A brief postulation on the term 'illegal immigrant'
“Flooding, deluge, waves of immigrants and so on. Numbers are used to conflate different categories, but also they use rhetoric to amplify the effect - ‘Incoming Migrants’ sounds really scary, they are bringing disaster with them. It is evocative language, and amplifies the sense of fear of them arriving.”
The Western European hesitation in dealing with a huge volume of international migration has manifested itself not only in our government’s approach to those seeking asylum, but it has bled into language too and the ways in which we refer to refugees. Public opinions of the refugee in 2017 has dehumanised them to little more than a statistic, or an ‘issue’. They become a detail within our own personal discourse of societal failure, instead of an individual entity deserving of equal rights and legal protection. Take the following, favoured terms for international migrants.
(from the Cambridge Online Dictionary)
- asylum seeker - someone who leaves their own country, often for political reasons or because of war, and who travels to another country hoping that the government will protect them and allow them to live there.
- refugee - a person who has escaped from their own country for political, religious, or economic reasons or because of a war.
- immigrant - a person who has come to a different country in order to live there permanently
All have very different meanings, but within the media-saturated national consciousness these words are widely seen as both interchangeable, and as having largely negative connotations. By just using the term ‘immigrant’ or ‘refugee’ in an angry or negative context, there stands a real danger of nullifying a person’s biopolitical status, reducing them in the public consciousness from being a human being to a mere political bargaining tool for either side to squabble over.
- illegal immigrant - actions are illegal, not people.