Words do have meaning yet, I hope. As does conciseness and exactitude. In these days when Bush & Co. cast their pollution-increasing environmental policies as “blue skies” policy, it does take a critical eye to discern objectivity versus subjectivity or spin. In Ms. Connelly’s review of There’s No Jose Here [“Invisible America,” January 26], re immigrant life in America, she bends the truth when she says the author, Gabriel Thompson, “avoids taking a stand on the immigration debate” and then gives as an example of his lack of bias his word choices thus: “While Enrique is a documented immigrant–Thompson uses documented and undocumented rather than legal and illegal.”
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The decision to avoid using the word illegal in reference to immigrants here illegally is a conscious bias and does smack of spin. It is important and germane to rational discussion of immigration that the word illegal as it relates to undocumented aliens is used rather than the word undocumented, which is so, so nebulous and meaningless. Honest, open debate requires honest words that accurately describe a situation.
To argue that with 12 million illegal immigrants already here that it is too late to do anything about them now is also false. They didn’t get here in one day, and we won’t get them all deported in one day, but you have to start somewhere. Eventually, yes, all 12 million illegals will be deported. It’s bad enough that our government’s economic and trade policies have shipped so many good-paying manufacturing jobs overseas. We do not have to compound that mistake with importing cheap labor (in the form of illegal immigrants) to save businesses from paying living wages to real Americans holding on to the jobs that have yet to be exported overseas.
