California, the Rhetoric of Illegal Immigration, and the Perils of Ignoring Thucydides’s Warning
7th November 2017
Victor Davis Hanson commits the crime of of Noticing.
The English has been clear and exact for nearly a century: illegal alien (cf. Latin alienus) was a descriptive term for any foreigner who crossed the US border without coming through customs to obtain proper legal sanction.
Illegal alien, then, was a politically neutral, exact, and descriptive term: one used by both the Supreme Court and Internal Revenue Service.
But open-borders advocates did not like the adjective and noun because they accurately emphasized both illegality and the foreignness of those arriving into the United States from another country.
What followed was a slow Orwellian devolution. Illegal alien initially was reinvented as “undocumented alien,” as if the violation became one of simply forgetting (rather than never having) one’s supposed legal documents at home. But the noun “alien” still implied arrivals were somehow separate from US citizens by virtue of their illegal resident status. So next the noun changed to immigrant, as if undocumented immigrant gave the impression that forgetful visitors had just strayed innocently across the border.
The Left is very fond of distortion-through-adjective. ‘Justice’ isn’t good enough; it has to be ‘social justice’, ‘racial justice’, ‘distributive justice’, etc. — which is to say, injustice.