{"id":1346,"date":"2012-10-04T18:09:14","date_gmt":"2012-10-05T01:09:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.malcs.org\/archive-2017\/?p=1346"},"modified":"2012-10-10T12:17:38","modified_gmt":"2012-10-10T19:17:38","slug":"illegal-is-not-a-neutral-term-linguists-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malcs.org\/archive-2017\/2012\/10\/04\/illegal-is-not-a-neutral-term-linguists-say\/","title":{"rendered":"“Illegal” is NOT a neutral term, linguists say"},"content":{"rendered":"

So a group of 24 linguistic scholars<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0have joined the effort<\/a> to remove the term “illegal” immigrant from our national vocabulary. \u00c2\u00a0The progressive magazine ColorLines<\/a> <\/em>launched a campaign late last year to “Drop the I Word<\/a>” after a series of articles showed that in recent years<\/p>\n

there has been a steady increase in language that frames unauthorized immigrants as a criminal<\/em> problem. References to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153illegals,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153illegal immigrants\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and their rhetorical variants now dominate the speech of both major political parties, as well as news media coverage of immigration.” \u00c2\u00a0—Colorlines<\/em>, “How the Right Made Racism Sound Fair<\/a>,” 9\/13\/11<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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. \u00c2\u00a0In part, they point out:<\/p>\n

A person diagnosed with cancer is not described as cancerous; however, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153illegal\u00e2\u20ac\u009d becomes a way of characterizing not just one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s migration status, but also one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s entire person. This perspective has galvanized a campaign to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Drop the I Word<\/a>.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

The \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Drop the I Word<\/a>\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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?<\/p>\n

One of the most noteworthy characteristics of immigration discourses is the naturalization of concepts such as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153illegality\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and the construction of immigration laws on as rigid, unchanging phenomena. Scholarship focused on this issue points out that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153legal immigrant\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is a redundant concept and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153illegal immigrant\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153migrant\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s migration status, such as language, religion, and physical appearance. These presumptions lead not only to law enforcers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 regular misidentification of people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s migration status based on wrongful assumptions about ethnolinguistic markers, but also to the broader public stigmatization of those markers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The complete statement is available here<\/a><\/p>\n

And the ColorLines campaign is here<\/a><\/p>\n

And a petition here by Helen Chavez<\/a> (widow of Cesar) to the New York Times<\/em> to stop using the term (thanks to Maribel Martinez<\/em>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So a group of 24 linguistic scholars\u00c2\u00a0have joined the effort to remove the term “illegal” immigrant from our national vocabulary. \u00c2\u00a0The 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1346","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-general-news","7":"entry","8":"override"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":978,"url":"https:\/\/malcs.org\/archive-2017\/2012\/05\/09\/shattered-families-kids-lost-in-deportation-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":1346,"position":0},"title":"Shattered Families: Kids Lost in Deportation","author":"la Webjefa","date":"May 9, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Colorlines Magazine's Seth Freed Wessler recently won a Hillman Prize in Web Journalism for this article on the impact of ICE raids and deportations on children. 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