New Yorker (Opinion)
By Jeffrey Toobin
August 5, 2015
I
wrote an article for The New Yorker last month about immigration
policy, focussing in particular on a family in Columbus, Ohio. The
mother and father had crossed the
border illegally from Mexico, and in the article I referred to them on
several occasions as “illegal immigrants.” Several readers chided me for
using the term “illegal immigrant,” which they felt was pejorative and
inaccurate. Increasingly, these readers are
not alone in holding this view. (The family did not express any
preference on the terms that I should use to describe its status.)
Should I have used the term?
The
New Yorker does not have a formal policy on the use of “illegal
immigrant.” Still, if I can reconstruct my thought process, I think I
considered three points, which
apply broadly to the use of any controversial word or phrase.
1.
Is it accurate? As I discussed in the piece, both adults made knowing
and voluntary decisions to violate the law when they crossed from Mexico
to the United States.
The article was about the implications of this illegal border
crossing—for them and approximately eleven million others. Opponents of
the term dispute its accuracy. According to Felix Salmon, in Fusion,
“People who speed aren’t ‘illegal drivers,’ nor are people
who fall behind on their taxes ‘illegal filers.’ ” Salmon may be
overstating that, but he is right about what we understand when we hear
the word “illegal” alone: “The use of the term ‘illegal’ to refer to a
person is a usage which is confined to exactly one
group of people: Migrants. As a result, ‘illegal,’ when used as a noun,
always means immigrants—people whose only crime is the victimless
pursuit of liberty and prosperity.” (Salmon’s article also has an
interesting summary of which news organizations use
the term and which don’t. For example, the Associated Press, NBC, and
ABC ban “illegal immigrant”; they generally recommend “undocumented”
instead, although the A.P. prefers “living in the country without legal
permission.” The Wall Street Journal and Reuters
prefer “illegal immigrant.” The Times and CBS, like The New Yorker, use
various formulations.)
I
see two issues here—an easy one and a hard one. It’s clearly wrong to
call someone “an illegal,” which I did not do. A person, as a person,
shouldn’t be illegal. (In
a similar vein, there has been a movement to refer to “enslaved
persons” rather than “slaves.”)
I
think the use of the term “illegal immigrant” is a more difficult call.
For starters, I’m not persuaded that “illegal” is inaccurate. It’s true
that many immigration
offenses are civil rather than criminal, but violations of civil law
are often “illegal.” The Securities and Exchange Commission brings civil
cases to punish insider trading and other offenses, and it’s still
accurate to say that insider trading is illegal.
It’s even common to discuss driving errors (which are clearly
non-criminal violations) as illegal—an illegal turn, for example.
Salmon,
and most others who abjure “illegal” immigrant, prefer to use the
adjective “undocumented,” which I also used several times in my article.
The term is clearly
accurate, but also incomplete. The problem of the family in my piece is
not simply that it lacks a document, like an American who, say, is kept
from voting because he or she lacks a driver’s license or other photo
I.D. The problem is that the law currently
forbids the family from living in the United States. The family is not
authorized to be here, which is different, I think, from simply needing a
piece of paper.
2.
Does the term interfere with or advance the story? The point of my
article was to show the human cost of the lengthy political standoff
over immigration policy. I wanted
readers to focus on the people and issues, not on my use of one term or
another. It’s no secret, of course, that the use of language has
political implications. But my effort was to try to mute the political
content of the language as much as possible, and
I thought that the straightforward (and accurate, in my view) use of
the familiar term “illegal immigrant” would not call attention to
itself.
3.
What do people prefer to be called? This is, of course, a subjective
category, because people often have differences of opinion about what
they want to be called. Still,
certain conventions become obligatory over time. “Negro” gave way to
“black” and “African-American.” “Ms.” became universal. The question,
then, is whether “illegal immigrant” has become so widely regarded as
pejorative that it should be excluded from civilized
discourse. When I wrote my article, I thought it had not; I now think
that I may have been wrong. Indeed, the term may have become so toxic
that it violates my second principle—by calling attention to itself.
An
erudite friend, Michael O’Hare, a professor of public policy at
Berkeley, pointed out that there are apt terms in French—sans papiers,
and situation irrégulière—but
I write in English. If we were being technical, it may be more accurate
to describe these individuals’ status as “unauthorized” rather than
undocumented or illegal. In the end, though, I think my third category
is dispositive. There does seem to be a consensus
against the use of the term by the people most affected by it, who
happen to be a vulnerable minority seeking a better life, and that’s
good enough for me. Personally, I’m dropping the use of the term
“illegal immigrant.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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