If they committed a crime. It’s a crime to enter the country illegally, so “criminals” would accurately cover people who swam the Rio Grande or who avoided detection while crossing the desert. As Czarcasm points out, it also covers your neighbor who got a DUI last month and me when I smoked some weed in college. Probably covers you, too.
Requesting asylum is not a crime, but people who use the term “illegals” tend to lump those who have requested asylum in with the illegals. “Criminals” then would be an inaccurate descriptor (as is “illegals”). “Undocumented immigrants” would accurately encompass both those who crossed the border illegally and those who requested asylum in compliance with the country’s laws. That precision is why it’s used in serious discussions of policy, and why i should be used here by people who want to be taken seriously.
It’s obviously a pejorative, but has there ever been a general “ban” on the use of pejoratives? I’m not particularly opposed to such a ban (pejoratives never add anything to the conversation and generally reduce the quality of it), but I don’t believe that there is such a restriction in place.
If we started calling those who entered illegally or overstayed their visum “snoegs”, how long before that is considered pejorative? In other words, is any word which describes a group of people by an attribute some, but not all, find objectionable- pejorative? Is “pedofile” pejorative ? If not, why not? If it is, why is it ok to use?
It’s clearly a short-hand/contraction of “illegal aliens” or “illegal immigrants” because those are both relatively long in terms of syllables versus “illegals”.
Reading into it that anyone’s implying that the people are illegal in some sort of existential way is absurd. People are objecting to the fact that they’re coming here, and trying to make their lives in total disregard for the legal immigration channels, and presumably with awareness that they’re disregarding the legal way to do it. And they don’t like the term ‘undocumented immigrants’, because it conveniently glosses over the question of whether or not they deliberately disregarded and flaunted our laws in getting here. It implies they just left their immigration card at home or something, which is incorrect at best.
In other words, it’s not the “immigrant” part of “illegal immigrant” that they object to, it’s the “illegal” part. So it’s not surprising that it would contract to “illegals”.
I understand the objections to the term and don’t personally use it, but until “people in the United States without authorization” becomes a protected class, attempting to label it hate speech is putting the euphemism treadmill on too high a setting.
There hasn’t been discussion about this term specifically. Generally we are cautious about expanding the scope of what is considered hate speech. In this specific example I don’t think this term has reached the tipping point where it would be widely enough regarded as derogatory enough to fall into that classification.
Thank you. Since there’s been no discussion, I presume that means you don’t know if the other mods agree with you. Would it be too much to ask to find this out?
I prefer to reserve “criminals” for convicted felons. And apart from everything else, as I understand it, entering the country without proper papers is only a misdemeanor, albeit one with potentially horrible consequences (viz. the lady reported on today separated from her nursing baby). eta: I should probably say “the nursing baby separated from its mother.”
It’s true that “illegals” is convenient shorthand; it is also dehumanizing at the same time. (I had a great-grandfather who was probably an illegal – he was an itinerant cook from Canada who ended up working and living for years in Washington State.) Dehumanizing suits the purpose of some in the discussion of immigration and enforcement, so that putting them behind barbed wire and separating families won’t seem so important. This is a very strong human impulse, to “other” people you don’t like or want to treat badly. We have that here a lot in San Francisco regarding the homeless.
That’s why not calling people “illegals” is better, because it helps us to consider them as individual human beings. This approach is always more complicated and difficult, and therefore less popular, especially in what passes for political discourse in this country. But it uses some other human traits that are, I think, worthwhile: compassion and intelligence.
I agree with Bone. Historically the word “Illegals” has not been treated as hate speech, and while it certainly can be used in a pejorative manner, it has not yet reached the point where it should be classified as hate speech here on the SDMB.
That said, some of the forums here are less tolerant regarding the use of pejoratives, so just because the word is not considered hate speech does not mean that you can safely use the word in all forums. Context matters.
But as far as actually being labeled as hate speech, no, it’s not.
Well that’s certainly an opinion. My opinion is that using “undocumented immigrant” or even (gasp) “immigrant” is an attempt to refer to a fellow human without diminishing that person’s basic human dignity.
I am an immigrant. I followed the rules, became a legal resident alien, and eventually a citizen. This has very little in common with some Finnish dude still here after overstaying his student-visa by 6 years, and I’ll thank you for not equating the two.
If someone walks away from Guatemala, travels through Mexico heading for the US, I’ll use “immigrant” to refer to that person. Unless we’re introduced, then I’ll use their name.