We need to get over Biden’s use of ‘illegal’
Growing up the word “illegal” wasn’t the one I overheard to describe people who came to the United States from Mexico without documents.
Most often, I heard two other words that equally dehumanized them for crossing the Rio Grande, “wetback” and “mojado.”
Sometimes, I swear, I heard no hate in them, at least from those around me. The terms sounded more matter of fact, as if acceptable to describe human beings.
History shows us that wasn’t true among others who filled such words with the hate of racist, white supremacy ideology.
But, as a girl, I read an ordinary commonplaceness in mojado, especially on the city’s West Side, where so many refugees landed before and after the Mexican Revolution.
They included my two sainted grandmothers, Catarina Rios Serna and Eulalia Pinales Ayala. The first looked white European, the other brown-skinned and indigenous to Mexico.
Catarina crossed the border when there was no border to speak of, walking across scrubby land sometime in the late 1800s.
Mama Lala, for Eulalia, arrived in 1910, in the midst of a violent, chaotic war. She held onto a green card with that date on it. It wasn’t yet unlawful to cross the border.
Both became naturalized citizens. In their lifetimes, they raised big families, suffered unimaginable loss and heard demeaning names about people like them.
They looked the other way. They read their Spanish Bibles and turned the other cheek, as instructed.
By the late 1960s and ’70s, that changed.
My generation began to understand the demeaning references — even used by relatives just two generations removed from our immigration stories — and many more times removed from Irish and Italian immigrants who faced discrimination of their own.
I recall hearing “dirty Mexican,” for example, and reading headlines in the newspaper calling a suspect “Mexican,” though his immigration status wasn’t part of the story but a descriptor for someone brown or Spanish-speaking.
The ignorance and prejudice was more out in the open. The arrogance and ignorance was loud and proud, just like the congresswoman in red who yelled at President Joe Biden during the State of the Union address March 7.
All the hateful words — “alien,” “illegal,” “dirty Mexican” — resurfaced when the president traded remarks with a member of Congress who likes yelling at the podium.
She first used the word “illegal” to describe an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela charged in the killing of a Georgia nursing student. Authorities said he entered the country illegally.
If found guilty, he’ll face prison time, as he should.
But no isolated incidents can determine policy, especially since studies show immigrants are less likely to commit crime than those who are U.s.-born.
To read “crime” into “immigrant,” however, is an old story in this country and still serves as a beleaguered talking point for anti-immigrant extremists.
Last month, it incited violence on live television when a group of Guardian Angels in Times Square tackled a man. The group’s founder, Curtis Sliwa, wrongly identified him as a Venezuelan migrant.
The man was a resident of the Bronx, according to reports.
Immigrants serve as scapegoats for all socials ills.
Democrats cringed at an otherwise exceptionally strong speech by Biden. It took a few days, but he apologized for using “illegal” and expressed regret.
He did so on MSNBC, a political move as it’s the network with a most progressive viewership and those most critical of his unmet promises.
Since then, I’ve sat in on various conversations about Biden’s comments and apology and what it could all mean in November. Several San Antonians and visitors from Washington, D.C., were ready to move on.
Those most supportive of Biden were disappointed in offering degrees of forgiveness.
To be sure, Biden is of a generation that used words now viewed as archaic, racist, insensitive and unacceptable.
Some saw a correlation to that, but most saw a heat-of-themoment exchange that happens when you get off script and take an opponent’s bait.
News accounts recalled comments made by beloved labor leader César Chávez, who used “wetbacks” and “illegals” to criticize workers hired by growers to cross the United Farm Workers union’s picket lines. Meaning: Even good guys make mistakes.
It’s noteworthy that his granddaughter, Julie Chávez Rodriguez, is running Biden’s reelection campaign.
The bigger point is no human is illegal. Punto.
Then there’s this: In 2021, the Biden White House instructed federal border agencies to stop using terms such as “alien,” “illegal” and “assimilation,” replacing them with “noncitizen,” “undocumented” and “integration.”
Because words matter. They matter especially in the White House and at the State of the Union. More than 32 million people were watching, up 18% from the president’s last State of the Union speech.
But when the other candidate speaks of immigrants as “rapists,” “criminals,” “vermin” and people who’ll “poison the blood of our country,” the choice seems clearer.
For my grandmothers, distasteful people deserved no attention. A mistake came with forgiveness. They were the forgiving kind.