# Deported Immigrants, and income earned while in the US

**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/deported-immigrants-and-income-earned-while-in-the-us/782529
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [March 19, 2017, 4:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/deported-immigrants-and-income-earned-while-in-the-us/782529 "2017-03-19T04:41:33Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 31

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### Author: ![Crazyhorse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crazyhorse/32/31_2.png) [@Crazyhorse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crazyhorse)
#### Post date: [March 22, 2017, 1:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/deported-immigrants-and-income-earned-while-in-the-us/782529/31 "2017-03-22T01:56:39Z")

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> [@Melbourne](#):
>
> I don’t want to argue this at length, again, and here, since it’s not the subject of the OP and it has long been established in countless other threads , but the term “illegal” applied to an illegal immigrant is intended to be a colloquialism and is not in any way intended to be a micro-agression

[Should I Use the Term “Illegal Immigrant”?](http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/should-i-use-the-term-illegal-immigrant)

[Why ‘illegal immigrant’ is a slur](http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/05/opinion/garcia-illegal-immigrants/)

[‘No human being is illegal’: linguists argue against mislabeling of immigrants](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/06/illegal-immigrant-label-offensive-wrong-activists-say)

[The Dehumanizing History Of The Words We’ve Used To Describe Immigrants](https://thinkprogress.org/the-dehumanizing-history-of-the-words-weve-used-to-describe-immigrants-18dd39c90459#.rrkbhrxf3)

[Immigration Debate: The Problem with the Word Illegal](http://ideas.time.com/2012/09/21/immigration-debate-the-problem-with-the-word-illegal/)

[The battle over the words used to describe migrants](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34061097)

[‘Illegals’](https://keller.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/llegals/)

The bottom line is the term is considered pejorative to those it applies to and many others and that is reason enough to consider it so. Especially once people started doing the tell-tale shortening of the term from ‘illegal immigrants’ to ‘illegals’.

There are plenty of people who argue otherwise but they’re wrong. Once the term has been used pejoritavely by many, and it has been explained it is offensive to a large group of people, those who continue to use it are doing so deliberately despite this. That’s why people don’t use “oriental” to describe people anymore either, along with many other examples.

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