Do you have anything even half-way intelligent to say about the illegal immigration issue?

Anyway, kudos to you for posting this. I always thought the same thing: calling an immigrant who might’ve come here in violation of immigration law an “illegal” reeks of bigotry. As you astutely pointed-out, by that logic, we’re all illegals.

Anti-immigration rhetoric aside, calling otherwise decent people who risk their well-being in desparate search for a better life “illegals” is a way of dehumanizing them. Why, they’re not people, they’re ILLEGALS!

As to your larger point, I don’t see any legitimate reason for going out of our way to find new ways to find racism in places where no one would have thought it existed. If you have to make a tendentious argument that a word is racist before anyone can see any racial aspect to it, then it’s not being used in a racist way.

I’ll grant that there are non-racist reasons why one might use the term. They just don’t seem to be very consistent or coherent. Not that every reason for every action has to be consistent — people act out of habit, or just because they don’t think through every action. But when we think it through, it seems like a strange usage.

As you rightly point out, there are many terms that label violators of laws or norms — terms like thief, tax cheat, sex offender, and so on.

However, these are relatively narrow terms, and they signal specific violations of specific social norms.

In contrast, the term “illegal,” on the face of it, really encompasses all illegality.

We can see the inconsistency in usage when we compare each word’s usage as a noun or an adjective:

Perform a thieving action, and you will be labeled a thief. Perform a murdering action, and you will be labeled a murderer.

In general, each label applies to the entire group. That is, all people who perform thieving actions may rightly be labeled thieves, and all people who perform murdering actions may rightly be labeled murderers. (Individuals may quibble or offer excuses or justifications, but the noun is essentially an exact match to the adjective.) This even applies to the broader term ‘criminal’: If you perform a criminal act, you are a criminal, and all people who perform criminal acts may accurately be labeled criminals.

This noun-adjective correspondence does _not_ carry over to the usage of the word “illegal.” That is, it is _false_ to say that all people who perform illegal actions are labeled as illegals. There’s a real lexical inconsistency in the way the term is used: _All_ thieving actions will make one a thief, but apparently only _some_ illegal actions will make one an illegal.

The question then becomes, which illegal actions are so singled out, and why?

If we were to start out, tabula rasa, and say, “let’s suppose that there is some category of illegal actions for which we’d like to use the term ‘illegal’” — what kinds of actions might we choose to so stigmatize? We might choose egregious and awful acts: murder, rape, violent assault.

Weirdly, though, current usage stigmatizes violators of an administrative law (immigration laws are not even criminal), who are given the label “illegals.”

I’ve suggested racism as one reason for this approach. Simple inertia may be another reason. If you’ve got other suggestions as to why immigration law violators receive this lexically unusual treatment, I’d be happy to hear them.

Ray,

Are you suggesting that there is a perfect correlation between people who want the country’s immigration laws to be enforced, and people who use the term “illegals” as a descriptive noun? I’ve discussed one group only.

Are the terms criminal, pedophile, thief, tax cheat, sex offender, terrorist, etc., familiar at all?

Perhaps you should give some thought to why people might use commission of a crime (regardless of conviction) as a primary descriptor. We don’t say describe people as “jaywalkers” because most people don’t care about jaywalking or think that the fact that someone has jaywalked in the past says anything useful about that person.

If someone is an illegal immigrant, that person has no legal right to be where he is, and some people find that fact interesting. There is something admittedly demeaning about the term, and people can certainly disagree about whether there is anything morally reprehensible about illegal immigration, but to say that using the word is racist per se is just silly.