New York Times Magazine
(Opinion)
By Emily Bazelon
August 18, 2015
Ten
years ago, the political strategist Frank Luntz issued a proclamation
about the language of immigration. ‘‘Always refer to people crossing the
border illegally as
‘illegal immigrants’ — NOT as ‘illegals,’ ’’ Luntz instructed fellow
conservatives. ‘‘Illegals’’ sounds harsh and spiky. As with ‘‘fatties’’
in high school, or ‘‘thugs,’’ it’s a way to write off a group and
justify its mistreatment. Luntz says his research
showed that ‘‘if you used the word ‘illegals,’ you didn’t get a chance
to say anything else — Latino audiences would turn you off.’’
Republicans have long respected Luntz’s messaging skills: This is the
man who helped them write the Contract With America and
pioneer the phrase ‘‘death tax.’’ Yet G.O.P. candidates for president
have repeatedly ignored his warning.
The
slight has become a primary-season refrain, brandished like a
conservative calling card. ‘‘We need to keep illegals out,’’ Donald
Trump said at the Republican presidential
debate earlier this month after being reminded of his earlier claims
that Mexico is sending rapists and other criminals across the border.
The Fox News anchor Chris Wallace picked up the term in a question, and
Mike Huckabee volleyed it back, claiming that
the solvency of Social Security and Medicare was under threat from
‘‘illegals, prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, all the people that are
freeloading off the system now.’’ In 2007, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani
deployed ‘‘illegals’’ while debating the rights
of undocumented workers, and Romney and Rick Perry used it four years
later while tangling over who was mowing Romney’s lawn. ‘‘I’m running
for office, for Pete’s sake, I can’t have illegals,’’ Romney sputtered.
The
more common phrase, ‘‘illegal immigrant,’’ also implies suspicion, but
strip the noun from it and the entire identity of a person who crosses
the border without permission,
or outstays his or her visa, is reduced to that of a criminal: What
rights could he or she be entitled to? ‘‘Illegals’’ becomes the noun,
the insult and the dismissal. Designating immigrants as ‘‘illegals’’
also makes it easier not to see the frequent lawbreaking
of employers who provide meager pay and unsafe working conditions. And
‘‘illegals’’ implies a permanent caste, as if there is no possibility of
becoming anything else — even if millions of immigrants in the course
of American history have shown otherwise.
In
the United States, the idea of the unwanted ‘‘illegal’’ immigrant arose
in the last century. ‘‘It dates to the 1924 Immigration Act, when the
United States solidified
a quota system for immigration, which was explicitly racial,’’ the Yale
historian Stephen Pitti told me. ‘‘The quotas were based on the census
of 1890 to favor immigrants from Northern Europe.’’ Asians were
excluded. Eastern Europeans and Russians (read: Jews)
were strictly limited. At the time, however, immigrants from Latin
America were exempt from the quotas, to keep a supply of cheap labor
flowing to the agribusinesses of the Southwest. As the population of
Spanish speakers along the border grew, so did restrictionist
sentiment. ‘‘There was an escalation of fear-mongering language,’’
Pitti said. ‘‘ ‘Illegals’ were stealing jobs, and they were also
responsible for a drug epidemic, for bringing in marijuana, for sexual
depravity.’’
In
1954, the country’s first large-scale deportations began, with military
planes and buses swooping into border settlements and cities. It was
called Operation Wetback,
a derogatory term for people who cross the Rio Grande from Mexico. The
official use of ‘‘wetback’’ seems bizarre now, but it was a mainstream
term within government for decades. Conservatives like to point out that
even the labor leader Cesar Chavez used ‘‘wetbacks,’’
along with ‘‘illegals,’’ in a burst of frustration over strikebreaking
in 1972, when undocumented immigrants were brought by employers across
the border to thwart unionizers. Plenty of the workers Chavez was trying
to organize were also in the country illegally,
says Pitti, who is writing a biography of him. Nonetheless, Chavez
reportedly supported a government plan to deport a million undocumented
immigrants in 1974, making his opposition clear only after a backlash in
the Chicano community.
Immigration
policy and language have been twin minefields for many decades. The
linguistic challenge may now be greater for Republicans, but the parties
don’t neatly divide
between immigration hawks and doves. It was President Obama whom the
head of the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic civil rights group,
labeled ‘‘deporter in chief’’ last year. Before Obama proposed work
permits and deportation deferrals for about five
million undocumented immigrants (out of an estimated 11 million), his
administration presided over a record number of deportations.
Advocates
for immigrant rights see the relationship between how people talk and
how the government acts and have proposed replacing ‘‘illegal
immigrants’’ with ‘‘undocumented
workers’’ or ‘‘undocumented immigrants.’’ ‘‘In an increasingly diverse
society in which undocumented immigrants are integrated in all walks of
life, language belongs to the people whose stories are being told,’’
Jose Antonio Vargas, a journalist and activist
who revealed his own undocumented status in The New York Times Magazine
in 2011, wrote in Time. ‘‘To be an undocumented person in the U.S.,
after all, is to live a life dictated by getting the proper documents.’’
If immigrants are principally defined by their
missing papers, their path to legal status becomes far more tenable.
Imagine if we started calling all immigrants ‘‘dreamers,’’ which is how
many of us think of our own ancestors. The word has been adopted by
young adults who came to the United States as children
from the Dream Act, a bill that would give them a path to permanent residency, if it is ever passed.
On
the political right, ‘‘undocumented’’ has few takers. To conservatives,
it smacks of soft-pedaling, which makes it difficult to see which safe
and neutral terms Republicans
trying to court both hard-liners and Latinos can fall back on. Media
outlets are similarly searching for neutrality, and they’re not in
accord. The Associated Press dropped ‘‘illegal immigrant’’ in 2013, soon
after NBC News and ABC News. The New York Times
announced it would encourage reporters and editors to ‘‘consider
alternatives,’’ but ‘‘illegal immigrant’’ has shown up dozens of times
in the paper in the two years since. The same goes for The Washington
Post, CBS and The Wall Street Journal. The term of
art that statutes and courts have used since the 18th century —
‘‘alien’’ — hardly bridges the gap. It comes from the Latin for ‘‘of or
belonging to others,’’ and was codified in the first federal law that
addressed granting citizenship to foreigners — which
allowed for naturalizing only an ‘‘alien’’ who was a ‘‘free white
person.’’ Led by Democrats, California decided earlier this month to
delete ‘‘alien’’ from its labor code.
The
controversy over what to call people who enter this country without
official permission will persist as long as their standing remains
uncertain. Even the toughest
talkers about immigration make the occasional rhetorical concession.
‘‘I said we need to build a wall,’’ Trump said at the Aug. 6 debate. ‘‘I
don’t mind having a big, beautiful door in that wall.’’ Jeb Bush and
Marco Rubio, Republican candidates for president
who have ties to the Latino community (Bush by marriage, Rubio by
birth), spoke of immigrants with respect. Bush talked about ‘‘people’’
who ‘‘want to provide for their family.’’ Rubio went with ‘‘people
coming across the border.’’ They also talked about fences
and border enforcement, but they didn’t sound quite so heartless. ‘‘If
you ask me the single most important group the G.O.P. has to improve
among, I pick Latinos,’’ Luntz told me. And as the number of Latino
voters grows, the party alienates them at its eventual
peril.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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