Sat on a panel last night for The Loyolan, the student newspaper at Loyola Marymount University, on immigration and the media. With me at the mics and water bottles were LMU professor Sonny Espinoza, a specialist on mass media and film, and UCLA professor Otto Santa Ana, author of "Brown Tide Rising," a study of the metaphors used for Latinos in mass media. One of the questions that generated good discussion concerned the uses of the labels "undocumented immigrant" and "illegal immigrant," their differences and political connotations.
I took the position that there is little difference in the words except the tonality; to be illegal is functionally to be undocumented, and vice versa, and that the better point of discussion would be, if an "illegal immigrant" has been in the country for years and years, runs a business, owns a home, and has U.S.-born children, at one point does such a person stop being an "immigrant" altogether. Professor Santa Ana disagreed, saying there is a huge difference: "illegal" conjures criminality and demonizes a person, and "undocumented" suggests some kind of error, like, "I forgot my wallet in Mexico" or something. He suggested a new term, "unauthorized immigrant."
Well, hadn't put that much thought into it, so I looked at some of my pieces on the immigrant-rights marches last year and found that for the most part I used "illegal immigrant" but also sprinkled in "undocumented" here and there. When the matter came up again during the audience questions, I basically said that reporters and editors usually do not stop and ponder the political significance of their word choices -- they're just trying to get a paper out, and filtering through the editing cycle whatever rhetoric and ephemera is out there in the public discourse. Sometimes, I said, I will switch an "illegal" for an "undocumented" if one or the other is used in the previous sentence, or in a nearby quote, or if it just sounds better, in the context of a sentence and a sentence's rhythms.
Anyway, here is a National Association of Hispanic Journalists's info sheet, very comprehensive and suitably strong, urging the mainstream media to stop using "illegals" as a noun and to curb the use of "illegal alien," two terms which most smart American journalists -- unless you are a jingoistic, reactionary, xenophobia-peddling "news" reporter or outlet -- are agreed to be unacceptable in any form. Link.
* Outrage alert: Guatemalan dishwasher fights for his $59,000 in cash, confiscated by the feds.