The Left’s Long Struggle Against the Use of ‘Illegal Aliens’

We’re now apparently in the age where using the term “birthing person” makes you a thoughtful speaker and saying “illegal alien” gets you suspended — at least if you’re a high school student in North Carolina.

Last week, “in Davidson County, North Carolina, 16-year-old student Christian McGhee was suspended for three days for using the term ‘illegal alien’ in class while clarifying the word ‘alien’ in a vocabulary lesson,” writes Donna King . , editor-in-chief of the Carolina Journal.

“A classmate threatened to fight Christian over his choice of words, but both the students and their teacher insisted the conversation was innocent, and the other student’s outrage was a joke,” adds King, noting the absurdity of politically correct terms like ‘birth’. person” and “womb owners” in her column about the incident.

To recap: Christian, a teenager, reportedly did not call someone an illegal alien, but simply asked the teacher if he was referring to an illegal alien or, say, a little green creature. But even uttering the term was enough to get him suspended.

It’s insane — but it’s also the natural culmination of the left’s long war against the term “illegal alien.”

It is not surprising that so-called objective journalists were among the first to make the term verboten. In 2013, The Associated Press, which sets the style used by many American newsrooms, banned the term “illegal immigrant.” In 2015, ABC and NBC did the same, The New Yorker reported.

Liberal lawmakers soon followed with advocacy.

In 2015, Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, introduced the Correcting Hurtful and Alienating Names in Government Expression (CHANGE) Act. (Yes, that’s the real name of the bill.) Under Castro’s bill, federal agencies would be required to use “foreign national” instead of “alien,” and replace the term “illegal alien” with “alien without paper’. Current language, Castro said in a statement, tended to “dehumanize” people.

California, always quick to embrace the latest in political correctness, “passed laws in 2015 and 2016 that removed (the word alien) from the state’s labor and education code,” The Associated Press reported.

Meanwhile, New York City’s Human Rights Commission decided in 2019 that it was perfectly reasonable to fine people who used the terms “illegal alien” or “illegals” up to $250,000. (No, that’s not a typo.)

In 2021, the Biden administration decreed that “illegal alien” and “alien” were terms that U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials could not use. ‘Noncitizen’ was now the preferred term.

“The words we use matter,” Troy Miller, acting commissioner for Customers and Border Protection, lectured in a memo to employees.

That same year, Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, signed a bill banning the use of “illegal aliens” in state government contracts, while California Governor Gavin Newsom, also a Democrat, signed a bill banning “aliens” who found in all state laws. The term, he pontificated, was “an insulting term for a human being.”

To be clear, lawmakers focused on banning “hurtful” terms even as “noncitizens” poured into the country across the southern border. An October report from the House Judiciary Committee estimated that 3.8 million illegal immigrants have entered the country since President Joe Biden was sworn into office.

Biden, who often seems a bit aloof from the policies his administration’s officials are aggressively enforcing, caused an uproar among liberals in March when he condemned the illegal immigrant accused of killing Georgian nursing student Laken Riley, 22. , referred to as an “illegal”. made remarks during his State of the Union address.

Cue the scolding.

“Just as we should not implement Republican policies, we should not repeat Republican rhetoric,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., a member of the ultra-left House of Representatives “squad,” told AP .

Castro, who had tried to ban “alien” in 2015, also sounded distraught. “The rhetoric President Biden used tonight came dangerously close to the language of Donald Trump, who is putting a target on the backs of Latinos everywhere,” Castro wrote on X.

Biden, chastened, admitted days later in an interview with MSNBC that he “shouldn’t have used ‘illegal.’ It is ‘undocumented’.”

But here it becomes abundantly clear that there is a huge divide between Americans and left-wing lawmakers. A Harvard Harris poll asked respondents whether Biden’s use of the word “illegal” in the State of the Union address was “appropriate” or “inappropriate.”

And in this divisive era of American politics, a whopping 79% of respondents said this was appropriate. Among Hispanics, 74% said they thought it was appropriate for Biden to call Laken Riley’s killer an “illegal.” That sounds like…consensus.

The left has long attempted to conflate the issues of immigration and illegal immigration, obscuring the difference between expanding opportunity for the American dream to those who have legally applied and waited, and those who enter opaquely through what is essentially is an open border. .

As Miller said in his 2021 memo, “The words we use matter.” That is precisely why the left is so determined to make the use of “illegal alien” – a term that clearly denotes reality – as outlawed as a horrible racial slur.