Do refugees/illegal migrants represent a ‘challenge’ or a ‘crisis’?
When politicians start arguing over words, it’s a sign that an issue has headed into more unpredictable terrain
What exactly is the difference between a crisis and a challenge?
The distinction is clearly a significant one to Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, who chose his words carefully when asked this week whether Canada was in the midst of a crisis at the border.
“There is a challenge, but it is not a crisis,” Goodale said during the rare, midsummer hearings by the Commons immigration committee.
Words always matter in politics, but it is striking to see just how much they count in the whole debate over asylum-seekers at Canada’s borders. Are we talking about irregular or illegal crossings? That’s an ongoing controversy all on its own.
Conservative MP Michelle Rempel did a little video on that very question earlier this month and circulated it on social media, essentially arguing that Liberals are playing with these words to make the controversy even more divisive. (Rempel prefers to use the word “illegal,” for reasons she explains in the video.)
The matter of what to call the asylum seekers in also problematic. Are these migrants or would-be refugees? Are they a threat? A crisis? Or a challenge?
Recent analysis tells us this is not unique. Migration has spiked before, and will again. Nonetheless, more than twothirds of respondents to an online poll in that same story said they agreed with the statement that Canada was going through a refugee crisis this summer. Not a refugee “challenge” — a crisis.
Canada isn’t the only country where the immigration issue has become entangled in wars over words. In the United States, the department of justice has recently ordered officials to stop using the word “undocumented” with regard to people in the country illegally and instead refer to them as “illegal aliens.”
“The word ‘undocumented’ is not based in U.S. code and should not be used to describe someone’s illegal presence in the country,” said the instructions, which were contained in an email obtained by CNN.
All these semantic skirmishes would almost lead you to believe that controversies over migrants at the border could be fixed with a simple thesaurus. If we could just agree on the right words, maybe we could all get along.
What this war of words should tell us instead, though, is how much the whole debate revolves around emotions and marketing — on all sides. Critics of Justin Trudeau are saying that Canada has been saddled with too much demand from asylum seekers, for instance, because he oversold this country in a welcome-refugees tweet 18 months ago. That’s pretty powerful word of mouth advertising.
But Trudeau and his ministers have also been trying to solve the problem with some word of mouth marketing of their own. Liberal MPs such as Emmanuel Dubourg and Pablo Rodriguez have been dispatched on missions to dissuade asylum seekers within certain cultural communities in the United States — government emissaries chosen because of their fluency in Creole (Dubourg) or Spanish (Rodriguez).
Once again, whether we’re talking about problems or solutions, there’s a heavy emphasis on choosing the right words and language.
We like to think that all the big issues in politics can be figured out by attention to facts, evidence and numbers — which will in turn lead instead to appropriate policy and legislation. But once the politicians start arguing over words, it’s a sign that the issue has headed into the more unpredictable terrain of marketing, emotions and values.
That’s where the debate over border migration has landed this summer — maybe not a crisis for the Trudeau government, you might say, but definitely a challenge.