Evolving Governmental Euphemisms in the Immigration Business

By David North, January 8, 2015

This is a report on the evolving euphemisms in the immigration field (which I have dubbed EEIF, pronounced "ee - ee - if").When I was younger, General Joseph W. Swing, then INS Commissioner, talked of "drying out the wets", meaning the conversion of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from Mexico into participants in the Bracero program, a specialized nonimmigrant worker program that offered few protections to the farm workers involved, but which was recognized legally.The regrettable term "wets" (from the Spanish "mojados"), short for "wetbacks", was eventually replaced by illegal alien, and that, in turn, has morphed to unlawful migrant, undocumented immigrant, unauthorized migrant, and more recently into undocumented worker and sometimes, in the Obama White House, to just migrant or immigrant.So there is a sad history of euphemistic precedents here, of seeking to defuse the facts of the situation by warping the terminology. (My colleague Jerry Kammer recently examined the interesting linguistic path of the term "La Raza" from its original meaning of "the race" to its new and politically correct meaning of "the community".Here are three recent examples of EEIFs, two of which were foisted on us by the Department of Homeland Security.The most recent one has been changing the title of President Obama's new amnesty-by-edict.

Riding on the back of the dishonorable terminology Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which should have been called the Young Illegals' Parole and Employment Scheme (YIPES), the administration has decided to use the initials DAPA for the newer program, probably involving as many of four million illegals.The attractions are obvious, DAPA more or less rhymes with, but is different from, DACA; the two abbreviations work well together.Ah, but what does DAPA stand for? It grants temporary legalizations to the parents of U.S. citizen babies and children, essentially rewarding people for having their infants on this side of the border, which amounts to a really twisted population policy.At first the administration said it means "Deferred Action for Parental Accountability", suggesting that coming to the United States illegally and then having children is in some way commendable and should be rewarded.Somebody must have thought that an ill-fitting term, and so the DHS pressies have more recently been using the only slightly less questionable "Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Legal Permanent Residents", whose initials should not be the easy-to-handle DAPA, but the awkward DAPALPR (perhaps pronounced "dapalapper"?). This time the always pleasant term "American" has been attached to this group of illegals.A digression: Has anyone asked the White House how old one must be to be the parent of an LPR? And how many illegal aliens have that distinction? The honest answers would be, respectively, "often very" and "damn few."An illegal alien who became an LPR, unless he or she was the beneficiary of the IRCA amnesty of the 1980s, would probably have to arrive at the LPR status in one of two ways: by marriage to a U.S. citizen or an LPR (and only after the two-year, post-marriage conditional residence status was terminated), or by securing a job calling for a permanent labor certification. Most people who arrive illegally (maybe 98 percent) lack the education or the skills to secure a labor certification, and if they do, there is another, totally separate waiting period for a visa (two-years-plus for Mexicans; much longer for some Asians and shorter for others). A few illegal alien parents could have illegal alien children who became LPRs, presumably as adults, who had obtained a green card from one of our give-green-cards-to-victims programs.Back to the euphemisms: Both the DACA and the DAPA terms totally avoid the reality that the populations concerned arrived illegally, but these are not the only bureaucratic twists in the language of immigration.One of my favorites is the use by DHS of the term "entrepreneur" in connection with the EB-5 program, which gives green cards to rich foreigners when they make the most passive of investments in the American economy, as I described in an earlier blog. The alien not only does not usually participate in the management of the investment, the investor has no obligation to know anything about how the half million dollars is being used.A newer euphemism showed up in a Migration Policy Institute presentation the other day. Instead of the long familiar, and accurate term "English as a Second Language" (ESL) term for language classes for new arrivals, we heard ELL, for "English Language Learners". Apparently someone got (inappropriately, in my eyes) sensitive to the linking of "English" and "second" in a single term, and hence ELL. I must say that while MPI is super sensitive on such matters, this is one we probably can't blame on DHS.

http://cis.org/north/evolving-govern...ation-business