Comments on: Illegal Aliens and Illegal Immigrants

By: Hector Amaya

Hector Amaya — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:23:08 +0000

The AP style guidelines are wrong in assuming some sort of neutrality to the term illegal immigrant. It is a pejorative term criticized by National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Asian American Journalists Association, Native American Journalists Association and National Association of Black Journalists. All of them recommend the use of “undocumented immigrant.” The AP has refused to change their practices despite repeated complains by these associations of journalists and in this refusal the AP shows an ongoing commitment to the preferential treatment of the view’s of some white journalists and media professionals to the detriment and exclusion of the rest of the news community. Shame on them.

By: Steven

Steven — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 06:30:20 +0000

In Australia these words would not be acceptable because of the negative connotations. Those who use them would risk being called a “racist”.

The currently politically correct term is “asylum seekers” which is applied universally.

By: Shamaine

Shamaine — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:31:39 +0000

This term is very complicated because you have the confluence of vocabulary from the social sciences to describe social phenomena and U.S. legal terminology which are not commensurate with each other. If we were to use just legalese, there could not be an “illegal immigrant”, as “immigrants” in the law constitute a narrow subset of those who come to the U.S. with authorization and even a smaller subset of those who immigrate in the socio-political sense . “Illegal alien” on the other hand constitutes a very small subset of the individuals the media is usually talking about (there are only about 10k “illegal aliens” in the U.S. each year which is significantly less than the number of individuals news reports discuss). So the term you use should be based on the discipline you are in.

By: Ellyoung

Ellyoung — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:53:20 +0000

I know this is discussing th language used, not the media.

However, this talk of illegal alliens and illegal immigrants, it is used in the recent film District 9. The aliens there are persecuted in the african nation, as illegal immigrants are persecuted in western civillisations.

IF this has any relevance what so ever

By: cmdweb

cmdweb — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:29:27 +0000

It feels like ‘illegal alien’ is a term used mainly in the USA or North America. It’s not a term you hear used in Europe at all. In the UK, anyone who is in the country who doesn’t have the legal right to be there, either with or without the government’s knowledge, is an ‘illegal immigrant’. There is a subset of these people that have applied for political asylum and these are referred to as ‘asylum seekers’ while their cases are being considered.