'No Human Being Is Illegal': Linguists Argue Against Mislabeling of Immigrants Lauren Gambino - The Guardian
go to original December 11, 2015

US border patrol agents detain undocumented immigrants after they crossed the border from Mexico into the United States in August in McAllen, Texas. (John Moore/Getty Images)

On a scorching day in May 2010, thousands of Latinos and immigration activists marched through the streets of downtown Phoenix in a mighty protest against SB1070, the so-called “show me your papers” law. Among the sea of protest signs was one with a more universal message: “No human being is illegal.”

In the years since, a linguistic dispute has welled up on the periphery of the highly charged debate over immigration reform – how to refer to the nearly 11 million people living in the US without legal residency?

“We don’t call pedestrians who cross in the middle of the road illegal pedestrians,” said Otto Santa Ana, a linguist and professor in UCLA’s Department of Chicana/o Studies. “A kid who skips school to go to Disneyland is not an illegal student. And yet that’s a sort of parallel.”

Santa Ana is among many linguists who argue that the phrase “illegal immigrants” is neither “accurate nor neutral”. Other law-breakers are not referred to as illegal, making immigrants an outlier in the naming system, he said.

Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton was recently drawn into the debate during a Facebook Q&A session when José Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and immigration activist, asked her to pledge to stop using the phrase “illegal immigrant”.

Read the rest at The Guardian

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