The First Rule of Illegal Immigration is No One Talks About Illegal Immigration

May 5, 2013 By Daniel Greenfield
frontpagemag.com

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Liberals love euphemisms the way that goats love eating rotten apples. But the problem with euphemisms is that they eventually take on the derogatory meaning of the thing they were trying to slowly back away from. Retarded started out as a euphemism to replace slow which was a euphemism started to replace moron which was also… you get the idea.

Liberals insisted that we use illegal immigrant to replace illegal alien which replaced more insulting terms. Now they are insisting that we use undocumented immigrant. And according to the LA Times, even undocumented immigrant is a bridge too far.

“Illegal immigrants” is overly broad and does not accurately apply in every situation. The alternative suggested by the 1995 guidelines, “undocumented immigrants,” similarly falls short of our goal of precision. It is also untrue in many cases, as with immigrants who possess passports or other documentation but lack valid visas.

The umm quest for precision naturally led the LA Times to eliminate precision entirely.

Use the term “illegal immigration” to describe the phenomenon of entering or residing in a country in violation of the law. Avoid using “illegal immigrant” or “undocumented immigrant” to describe individuals except when necessary in direct quotations.

Refusing to categorize individuals is not precision. It’s political correctness. But the left is understandably trying to dodge the euphemism treadmill knowing that any word that they use to describe illegal aliens will take on derogatory connotations. So in true Newspeak style, they are going to eliminate the term entirely.

But that just leaves everyone free to default to the core term, illegal alien, while the LA Times hacks worry about being bought out by the Koch Brothers and find new creative ways to advocate an amnesty for illegal aliens without using of any of those terms.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenf...l-immigration/

An immigrant is one who has left one country and taken up residence in another country.

An alien is one who is now present in a country of which he is not a citizen.

Some individuals are both immigrants and aliens,
some are immigrants but no longer aliens, and
some are aliens passing through, who will not remain in the country and become immigrants.

A foreigner is a citizen of another country (which is foreign to the speaker).
An alien is anyone who is presently outside the country of which he is a citizen: presumably a foreigner in the present country, but instead of a foreigner, he could be an expatriate, a native of the present country who later became a citizen of another country. However, a foreigner is not an alien when he is present in his own country.

Immigrant, alien, foreigner, native - they all mean different things, but there is some overlap.

Of course, when political correctness insinuates euphemisms and deceit, words lose their meanings and their moorings, cutting language loose and setting it adrift.

Quote:

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"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master— that's all."

Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll (1871)

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