When she lived in L.A., Sandra Liliana Pucci’s bumper featured a sticker which read, “No human being is illegal.”
Pucci, an associate professor and chair of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Linguistics Department, has spent 20 years in the land of lingo. But she has also spent time translating credible fear asylum interviews and listening to immigrant stories.
Those experiences reshaped Pucci’s understanding of the immigrant debate as well as the words used to describe it.
“(We) should look very carefully at the terminology,” she said. “(‘Illegal alien’) would make you think that an immigrant or a person who comes from another country is something to be afraid of. And people who are ignorant or not in contact with many immigrants are made to be fearful.”
In fact, the way people attempt to inform themselves is often reflected by what they search in Google.
For example, from June 17 to June 23, the word “illegals” was one of the most popular search terms in Google, according to Google Trends.
Such phrases are commonplace on social media platforms like Twitter, where terminology alone differentiates political ideologies on immigration.
“The political impact is not to be underestimated,” Pucci said. “We have a president who uses those terms all the time and basically fabricates fear. (It) whips up some fear, so they agree with certain kinds of measures that are less than human and unfair.”
Pucci was referring to the Trump Administration’s “zero-tolerance” family separation policy, which Jeff Sessions discussed at a law enforcement conference in early May.
Among others, that policy, said attorney Peter Earle, has made many in the community fearful of government, and specifically, the police.
“The milk has been spilt,” he said. “I think that the federal government, the Trump administration has probably irreparably poisoned the well with regards to Latino communities’ willingness … to cooperate [with law enforcement].”
David Clarke, the former sheriff of Milwaukee County, said there is no proof that fear of the governmental deportation affects crime reporting among people unauthorized to reside in the U.S.
“There is no empirical research to show that that is actually happening,” he said.
However, Jill Messing, David Becerra, Allison Ward-Lasher and David Androff’s research, which involved surveying over 1,000 Latinas, found that for each 1-point increase in fear of deportation, Latina participants were 15% less willing to report being victims of violent crime to police.
Many strong opponents of people crossing the border without government authorization still believe defining immigrants as “illegal” is necessary and, under the constitution, legally precise.
Clarke is one of those opponents and he said immigration enforcement is a solemn, constitutional duty.
“All of a sudden, the United States wants to enforce immigration laws and they become the bad guy? This is nonsense. That’s why I’m glad that this president is pushing back and pushing back hard.”
One of the ways Trump is pushing back?
In July, CNN uncovered emails from the administration’s Justice Department outlining a new protocol of exclusively referring to people in the country without government authorization as “illegal aliens.”
In the email, it is stated: “To clear up some confusion and to be consistent in the way we draft our releases, the following is OPA’s (Office of Population Affairs) guidance on describing alien status in the U.S. When a defendant’s illegal presence in the U.S. is an established fact in the public record … they should be referred to as an illegal alien.”
Clarke agreed.
“That is a legal term,” he said. “They are illegal aliens. They are not migrants. They’re not immigrants. They’re illegal aliens in the county illegally.”
… if you don’t have a paper document, it doesn’t mean you don’t exist.
— Sandra Pucci
Pucci said terms like “illegal alien” unnecessarily criminalize people when they’ve only committed a civil offense.
“I think the intent is to ‘other’ someone,” she said. “It obviously dehumanizes people.”
The League of United Latin American Citizens’ Darryl Morin said “undocumented immigrant” is the term most people living in the U.S. without authorization prefer.
However, that term has its limitations as well.
The Justice department’s document specified that, “The word ‘undocumented” is not based on U.S. code, and should not be used to describe someone’s illegal presence in the country.”
Clarke said the term “undocumented immigrant” was invented for political reasons.
“That’s a wordsmithing game [played] by the left to try to dupe people who are not informed,” he said. “They are not ‘undocumented immigrants,’ they are trespassers.”
Pucci agreed that the term “undocumented” is problematic, but for different reasons:
“Everyone is documented in some way,” she said, taking a moment before pointedly adding:
“And if you don’t have a paper document, it doesn’t mean you don’t exist.”
Constitutional ambiguities have also added to the confusion. As Earle pointed out, the fourth amendment of the constitution (and the fourteenth) applies to everyone:
“If a person in the United States (is) documented or undocumented, citizen or non-citizen, resident alien or nonresidential, it doesn’t matter; they have a fourth amendment right in the United States,” he explained.
Nothing is neutral.
— Sandra Pucci
This debate around the language of immigration extended into media circles in 2013, when the Associated Press announced it was changing its policy on referring to people living in the U.S. without government authorization.
In an AP blog post, Paul Colford, the former vice president of AP media relations, wrote, “The Stylebook no longer sanctions the term ‘illegal immigrant’ or the use of ‘illegal’ to describe a person.”
Colford was quoting a lengthy statement from Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll, explained the AP Stylebook’s thought-process behind the change.
For example, the term “undocumented” was rejected for its imprecision.
“A person may have plenty of documents,” Colford wrote. “Just not the ones required for legal residence.”
Instead, the entry which featured “illegal immigration” now states: “Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant. Acceptable variations include living in or entering a country illegally or without legal permission. Do not use the terms alien, an illegal, illegals or undocumented (except when quoting people or government documents that use these terms).”
Pucci said the AP’s choice to continue using “illegal immigration” still presents an issue.
“The word ‘illegal’ is inappropriate,” she said.
So what would be best?
In our series, Media Milwaukee has chosen to use the term “unauthorized immigrant” as the most accurate, neutral way of referring to people crossing the border and/or residing in the U.S. without government authorization.
But, as Pucci pointed out, “Nothing is neutral.”
For Pucci, “illegal immigrant” is one term which is definitely not neutral, even though it represents one of the most widely used terms to refer to this country’s unauthorized immigrants.
But what does the term really mean?
In the term, the word “illegal” acts as a modifier of the word “immigrant,” pricking at the ever-present, hot-button intersection of crime and immigration while provoking thoughts of fear, insecurity and resentment.
As Media Milwaukee’s open records documents show, there are unauthorized immigrants who actually commit violent, felonious crimes; however, they represent a very small percentage of the unauthorized immigrant population.
And while some argue the term is fair because living in the U.S. without authorization is a crime, under that premise, anyone who has broken a law in this country — from jaywalking to blowing through a stop sign — is a criminal. But of course, every U.S. citizen with an OWI isn’t referred to as a “criminal American.”
So what’s the difference?
Immigration lawyer Davorin Ordcic said there is none.
“A frontal lobe is a frontal lobe, whether it’s in a U.S. citizen or in Mexico,” he reasoned. “The level of dumbassery is not distinguishable from dumbassery in U.S. citizens.”
While this linguistics question may be more technical than that, it echoes a deeper conundrum bounding among authorial circles. Throughout history, America as a whole has struggled to identify groups in a way which accurately reflects their reality, but doesn’t reduce them to one — oftentimes, unflattering — state of being. Today’s debate over immigration and its rhetoric, is merely the latest iteration of that dilemma.
Bu Pucci said even if we don’t have the answers yet, it’s important that we keep trying to find the right words.
“Ask a lot of questions. Do a close reading first. Then step back and start looking at the framing, what the context is and what the perspective is,” she said. “Keep in mind that (this) is a very heated topic fueled by a lot of issues that have nothing to do with immigration.”