The Californication of immigration language

The fight over illegal immigration plays out by altering words and their meanings. Take the traditional rubric “illegal alien.” The English has been clear and exact for nearly a century: illegal alien (cf. Latin alienus) was a descriptive term for any foreigner who crossed the US border without coming through customs to obtain proper legal sanction.

Illegal alien, then, was a politically neutral, exact, and descriptive term: one used by both the Supreme Court and Internal Revenue Service.

But open-borders advocates did not like the adjective and noun because they accurately emphasized both illegality and the foreignness of those arriving into the United States from another country.

What followed was a slow Orwellian devolution. Illegal alien initially was reinvented as “undocumented alien,” as if the violation became one of simply forgetting (rather than never having) one’s supposed legal documents at home. But the noun “alien” still implied arrivals were somehow separate from US citizens by virtue of their illegal resident status. So next the noun changed to immigrant, as if undocumented immigrant gave the impression that forgetful visitors had just strayed innocently across the border...

What does “sanctuary city” really imply other than a place where advocates of illegal immigration ignore and override federal law to allow illegal aliens to reside, often in violation of the local, state, and federal law?

Such no-go sanctuary zones are supposed to channel the idea of religious and political sanctuaries in time of civil war...

Yet a more honest description of sanctuary cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles would be “secessionist cities.”...

An equally accurate description would be “amnesty cities,” ...

“Dreamers” is another linguistic contortion that increasingly and by design does not reflect reality.

Originally the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) act was an executive order— most likely unconstitutional and illegal—issued by former president Barack Obama to exempt foreign national minors who were brought by their parents illegally into the United States from federal immigration law enforcement...

Anytime an idea or political agenda cannot achieve majority political support, its sponsors turn to euphemisms and linguistic gymnastics...

In our age, we have witnessed how the Obama administration went to great lengths to downplay the threats of radical Islamic terrorism. Apparently he preferred new words that would not capture the reality that thousands of radical Muslims had terrorized innocent civilians...

The public does not approve of open borders...