Watch your language
Many journalists do a great job covering immigration, but too often I see headlines and stories that make a mistake outlined by the AP Stylebook:
This might seem like a quibble, but it’s not. Even if it’s not used with deliberate malice, a code word like “illegals” dehumanizes the immigrants to whom it’s applied, reducing people created in God’s image to nothing more than anthropomorphic crimes. Applying this term consistently, I should be called an “illegal” for having an unpaid parking ticket.
And this isn’t the only rhetorical device that degrades the immigration debate. In another example, opponents of comprehensive immigration reform often describe a pathway to earned citizenship as “amnesty,” clearly connoting that people who violate immigration law will be granted forgiveness without punishment for their violations, when in fact comprehensive reform would require those who break immigration laws to pay fines (a punishment in both legal and colloquial terms) and fulfill requirements such as studying English and remaining employed in order to become eligible for citizenship. In the context of comprehensive immigration reform, “amnesty” is a profoundly misleading term.
Words matter. When choosing which terms to deploy, especially in contentious debates about issues of great consequence, we’d all do well to consult not only our dictionaries and stylebooks, but also the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule.