Guest Column
Journalists: Beware of the Vigilante Term “Illegal”
By Otto Santa Ana
The news media has reported that
President Bush is now being snubbed by members of his own political party
when he states a truism: "Immigrants are hard-working, decent human beings."
The entirely peaceful demonstrations of millions of immigrants and their
supporters affirm Bush's assertion. These marches have been widely reported
to involve collective recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance against a
background so splashed with the Stars and Stripes as to resemble majestic
Fourth of July parades.
These gestures of allegiance to the United States aren't just symbolic. In
mid-April, record numbers of immigrants filed U.S. income tax returns. Their
significant contribution to the U.S. economy is well documented, but none of
this satisfies hard-line Republicans who insist that real reform only begins
by "deporting the criminals" and that Bush has "betrayed the trust" of
America.
It must be said that it is not customary for U.S. presidents, leave alone a
conservative one, to speak of immigrants in unquestionably humane terms. To
do so effectively legitimizes the presence of millions of people who lack
the proper documents to be here. Because politics so often hinges on the
emotional appeal underlying words, many conservatives are angry because Bush
has not stayed "on message." They want to retain control of the immigration
issue by sticking to a discourse that disparages immigrants.
This generation of conservatives is not exceptional. Historians have noted
throughout the past century that in times of economic stress astonishingly
negative imagery about immigrants is commonly articulated in public,
especially by mass media.
In my research, I engage UCLA students to help me analyze news stories on
political issues ranging from gangs to public education to environmentalism.
We subject the reportage on these topics to rigorous scientific protocol
designed to avoid injecting political bias. The media images we uncover are
often chilling. Today's images are not blatantly racist, as in the days of
yellow journalism. But they're far from harmless. Cognitive science now
indicates that the subtle language of everyday conventional metaphor encodes
social and political values. For this reason, the news media have tremendous
power to impart politically partisan views to readers/viewers via the
recurrent text and visual images they disseminate. Our research on the issue
of immigration, for example, has found a key public (and news media)
discourse image: immigrants as animals.
During the 1992-1994 anti-immigrant Proposition 187 campaign in California,
which we have had time to fully analyze, we found that the Los Angeles Times
repeatedly depicted immigrants as animals in various ways, including being
drawn into a trap. Although the Times pointedly opposed the ballot measure,
it inadvertently supported the measure when it depicted immigrants as
animals, fore example, that can be chased down and eaten: "The truth is,
employers hungering for really cheap labor hunt out the
foreign workers" (italics mine). In this, the Times was not alone. All
national news sources used such politically biased language.
All the conventional metaphors in this deplorable discourse are negative.
Immigrants were then (and continue to be) depicted as invading soldiers,
flooding tides, and criminals. In the last wave of anti-immigrant sentiment
of the 20th century in California, during the Prop. 187 years, the effect of
this prejudicial discourse of degrading imagery in the news media was that
the electorate was provided only a single view of immigrants - one that
depicted them poorly. The electorate then voted accordingly. The news media
did not offer, at this level of language, proper debate of the issue.
Bush's words, first articulated with astonishing compassion at the start of his reelection campaign in 2004, may lead to a change the playing field. Bush has repeatedly called immigrants "Americans by choice," people of "talent, character, and patriotism" who hold values such as "faith in God, love of family, hard work, and self reliance." Further, Bush described the United States as a "welcoming society by tradition and conviction" that can only become a "stronger and better nation because of the hard work and the faith and entrepreneurial spirit of immigrants."
Thus the president effectively legitimized the use of a new - and unquestionably humane - discourse to alternatively frame the current policy debate. This is rival discourse to the dominant and dehumanizing discourse favored by some conservatives. Such verbal competition offers greater democratic dialogue (small "d") on this vital national issue.
Unfortunately, today's news media is not providing a truly balanced debate. In a "LexisNexis" review of print media stories on immigration from March 24 to April 3, 2006, my students and I found that 898 newspaper articles nationwide used the criminalizing and punitive term "illegal immigrant," while only 54 articles alternated with the non-punitive term "undocumented immigrant."
Still, there is a hint indication of progress. Following the immense March 25 demonstration in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times employed both the "illegal" and "undocumented immigrant" terminology. This was in marked contrast to 1994, when the paper overwhelmingly alluded to immigrants as "illegal," thereby contributing to the passage of Proposition 187 (which was subsequently ruled to be unconstitutional).
Recent national polls indicate that the public - as opposed to the partisans - is taking a far more pragmatic approach to the complex issue of immigration, tied up as it is with law, economics, human rights, and human dignity. Unfortunately, this change is not yet amply reflected in the news media, judging by how it continues to describe and label immigrants.
Journalists must realize two things. First, in this context the word "illegal" is a vigilante term. Most responsible news editors already exclude the word as a noun. After all, we don't call a jaywalker an "illegal pedestrian." Just because people commit civic infractions - and that's the legal offense of the immigrants in question - doesn't make them "illegal." Remember, we don't habitually call firms that use immigrant services "illegal businesses." Since we do not routinely refer to the business owners in question as "criminal bosses," the use of the term "illegal" when referring to immigrants is biased.
The other thing journalists must keep in mind is that every time they resort to the dysphemism (the opposite of euphemism) "illegal immigrants," they bolster a partisan position on a vital issue being debated in homes, diners, and coffee houses across the country - as well as in Congress. Those who insist that immigrants be referred to with the term "illegal" would require journalists to employ terminology that serves a partisan position.
Choosing appropriate political labels in the immigration debate is a huge challenge for journalists. A good start will acknowledge that "illegal" is a harsh expression whose unfair use demeans immigrants, the most vulnerable of people, in the public mind.
There's nothing politically neutral about the term "illegal immigrant" - its criminal connotation is built into its semantics. The news media must accept that its democratic responsibility to be unbiased outweighs stylistic criteria such as common use or concision. Only then can American journalism positively encourage democratic dialogue about one of the most pressing issues of the 21st century.
=====- Otto Santa Ana is Associate Professor in the Department of Chicana & Chicano Studies at UCLA. He is author of the award-winning Brown Tide Rising: Metaphoric Representations of Latinos in Contemporary Public Discourse (University of Texas, 2002). The American Political Science Association named Brown Tide Rising the year's Best Book on Ethnic and Racial Political Ideology and/or Political Theory. Santa Ana currently is studying meaning making in the television network news stories. Contact at: otto@ucla.edu
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