So a group of 24 linguistic scholars have joined the effort to remove the term “illegal” immigrant from our national vocabulary.  The progressive magazine ColorLines launched a campaign late last year to “Drop the I Word” after a series of articles showed that in recent years

there has been a steady increase in language that frames unauthorized immigrants as a criminal problem. References to “illegals,” “illegal immigrants” and their rhetorical variants now dominate the speech of both major political parties, as well as news media coverage of immigration.”  —Colorlines, “How the Right Made Racism Sound Fair,” 9/13/11

Linguist Jonathan Rosa (U Mass Amherst) wrote a statement last week signed by 23 other scholars and the AAA Committee for Human Rights that points out the significance of language in shaping human action, and calls for reconsideration of the term by journalists and media.  In part, they point out:

A person diagnosed with cancer is not described as cancerous; however, “illegal” becomes a way of characterizing not just one’s migration status, but also one’s entire person. This perspective has galvanized a campaign to “Drop the I Word.”

The “Drop the I Word” campaign resonates with a central tenet of Linguistic Anthropology: language is a not merely a passive way of referring to or describing things in the world, but a crucial form of social action. Thus we need to ask: What forms of social action take place in and through popular representations of immigration?

One of the most noteworthy characteristics of immigration discourses is the naturalization of concepts such as “illegality” and the construction of immigration laws on as rigid, unchanging phenomena. Scholarship focused on this issue points out that “legal immigrant” is a redundant concept and “illegal immigrant” is oxymoronic, since the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act defines immigrants as people who have been lawfully admitted for permanent residence. The use of “migrant” throughout this statement reflects this insight. Moreover, immigration law has undergone dramatic shifts throughout U.S. history, with straightforward pathways to citizenship for some, but lengthy and laborious roads for others. The dynamic nature of this history is obscured by the notion that migrants simply opt to be legal or illegal. In fact, authorization should be understood primarily as a matter of political will rather than the individual choices of migrants themselves.

This misleading construction of illegality is tied to the circulation of troublesome stereotypes about the migration status of different ethnoracial groups. Specifically, assessments of illegality are often associated with unreliable signs of one’s migration status, such as language, religion, and physical appearance. These presumptions lead not only to law enforcers’ regular misidentification of people’s migration status based on wrongful assumptions about ethnolinguistic markers, but also to the broader public stigmatization of those markers.

The complete statement is available here

And the ColorLines campaign is here

And a petition here by Helen Chavez (widow of Cesar) to the New York Times to stop using the term (thanks to Maribel Martinez)

From an article by Anh Do in the Los Angeles Times

A group of Filipino nurses who claimed they were mocked for their accents and ordered to speak “English only” won a nearly $1-million settlement against a Central California hospital where bosses and co-workers were allegedly urged to eavesdrop on the immigrant workers.

“They were always telling us, ‘Ssshhh. English only. English only. I felt embarrassed, ashamed,” said Elnora Cayme

The $975,000 settlement, announced Monday by lawyers from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, is believed to be the largest language discrimination settlement in the U.S. healthcare industry, according to the Asian Pacific American Legal Center.

Officials at Delano Regional Medical Center insisted they did nothing wrong and settled the lawsuit only because it made financial sense. Under the terms of the settlement, however, the hospital must conduct anti-discrimination training and hire a monitor to track workplace conduct. [Read more…] about Filipina nurses win language discrimination suit (CA)

From Gabriella Gutierrez y Muhs, an interview with Junot Diaz  from Atlantic Magazine:

The stories in Junot Diaz’s new collection, This Is How You Lose Her, tread some familiar territory. Unfolding in Bergen County barrios and on Santo Domingo beaches, they feature fast-talking Dominicans (from there, from here) struggling against the pinions of racial prejudice, poverty, and immigrant status. But the specific focus on romantic relationships is new for Diaz. Each story depicts the complex negotiations between men and women held in thrall by the thrill or ravages of love, the lure and pathos of betrayal.

Eight of the nine stories here are narrated by Yunior de Las Casas, the poet and career philanderer whose acerbic silver tongue spoke Diaz’s first two books. But This Is How You Lose Her is a long way from the cocksure swagger of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2006). Yunior’s older now, more contrite and desperate and vulnerable, and his cheating’s catching up with him. “I’m not a bad guy,” he tells us in the first sentence of the book. Like the excuses and alibis he slips his jilted lovers, it’s a lie he badly needs us to believe.

The guiding irony of This Is How You Lose Her is that Yunior never does lose his women—not fully. Even after the cheating, the screaming and hair-pulling, the train-wreck breakups, Yunior’s exes haunt him in visceral ways: “The half-life of love is forever,” he confesses in the book’s final epic “The Cheater’s Guide to Love.” There’s a paradox here—loss can have a permanence love rarely attains. In this light, each story is a shrine to the women who, because of his own limitations, Yunior loves most earnestly, and most loyally, in hindsight.

Two questions underlie the propulsive energy of this book: Why does Yunior scuttle his relationships as soon as they hit full sail? And who are these women really? They’re never fully visible in the narrator’s machismo, anatomical confessions. I discussed these and other questions with the author, who spoke to me by phone from Harlem.

How long have you been working on these stories? What’s the oldest? The newest?

When I was working on Drown—this was way back in the mid-’90s—I had this idea that I wanted to do another collected stories. I wanted to do another book like Drown that focused specifically on infidelity. Male infidelity was something that kept coming up in Drown, and I wanted to follow my main protagonist Yunior in his progress through cheating. It grew into the idea for this book.

That was in the mid-’90s, and then it took absolutely forever to get the damn thing done.

So Drown and This Is How You Lose Her are, in a sense, sister projects.

Yeah. They definitely had their geneses at the same moment.

Full interview at the Atlantic

Also don’t miss his two-part interview with Chicana literature scholar Paula Moya at the Boston Review

This is a really interesting study of the community of Kalamazoo, Michigan, where a group of anonymous donors back in 2005 announced that they would pay full college tuition for every Kalamazoo public school student who graduated from the district’s high schools, at any of the state’s public colleges and universities. “The Promise,” as it called locally, has had a range of effects on the local community.

From the very beginning…[Superintendent Janice Brown], the only person in town who communicates directly with the Promise donors, has suggested that the program is supposed to do more than just pay college bills. It’s primarily meant to boost Kalamazoo’s economy. The few restrictions — among them, children must reside in the Kalamazoo public-school district and graduate from one of its high schools — seem designed to encourage families to stay and work in the region for a long time. The program tests how place-based development might work when education is the first investment.

“Other communities invest in things like arenas or offer tax incentives for businesses or revitalize their waterfronts,” says Michelle Miller-Adams, a political scientist at the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, which is located in the city. [Read more…] about The Effects of Education…