AP Stylebook discards the term "illegal immigrant"

I think we can call this a small victory.

Will the Associated Press now stop referring to Lebron James as a "basketball player" and instead now describe him as "a human who plays basketball"?

lagatta wrote:

It is. The only problem with the new, less-stigmatising terminology, is that is extremely wordy, and mainstream press articles require extreme concision, so they may be contracted in other ways.

True. On the other hand, if there is something about the status of a person that is relevant to the news story, then it is worth explaining exactly what that is. If not, then there is no reason to mention it at all.

Of course, that begs the question of why the term was turned into shorthand in the first place.

It's just incredibly clumsy language. One can be a "basketball player" and one can be an "illegal immigrant". Seems silly to refer to "someone who played basketball" just as much as "someone who resides in the country illegally".

Being "illegal" is a crime? A single-category, one-size-fits-all term that applies to every person who may not have full citizenship? It carries no weight of prejudice? It is comparable to being a basketball player, or to keep it in the realm of ciminality, a sadistic murderer? What are your views on referring to people of colour, or people with disabilities? Tell me more.

Mr.Tea wrote:

To expand a bit: illegal immigration is a crime, as are many others. People are routinely referred to and categorized by the crimes they committed. So, the press will refer to Paul Bernardo as "a murderer" rather than "a person who committed murder".

Or not. Can we expect to see Nelson Mandela,  Conrad Black and Martha Stewart refered to as convicted criminals in every news story? Again, if it is relevant to the story then it is important enough to explain. If not, then there is no good reason to mention it.

And in fact, it likely would NOT be used for any reason other than to smear.

rabble.ca and babble understand that categorizing a human being as "illegal" is ideologically rooted in racist and xenophobic immigration policy. That's why we don't use the term in our articles, and it's why allies of racialized and exploited peoples have dropped the term for years. Your "logic" (sic), Mr. Tea, is based on your faulty assumption that it is possible that "someone is an illegal immigrant," rather than realizing that such a statement normalizes a particular mode of thinking about immigration and citizenship. We don't call someone convicted of shoplifting an "illegal consumer," or someone smoking contraband cigarettes an "illegal smoker." We don't even call doctors practicing without a license an "illegal doctor." Add to the fact that there is a very real hegemonic violence attendant to calling marginalized people "illegal" and any ally of social justice can see that this move constitutes a major victory in changing the way people talk about migrant and itinerant people.

Why the AP’s Choice to Drop the I-Word Is a Crucial Victory

This decision is a victory for immigrant communities. We took a word that has been normalized by anti-immigrant forces and revealed it as unfit to print because it is both inaccurate and dehumanizing. We started Drop the I-Word in 2010 because we could see the harm that it was doing to our readers and community. In the early days, many people told us it didn’t matter, that the policy was all-important. But the word itself has blocked any reasonable discussion of policy issues, and we have been unable to move forward as a nation while its use has remained common.

The AP’s new guidance is also a victory for journalists, who strive daily to be accurate and honest with their readers. News people have nothing if not our ability to dig underneath the labels, as the AP says, that provide convenient categories for complex people and problems. When communities also experience those categories as demeaning of their humanity, we have failed at our jobs. The AP just gave us a little more clarity about how to avoid that. They’d like to hear our reactions, so send them a little note.

For years, immigration restrictionists have been stopping all discussion cold with “what about illegal don’t you understand?” Well, we did understand—that the word hid severe problems in the policy, that it has been applied selectively to people of color (undocumented, green-card holding, and citizens alike), and that it fuels hateful action.

People have lost their lives behind this word. Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadoran immigrant was beaten to death on the streets of Brooklyn by men yelling that he was a “f__ illegal.” That state of affairs could not be allowed to continue and thousands of people just like you took a stand to bring it to an end.

This campaign is inspired and instructed by historic and contemporary struggles over language. The civil rights movement made us stop saying “colored” and worse. The women’s movement changed newspaper standards to use “Ms.” The LGBT community and GLAAD got “homosexual” replaced with gay and lesbian. And most recently, the disability rights community has been pressing us all to stop using the r-word.

Ours is not the first generation to debate the i-word. In the 1980s, the “No Human Being is Illegal” campaign, which was named by Nobel prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and led by immigrants through the Sanctuary movement, helped humanize immigrants and mobilize support for the 1986 reform. Wiesel’s phrase has been the unofficial tagline for many people supporting this campaign.

Many people contributed to this moment. It would take pages to name them all, but you can see the early adopters here. The tireless staff of the Applied Research Center and Colorlines.com, especially Coordinator Monica Novoa, has lost sleep over this campaign. Roberto Lovato provided critical encouragement and was key to the early campaign strategy.