do that now.
As for the abuse of a right to become a citizen if one is born here, I’m not sure how you can call that an abuse. It isn’t breaking any law to be born here and someone like that is certainly a citizen. And I am optimistic that the American ship is big enough to hold all of these people.
On the other hand, you posted on another thread that our immigration problem is a “grave threat” to the United States. What did you mean, exactly?
You cannot divorce a word from its connotations. Illegal immigrant is a pejorative word no matter how you slice it. Native American is a preferred word because a grave injustice was done to them and the memory must be kept alive. When we have to explain the word we by that very fact are showing we are adding or subtracting from its meaning.
This is why Ted Turner forbade his employees from using the word “foreigner.” Words are packed. When they are unpacked you rob their meaning.
Unagidon:
By “grave threat” I mean several things. First of all, it is a highly divisive issue on which various groups–from governors and local city governments to the Minute Men and potentially other organizations–are taking matters into their own hands because the federal government is failing to live up to its responsibilities. Yet in many cases, the courst have shot down these non-federal efforts using the argument that only the federal gov’t is supposed to deal wioth immigration issues (even though, as I said, it is not doing so). That is a recipe for greater and greater frustration which could easily lead to violence–especially because this is an issue over which people are so passionate (the relatively few cases of abortion-related shootings could eventually seem mild compared with the potential for violence when people feel their jobs and communities are at risk from a perceived foreign invasion of illegal immigrants who represent a very different culture and language (as you have suggested with your comments about various words, the terminology used is often quite important; thus, the issue of language itself must be even more important to people). It is also a grave threat because it undermines the achievement and assimilation of Hispanic Americans in two main ways: first, many anti-illegal immigrant groups and some that are outright anti-immigarnt (the two are not the same, no matter how hard others try to paint them with the same brush) will deliberately or simply incorrectly lump all Hispanic Americans together with the non-citizen illegals, raising tensions even higher (for example, if a business cannot distinguish a Hispanic American citizen from an illegal immigrant but must avoid hiring illegal immigrants, the easiest way to do that will be to not hire any Hispanics at all); at the same time, too many Hispanic Americans seem to side with the illegal immigrants against the interests of the United States (and it is indeed in the interests of the USA to control its own borders; to say anything else is utter nonsense) and thus they will invite charges of disloyalty and separatism (not entirely inaccurate, if they place their ethnicity ahead of their nationality), which will lead to further divisiveness, further potential for violence. And please note: I am NOT advocating any actions of violence or discrimination or divisiveness–I am merely pointing out that such actionswill be the likely consequence of our inability to control our borders. I stress that, unagidon, because I know frome xperience that you tend to read into comments whatever point you wish to make regardless of whether they other person actually said what you think they did (ion your above post, for example, you imply that I said the children of illegal immigrants born in the US had somehow abused our birth-citizenship laws when it is obvious that I was referring to the parents who are not in this country legally but whose children get to be US citizens simply by being born here–and then get to be used as emotional pawns by their own parents and various pro-illegal immigrant groups who bemoan the fact that families are being broken up when the illegal immigrant parents eventually face the consequences of their actions and get deported … no other major country allows itself to be manipulated so easily–just try entering Mexico illegally from its southern border and see how well you get treated)
unagidon, the problem with the term “undocument aliens” is the likelihood that a sizable number of people will think (or think that you think) that such people come from Mars, and not Mexico or some other country. Just saying.
Robert: Thank you for your response.
The word “grave” to me means something like this. If someone tells me that Uncle Bill is in grave condition, I would expect to find him in an intensive care unit with a priest anointing his forehead and his soon to be widow and five children sobbing at his feet. I would not expect to find him at a 7/11 buying a carton of cigarettes and telling me that he is moving from one pack a day to two packs.
Your examples read more like the second case. It could be that vigilante groups might start engaging in massive violence against people coming up from the south. And it could also be that an influx of undocumented Hispanics will cause people to question all Hispanics (although I think the racist part of this actually works the other way around). But I simply don’t think it is reasonable to call this situation “grave” in any sense of the word, even if what you claim could happen was the only thing that could happen, which I strongly doubt.
The rhetoric about these people seems to me to mirror the rhetoric about the big world Muslim threat. Fearful chains are being constructed about where things might lead. Next, we are told that things ARE leading there and that we have a simple choice of either doing some immediate overkill or accepting the inevitable disaster. Normally this would merely be annoying. But the one thing that you didn’t mention (and I am surprised that you didn’t) is that the reason that armed vigilantes are springing up on the border is that they in their minds have linked the undocumented worker thing with the national security thing. They are not out there patrolling because they are afraid that Guatemalans are going to be making free visits to the local emergency room or that Mexicans are going to be having citizen babies in Detroit. They think that they are defending the United States, either directly from terrorism or indirectly from some perception of a Hispanic cultural threat.
I live in a town in Illinois that has been “invaded” by Mexicans, many of whom are undocumented. They all came up to work and they are all working. They want to stay, so they tend to keep a low profile. Sometimes they get arrested and the local paper, which has a little police blotter on page two, tells us that they aren’t getting arrested for rape and murder but for drunk driving without a license; pretty much what most underpaid workers in our town get arrested for regardless of nationality. In other words, they fit in as well as lots of other people do. If it hadn’t been for 9/11, I don’t suppose that people would be taking a lot of notice of them.
Barbara said: “unagidon, the problem with the term “undocument aliens” is the likelihood that a sizable number of people will think (or think that you think) that such people come from Mars, and not Mexico or some other country. Just saying.”
I wish people did think this. The number of people who are willing to piggyback anti-Martian racism onto an imaginary immigration invasion is blessedly small.
I would say in Robert’s defense, somewhat, that a sudden spike in school enrollment of students who don’t speak English is not an easy situation to deal with. By the time my daughter started kindergarten, the percentage of children of Spanish speaking parents rose from something like 10 to 55 in my district, over a period of no more than 10 years. It’s gone down as the cost of living where I live has risen dramatically. I live in a place where the district responded with intelligence and creativity, but the strains were palpable. Many other places lack the finances, the will, and the charity to respond nearly as well. Which is to say, your perception of immigration (if your family is living with you can we skip over the theoretical possibiltiy that they are planning on returning to their country of origin?) as a problem is probably proporational to how vulnerable you feel your public schools are to this kind of stress.
There are other issues, often arising out of the cost of housing. I live in an epicenter of immigration, I think it is unfair to roll our eyes and cry racism when, for instance, someone complains that their neighborhood property values are clearly declining because three and four families are living in a so-called single family house, with 8 cars parked in what used to be the yard, and it is apparent that all of these families are immigrants. And that doesn’t begin to address the places where 20 or more people are stuffed into a townhouse and it turns out they’re mostly employees of a chain of local restaurants that bought the house pretty much for that purpose, and yes, they happen to be from the same country as the owner of the business.
I’m not hard hearted, I’m not in favor of mass deportation by any stretch, but the immigration pollyannas annoy me. Localities often overreact (a lot, in fact), enacting mean spirited and ill-conceived measures, but if the majority of immigrants that we are addressing were not Catholic, I doubt if the Church’s response would be quite so munificent, as for instance, it certainly is not in Europe.
Unagidon,
As a professional writer I choose my words carefully (whatever typos are on my postings result from my usual access to an automatic spellchecker for e-mails thaty does not work here …)
When I said “grave” I meant it as close as possible to your first example. Just Google the phrases “illegal immigration” and “new civil war” or “second civil war” … you’ll find well over 1,000 references, most of them suggesting some form of bloodshed resulting from our inability to control the borders. No, it won’t likely be full-scale armies fighting full-scale armies, but it does threaten a very “grave” future …
As for the national security implications of the vigilante border patrols, it did not really pertain to what we were discussing. However, since you brought it up, there are reports of islamic prayer rugs being found in the southwestern deserts along known illegal immigration routes. Anecdotal, to be sure, and perhaps belonging to otherwise law-abiding Muslims who somehow feel they have the right to break this country’s immigration laws … but then again, it would be better to keep watch.
And I cannot second Barbara’s statment strongly enough regarding the church and the Catholic status of the vast majority of the illegal immigrants. In my parish, the church is quite literally divided between those who speak English and those who speak Spanish, with separate Masses in separate languages–except that we who speak English (depsite otherwise being a rather diverse group of Caucasians, African-Americans, Asians, and Hispanics who prefer to attend the English Mass) are rather freqeuntly lectured during sermons about how terribly racist we are if we don’t want to throw open the borders … perhaps we should go back to a Latin mass–then everybody in our parish would be equally unable to understand whatever the pastor said!
Perhaps like almost everyone I am influenced by my own experiences. I grew up in Chicago and have seen a number of waves of various kinds of immigrants all of my life. There are problems with it as there always are, but the problems were also a sort of way of life. One just rolled with them.
I now live in a small town west of Chicago that has had a major increase in its Mexican population, which has doubled in recent years. Many of them are undocumented. They come up here to work and work they do. They want to stay, so they tend to keep a low profile. When they do get arrested for something, it isn’t for murder or rape but for drunk driving or driving without a license. Their profile in this regard is similar to that of other underpaid workers in town. For me at least, their problem is a class problem; perhaps aggravated by a language problem.
I am not saying that there is no problem. It most certainly is a big problem if several million people feel that they have to leave their country to find work. I personally don’t believe that they are being pulled here as much as are being pushed here by economic changes caused by, well, us mostly. I think the key to fixing the problem is not building a wall that they can bounce off of but helping to solve the economic problem at its source. The Mexican/Central American economies are in bad shape desite the numbers of new millionaires that have been appearing there and NAFTA has clearly not worked, at least for the general public.
Robert Reid has stated that he believes that people have a right to leave their countries in search of work, but that this does not translate to an obligation on our part to let them in. While technically this is correct, the problem is that they don’t have any place to go. Another problem is that this great mass of jobless people were created by a partial local “globalization” that concentrated on ensuring the free flow of capital without properly addressing the problem of the free flow of labor. If I can go all conservative here for a moment, but what we are seeing with the immigration crisis in America is the free market in action. Supply and demand. In terms of local stresses, part of being American has always been welcoming immigrants.
That’s all true. But I’ll leave you with another thought: the issue of past waves of immigrants (believe me, I grew up in the same kind of place) was to a very large extent ameliorated by the availability of low skill well-paying jobs that didn’t require education. It’s a lot harder to assimilate (not impossible) and certainly, a lot harder to gain economic traction in light of the tidal wave of economic changes that have occurred in the U.S., as well, many of which are also due to the forces of so-called globalization (a misnomer in its own right). We like to think that the more things change, the more they stay the same, but there are reasons to think that current immigrants without education have a much harder time achieving economic and social stability, just as native born Americans are also finding it harder to achieve stability.
I don’t know off the top of my head what policy implications that should have, but I’m tired of pretending that things are exactly the same they were when my grandparents arrived (somewere between 1895 and 1910).
“I don’t know off the top of my head what policy implications that should have, but I’m tired of pretending that things are exactly the same they were when my grandparents arrived (somewere between 1895 and 1910).”
Oh, I wouldn’t pretend that either. Different immigrant groups have always had different problems. I am not so worried about the current group’s job situation since after all they are being drawn here by the supply. What I think is a more likely problem then, say, all of having to speak Spanish in the future is the possibility that our rotten national economic policies will lead to a recession that will knock out many of the jobs they are doing. It isn’t so much that they are low paid, bad as that is, but that many of the jobs that they are doing would be considered expendible in a recession. We might have to start cutting our own grass again for example.
As per John Allen, at the Sant’Egidio gathering in Rome last week, a Catholic Louvain educated South American president asked the Vatican to rebuke “anti-immigrant American Christians.”
Do we like that code word?
And the whole immigration debate could have been dealt without without making “amnesty” a code word.
Then there’s the problem of the using the words legal and illegal. As a peace officer, I was sworn to uphold the law. I also saw the law manipulated by legislators and enforcers in a numbr of cases.
Such ;ies the way of oversimplified debate…
Hola! Quiero dar mis pensamientos sobre el problema de immigracion.
Does that scare any Minutemen who might happen upon this blog? (I doubt any of them are regular readers.)
I live in San Antonio, Texas – probably Grand Central Station for illegal immigrants / undocumented aliens/ or, as they’re popularly known here, “mojados.” (Check your Spanish dictionaries.)
While not wishing to be an “immigration Pollyanna” (Barbara) or believing that we should “throw open the borders” (Robert), I want to share a recent experience which reflects upon a question posed by Unagidon.
I teach English as a Second Language to several classes of legal(?) immigrants. (We don’t check visas or Green Cards.) All of my students are employed. Consequently, they do pay payroll taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes, as part of their apartment rental fees. All of them are struggling to learn English. Last week I asked this question to each student – “Where would you rather live? The United States or Mexico?”
At least 80% chose Mexico. 100% of them told me that they came to the U.S. because they could not find jobs in their home country or could not survive on their salaries there.
Putting aside the question of whether we have the obligation to employ these job-seekers, almost all analysts agree that if the
12 million undocumented workers in this country were to be expelled tomorrow we would suffer a massive economic disruption. For example, one half of all the agricultural workers in the U.S. are undocumented. One of my ESL classes is at a large hospital where the majority of the housekeeping staff speaks little or no English. Most illegal immigrants do not work at jobs that Americans covet. Our fellow
citizens are not eager to pick crops, change dirty sheets, mop floors, and clean toilets.
And these jobs are not likely to disappear in the near future, not matter what happens to the economy.
Of course we can’t throw open our borders! But walls, Minutemen, and an increase in Border Patrolmen will not completely prevent illegal immigration. Until the economies of Mexico and Central America improve, people will go where the jobs are – and that’s here.
I am aware that the influx of undocumented workers has put a strain on some school systems and publically supported hospitals. But I wonder if , under a different, equitable guest-worker system, the employers of these workers could make a financial contribution to these institutions…
Yes, our immigration system needs fixing, but the adjustments should be guided by social and economic realities, not by hysterical fears that immigrants are stealing jobs from the citizenry, polluting the airwaves with Spanish, and secretly adding jalapenos to our Big Macs.
I usually abstain from the “immigrants are the only ones who are willing to do _____________” discussion, but I would note that in many parts of the country where growth is not robust or even stagnant, anon-immigrants routinely do the kinds of jobs that “only immigrants” do in places such as Texas or major, growing metropolitan areas. For instance, where I live, menial hospital jobs are not done primarily by immigrants. Where my mother lives, even landscaping, waiting tables, and housekeeping are not done by immigrants. So I think that more than one factor is at work in determining which jobs will only be done by immigrants, including whether such jobs pay a “living wage” in the locality where you live. Which might lead to the variation of views of this subject — it really does depend on where you live.
Where I live, the parish I formerly attended was part of an umbrella organization that pressed localities to enact “living wage” laws. Yet, there are many jobs that go to immigrants at least in part because they are willing to do them for something other than a “living wage,” and the gaps — in health care coverage, unemployment compensation, retirement, are left to state and local governments to fill.
And then, those jobs that do pay “living wages,” primarily around here that would be construction (or used to be), the construction is part of a pattern where basically affordable housing is replaced with housing that is affordable by very few, including the people building it.
I think these things present a real conundrum about how society treats workers that goes beyond immigration, but immigration introduces a nativist reaction that is exploited so that this conundrum is never faced head on. It’s not the fault of the immigrants.
I prefer “unauthorized entrant/resident.”