Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Illegal Aliens:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_09_13-2009_09_19.shtml#1253146319
The [1]National Association of Hispanic Journalists writes:
As the heated debates over health care and immigration reform
collide, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists calls on
our nation�s news media to stop using the dehumanizing term
�illegals� as a noun to refer to undocumented immigrants.
NAHJ has long advocated for accurate terminology in news media�s
coverage of immigration. NAHJ is concerned with the increasing use
of pejorative terms like �illegals� � which is shorthand for
�illegal aliens�, another term NAHJ objects to using � to describe
the estimated 12 million undocumented people living in the United
States.
Using "illegals" in this way is grammatically incorrect and crosses
the line by dehumanizing and criminalizing the person, not the
action they are purported to have committed. NAHJ calls on the
media to never use �illegals� in headlines and in television news
crawls.
�We continue to see �illegals� used as a noun seeping from the
fringes into the mainstream media, and in turn, into the mainstream
political dialogue,� said NAHJ Executive Director Iván Román.
�Using these terms not only distorts the debate, but it takes away
their identities as individuals and human beings. When journalists
do that, it�s that much easier to treat them unfairly and not give
them an equal voice in the controversy.�
By incessantly using metaphors like �illegals�, the news media is
not only appropriating the rhetoric used by people on a particular
side of the issue, but also the implication of something criminal
or worthy of suspicion. That helps to predetermine the credibility
or respect given to one of the protagonists of this debate, which
is not conducive to good journalism and does a disservice to the
principles of fairness and neutrality.
In addition, NAHJ has always denounced the use of the degrading
terms �alien� and �illegal alien� to describe undocumented
immigrants because it casts them as adverse, strange beings,
inhuman outsiders who come to the U.S. with questionable
motivations. �Aliens� is a bureaucratic term that should be avoided
unless used in a quote.
NAHJ prefers using the term "undocumented immigrant" or
"undocumented worker" rather than the term "illegal immigrant"
which several media outlets have adopted.
NAHJ also calls on editors and journalists to follow generally
accepted guidelines regarding race and ethnicity and refrain from
reporting a person�s legal status unless it is relevant to the
story in question. The public in certain regions of the country
have pressured news media to publish the legal status of any Latino
who appears in the newspaper or on television, regardless of the
story�s subject.
Doing so contributes to the growing trend of profiling Latinos as
non-Americans or foreigners and using them as scapegoats for a
variety of society�s ills, a tone that has become more pervasive in
the public dialogue over the past few years. Few now doubt that
this helps create a fertile environment for hate speech which we
have seen can lead to discrimination and a growing number of hate
crimes in the U.S. against Latinos.
As the U.S. tackles immigration reform in the future, NAHJ believes
that responsible, fair, and non-simplistic coverage of this complex
issue is in order. The words used can be part of the problem or can
contribute to fair coverage and a fruitful public debate.
NAHJ, a 1,500-member organization of reporters, editors and other
journalists, addresses the use of these words and phrases by the
news media in its Resource Guide for Journalists. For excerpts of
some of the relevant entries in the resource guide, [2]click here.
Of course there's nothing "grammatically incorrect" about using
"illegal" as a noun; adjectives often double as nouns, often with
"the" ("the poor," "the rich," "the dead") and sometimes without a
"the" ("Americans"). Dictionaries, including the Oxford English
Dictionary, list "illegal" as a noun, though the Random House lists
it as an informal usage.
Nor is "undocumented immigrant" or "undocumented worker" somehow
more "fair" than "illegal alien." Illegal aliens' problem --
perhaps it shouldn't be a problem, but it certainly is a problem
for them -- isn't just that they somehow lack documents. It's that
they lack the legal right to be here. One can debate whether they
should have the right to be here, but the fact is that under the
current legal system their being here is not legal. Someone who
owns a gun without a registration required by state law, because
state law bars him from getting such a registration (because he's
underage or a felon or what have you) isn't just an "undocumented
gun owner." He's an illegal gun owner, and identifying him as such
better expresses the reality of the situation, even if you think
that the law should be different.
This leaves the question of whether the terms are unduly
pejorative, in much the way that "abortionist" is unduly
pejorative, to the point that using the term this way is
unnecessarily argumentative, and distracting and
credibility-reducing in an objective article. I'm actually
inclined, based on my sense of how the term is used, to think that
the noun "illegal" is, which is why I generally don't say
"illegals." But that's in large part because there is an
alternative that is not deliberately obfuscatory, and commonly used
as simply descriptive -- "illegal alien" (or, for "abortionist,"
"abortion provider").
As between "illegal alien" and "undocumented immigrant," it strikes
me that the former is more reflective of what is actually going on,
for better or worse, and the latter is an attempt to hide what is
actually going on. If one is writing political advocacy, one may
deliberately choose the latter term (though even then one risks
losing credibility). But if one is trying to be an objective
journalist, I think "illegal alien" or "illegal immigrant" is the
more objective and more candid way of putting things.
References
1.
http://www.nahj.org/nahjnews/articles/2009/september/immigrationterms.shtml
2.
http://www.nahj.org/nahjnews/articles/2009/september/immigrationentries.shtml
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