Update: Lamar Smith’s office has announced that he plans to keep using the term “illegal immigrant”–“and trusts the the AP will keep quoting people who do so as well.”
Immigration activists and advocates yesterday were abuzz with excitement when the Associated Press announced it was dropping the use of the term “illegal immigrant.” The change comes after activists’ years-long campaign to push those in the media to stop using the term, and during a year that has seen a sea change in how Republicans talk about and treat immigration.
Not everyone is thrilled about the change, of course. The super-anti-immigrant group ALIPAC announced that it would move in the opposite direction of AP’s progress, double down, and start calling immigrants “illegal invaders.” Note this is the same group that refers to the President as “Dictator Barack Obama” and has called for an armed coup to remove him.
Mark Krikorian, the Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies, also had thoughts about what immigrants should be called now. “Forget “illegal immigrant,” he tweeted. “The Israeli term is more accurate: ‘infiltrator.'”
Wrote a horrified Michelle Malkin, “It won’t be long before illegal border crossers, illegal visa overstayers, illegal deportation evaders, document fraudsters, and illegal-alien traffickers are all referred to as ‘our fellow Americans.’ Without the quotations. Mark my words.”
For that crowd, it would be absolutely horrible for immigrants to someday be referred to as Americans. For us, that will be an amazing victory for America. In fact, that’s the whole point of immigration reform: to legally recognize the 11 million aspiring Americans as citizens.
Leave it to the anti-immigrant crowd to stir themselves into such a frenzy over the AP deciding to recognize the fact that a term could be demeaning to people. We know that if it were up to them, they’d be calling immigrants “dirty” “dogs” who should be shot from helicopters. But the world is quickly moving away from them. And clearly that’s what they hate most of all.
