Would you say the same of someone who mugs people to feed their children? Or kills them?
Doing something with the intent of helping your children does not instantly forgive breaking the law.
It is impossible to have any sort of conversion about this issue when people won’t even admit that the people in question immigrated illegally out of some insane desire to be PC.
I guess the difference is i don’t think calling someone an Illegal immigrant, a jaywalker, a Software Developer or whatever means that they are “fucking illegal scum” or less of a human being. I see it as a description of something they did or do. Just like a skater is still a human, even if they… skate.
We could call them “Person who previous illegally entered the country and is now living in the country illegally,” but that seems too long and hard to say to me.
The phrase invokes the notion that the person is by default less deserving of their current status. If you start with the premise that all humans are equally deserving, then that does indeed imply the individual is less than human.
Of course an illegal immigrant is less deserving of being a resident than a legal immigrant. If someone can just break the law to get ahead it isn’t fair to the people who actually follow it.
If you get a job in order to buy a car, aren’t you more deserving of said car than someone who steals a car?
If you don’t believe these policies are just, change them, but don’t punish people who actually did what was requested of them.
I think perhaps you’re reading more into what I wrote than is actually there. In fact I’d say by quite a bit. I’m talking about semantics in a thread about semantics. You’re talking about policy and assuming a hell of a lot about my outlook.
Instead of calling them “Illegal Immigrants”, I propose a far more accurate name for the overwhelming majority of persons who enter this country illegally:
“Social Security System saviors who pay a higher ratio in taxes to take-out than anyone here in this forum ever will.”
I worked with this guy called Tony growing up. Tony wasn’t the smartest guy on the farm, he wasn’t the most hardworking either, but he loved America - god bless him. He’d grown up in Mexico and came across the border around twenty years ago. He was pretty good at dodging the federalis, he crossed the border twice a year and managed to get by without much hassle. Still don’t understand how.
He had this thing for sales though, if something was on discount - he had to buy it. The last time I saw him was memorial day, about six years back. He had just picked up a couple of couches from the local discount chain. They were half off and as Tony said they were “a total steal.” The American dream was built on the lazy boy, and god dammit - he was buying in. Of course Tony lived in a double wide and he didn’t have room for his new haul. No problem though, he simply rented out a storage unit for a few months.
Now Tony was never the best at math, so I’m not sure it occurred to him that the storage unit (at a 100 month) wasn’t the best deal, and that he might eat threw those ‘savings’ pretty quickly. Honestly, I expect those couches are still sitting in that storage unit to this day. Those couches probably cost him a couple of thousand by now.
Also, for a guy who made ten bucks an hour he had a really nice stereo system.
That’s right. Somewhere back there I called them scum and carpetbaggers and welfare cheats and terrorists and wetbacks and assholes and SEC fans…didn’t I?
Get a clue and read what has been written before writing something stupid.
I guess in your world every poor person with a kid should be granted citizenship and a free healthcare?
The real issue isn’t the term (which should be removed simply because of its dog-whistle usage), but the reasoning behind the change (which is a cop-out). Labels are how language works. They aren’t going to demand that “likely voters” be replaced with “persons who fit a demographic profile that indicates they will vote in this year’s election”. And replacing terms like “suspected rapist” with “person suspected of commiting rape” or “parole violator” with “person who broke the terms of a parole agreement” doesn’t really elevate discussion in any pertinent way. The problem isn’t that “illegal immigrant” is a label, it’s that it is a class. Referring to someone as an illegal immigrant when immigration status is irrelevant to the discussion is problematic, and this change makes it much easier to call out those uses - as soon as you have to think through some awkward phrasing to convey the idea that the person is here illegally, you (or your editor) also have to think through why you are calling out that fact, and whether or not it is necessary. That should be the rubric in general (though as I said, the term “illegal immigrant” in specific is now tainted and suspect regardless of it’s accuracy).
For any other violation, we don’t say “you are illegal” even if you are still doing something illegal. If someone is robbing your house, you don’t call 911 and say “Help, there’s an illegal in here!”. And that’s why the term should be updated.
So maybe they should be called “illegal stayers” or something?
Well, that’s slightly better except that it’s vague. There is no specific law against “staying”. And there are lots of people who “stay illegally” who are not immigrants, e.g. people who don’t pay rent, people who resist arrest, squatters, etc.
To be more accurate, you could start by consideration the nature of violation. For example, some “illegals” are actually “visa overstayers”. Others could be described as “visa-less”. You get the idea.
