[Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively on VDARE.com]
In a recent post , I discussed an article by Adam Ellwanger, Professor of English at the University of Houston. Professor Ellwanger tracks the way we have, across the years, most commonly referred to illegal aliens.
He reports that we started by referring to them as, duh, “illegal aliens,” a straightforward and precise term used in federal legislation. However, it turned out that some high proportion of Americans thought that the word “alien” was a synonym for “bug-eyed monster,” so we switched to “illegal immigrant.”
But hey, no human being is illegal! Only acts can be illegal: larceny, forgery, assault, et. So we switched to “undocumented persons.”
That prefix “un-” is kinda negative, though…so after wrestling with our national conscience a few more years we ended up, in the Obama Administration, with “migrant workers.” Professor Ellwanger writes:
A “migrant” is just someone who moves around, and Americans highly value freedom of movement. But what are they doing while they move around? Working! The Protestant work ethic that has been at the core of American identity insists upon the virtue of hard work. Thus, the “illegal alien” is reconstituted as a paragon of industry and individualism. Is it any coincidence that as we softened and neutralized this terminology, and thereby valorized the persons to whom it referred, our nation became less and less able to meaningfully address the problem of illegal immigration? Rhetorical manipulation is a power that the Left has applied to issue after issue, and it is a gambit that we need to grow more courageous in resisting.
“‘Sex Work’” and the Language Games We Play, August 14, 2023
This is a powerful and important piece that Prof Ellwanger has written, reminding us that
public attitudes can be shifted this way or that by manipulating the language we use when talking about issues, and when one single point of view has a near-monopoly of the media, the academy, and politics, public attitudes will be shifted in the direction of that point of view. There is something to be said on the other side, though.
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