The Biden administration has ended use of the phrase ‘illegal alien’. It’s about time

This week, the Biden administration fulfilled a promise it made on Joe Biden’s first day in office. Agencies that deal with immigration, such as US Customs and Border Protection, have now been instructed to change their official language practices. Gone are the terms “alien”, “illegal alien” and “assimilation”. Instead, new vocabularies will apply, including the words “noncitizen” for “alien” and “integration” for “assimilation”.

As a former “alien” (who arrived here from the planet “Canada”) and now citizen, here’s what I say to these changes: well, United States, it’s about time! For far too long, so much of the language we use in the US when discussing immigration has been bizarre and dehumanizing. Officials talk about “catch and release”, as if they are chatting about fish when they’re really talking about people’s lives. The term “migrant caravans”, meant to summon images of marauders, is used to describe people searching for refuge together while risking everything in the process. Our southern border is routinely described as being beset by swarms, hordes, swells, or surges, terms that evoke insects or ocean catastrophes – anything, in other words, but people.

The humanity in any immigration policy would be eviscerated by this language. And these dehumanizing terms are deployed so commonly that we may not even notice how much of this damaging rhetoric is deliberate. Usage of the thankfully now-defunct term “illegal aliens” is probably the worst culprit. In 2018, then attorney general Jeff Sessions, whose office was the driving force behind the Trump administration’s unconscionably cruel family separation policy, even told prosecutors not to employ the words “undocumented immigrant” when those words fit the circumstances. Instead, Justice Department lawyers were explicitly instructed to use the term “illegal aliens”.

Sessions’ former boss, Donald Trump, who once said he wanted