San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
‘Illegal alien’ stirs fear, dehumanizes
Shortly after assuming the presidency in January 2021, Joe Biden issued a memo to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services directing the agency to stop using terms such as “illegal alien” to describe migrants.
Biden forgot his own directive during an unscripted moment in his State of the Union address on March 7.
He was responding to U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., whose outbursts interrupted his speech. She dared him to say the name of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old woman killed last month, allegedly by Jose Ibarra, a Venezuelan immigrant who entered the U.S. illegally new El Paso in 2022.
After mistakenly referring to the victim as “Lincoln Riley” (the USC Trojans’ football coach), the president said Riley was “an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal.”
He said his “heart goes out” to Riley’s parents but asked, “How many thousands have been killed by legals?”
Biden’s fundamental point was correct. But Riley’s death was the result of a horrible and brutal act. Her killer, who had previously been arrested in New York City, faces numerous charges, including murder, must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Biden should have explicitly said that.
But the use of this case by Greene and other far-right extremists, to score political points by stirring up fear and hatred of migrants, is a cynical ploy.
Georgia averages about 825 homicides per year, mostly committed by U.S. citizens or legal residents. But Greene isn’t wearing pins to honor any of those victims.
Unfortunately, Biden undermined his argument by using the word “illegal.” Two days later, he said he misspoke; he meant to say “undocumented.”
Used interchangeably with “illegal alien,” “illegal” was a common part of our lexicon for the entirety of the
20th century.
The term “illegal alien” was used in a September 1948 syndicated report about West Texas ranchers’ concerns that the “mass exodus of illegal Mexican aliens into the United States may bring the dreaded foot-and-mouth disease virus into this country.”
A five-part 1983 series in the Chicago Tribune about the economic impact of undocumented immigrants was titled “The Illegals.”
An April 1980 debate between Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush is often shared on social media by progressives as an example of how sensitive and compassionate Republicans used to be on the issue of immigration. In that discussion, Bush praised migrants as “really honorable, decent, family-loving people.”
But he also reflexively used the term “illegal alien.”
It was a phrase that practically everyone used.
For example, during his 1995 State of the Union address, then-President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, said Americans were “rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country.”
Eventually, however, through the advocacy of civil rights activists such as Noé “Bert” Corona, the use of terms such as “illegal aliens” and “illegals” began to be criticized by mainstream media, academics and Latino organizations. The argument was that this type of language fed anti-migrant demagoguery.
It’s an argument that was persuasively amplified after Biden’s State of the Union address by Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor and former secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
Castro commended Biden for clarifying.
“I know a lot of people, even many Democrats, say, ‘What’s the big deal?’ I used to think that,” Castro said. “But language has tremendous power, including the power to dehumanize migrants and make violence against them more acceptable.”
Of course, Biden’s clarification was twisted by his likely Republican opponent in the general election, former President Donald Trump, who suggested Biden was apologizing to Riley’s killer.
We saw similar political gamesmanship in 2021 from U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who pushed back against Biden’s order to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services by posting to X, “This kind of weakness and obsession with political correctness is why we’re having a crisis on the border in the first place.”
It’s an absurd but familiar refrain, comparable to the common GOP complaints that our military services have gone soft because they make an effort to avoid slurring gays and lesbians.
We should also consider that the term “illegal” is not merely insensitive. It’s also, in many cases, inaccurate.
Most of the people now being described by Republican politicians as “illegals” are going through the legal process of applying for asylum in the U.S.
Using terms such as “illegals” and “illegal aliens” won’t address our urgent border challenges — including border security. But it could perpetuate the all-too-common sense that migrants are subhuman. And that needs to end.
Describing humans this way is not only insensitive, it’s often inaccurate