You Should Stop Calling Them “Migrants”

During the presidential debate, Kamala Harris cracked up when Donald Trump ranted about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, supposedly snatching and eating local residents’ cats and dogs. The vice president rolled her eyes and broke into a “This dude is crazy” chuckle. 

Trump’s slander was dotty, but it was also chilling. And yet, despite being thoroughly debunked, the Trump campaign, including Ohio’s own JD Vance, continued to latch onto the attacks against Haitians and other immigrants.

How did we get here, where such outlandish fictions about people who come to the U.S. can take hold of the body politic? This has been a long slide. And while the American right deserves much of the blame, liberals and progressives have, however unwittingly, contributed to the ways we think about immigrants too. 

While the right has embraced anti-immigration politics as a means to appeal to a white voter base energized by the threat of the Other, the left has stopped pushing back. Instead, politicians desperate to court moderate voters and a media that follows their lead have employed narratives and buzzwords implying that immigrants are seedy, animalistic, and dangerous.

To see how this sort of thing takes root and spreads, consider the word “migrant.” Today, it’s the term of art from both the right and the left. “Nearly 7.3 million migrants have illegally crossed the southwest border under President Biden’s watch, a number greater than the population of 36 individual states,” Fox News warned earlier this year, without noting that many, if not most, were seeking relief from government oppression, violence, and other dangerous and demeaning chaos. Meanwhile, the leftist daily news show “Democracy Now!” reported on people new to the U.S. being left in the cold in big cities, including New York, and called these neglected people “migrants.” The Nation titled a series of first-person accounts of immigrants “Migrant Voices.” 

It used to be fairly rare to call human beings migrants. From the 16th to 19th centuries, the word mostly referred to birds and other animals that moved back and forth between different climates and terrains every year, not from desire or planning but from pure, immutable instinct. 

By the early 20th century, “migrant” in the U.S. had commonly come to refer to Mexicans crossing north to do agricultural labor in states including Texas, California, and Colorado, following seasonal crops. The notion was that, unlike immigrants who uprooted their lives to resettle, migrants came for economic reasons and didn’t fully intend to stay.

Not all the people labeled as migrants, however, fit that bill. Some settled for good in the U.S. and during hot economic times came to be considered a permanent fixture of the American labor market, even while deemed social and racial inferiors.

Not so today. Now, everyone who leaves a poor or troubled country and comes north to the United States is a “migrant.” This is how they’re described by the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, CNN, and other major media. 

The word “migrant” implies that they’re traveling around unsettled: rolling stones with no intention of gathering moss and no right to land in one place. 

As Al Jazeera has commented, “migrant” has “evolved from its dictionary definitions into a tool that dehumanizes and distances, a blunt pejorative.” 

In recent years, voices have popped up to renounce the use of “migrant” — as Al Jazeera did in 2015 — or at least question its use. The English scholar of international affairs Alexander Betts uses the term “survival migration” to refer to how people are compelled to cross borders in order to live, even if they are not technically refugees under international law. The International Organization for Migration adds an adjective, making the phrase “vulnerable migrants,” to refer to people needing protection and help, even if they are not refugees. Those voices, though, are few and far between, with the one-word use of “migrant” continuing to grow and negative connotations increasingly becoming attached to it.

The philologist Victor Klemperer wrote about these kinds of subtle language shifts under the Nazi regime. In his definitive study, “The Language of the Third Reich,” Klemperer, who himself narrowly avoided death at the hands of the Nazis, was less interested in the obvious language shifts — the kind of thing any antifascist would have recognized. Instead, he focused on the unnoticed changes, the ones that slipped by almost everyone; he called it “the language of hysteria” and “the language which writes and thinks for you.” 

Though it crept in quietly, these shifts of meaning could have dramatic effects, being used, for example, to demonize whole swaths of society. Today, we ought to be wary of these unnoticed shifts — and “migrant” is a good starting place, but only the start.

The shift to “migrant” has come with other buzzwords that at best dehumanize and at worst demonize. 

Republicans often claim immigrants are carrying out an “invasion.” For even the liberal media, however, people come to the U.S. in “waves,” “surges,” and “floods.” On the Southern border, officials issue disaster declarations — even Democrats. Once over the border, some of the newly arrived will be sloshed north on buses and plans on the orders of officials from both parties. 

Little help is forthcoming because Republicans in Congress won’t allow it, and Democrats have allowed the GOP to own the issue of immigration — including its lexicon. 

Republicans have been aggressively blaming immigrants for the country’s woes for decades, and Democrats started wagging the tail of that dog almost three decades ago, under President Bill Clinton. Rather than mounting a challenge, his administration tacked rightward, with new policies supporting the deportation of people who fit a new buzzphrase: “criminal alien.”

That phrase was a variant of “illegal alien,” which was widespread in the 20th century and focused on calling immigrants “aliens”: foreign things with no right to belong. Immigration rights activists in the 1980s protested that human beings could do illegal things but not be illegal. But during the so-called war on drugs, the category “criminal alien” expanded, sweeping up young and often people of color who were convicted of minor possession and distribution of marijuana (a substance that is now mostly legal). Only during the Biden administration did federal agencies ditch the words “illegal” and “alien” when referring to immigrants. Yet the president lapsed into “illegal” in his State of the Union address this past March. He later said he regretted not having instead used “undocumented,” which many advocates also consider dehumanizing. 

Every Democratic administration since Clinton’s has been increasingly hard on immigrants. The shock of 9/11 introduced and ossified another buzzphrase: “border security.” No one has been caught crossing from Mexico to the United States with plans for fomenting terror, and most fentanyl comes not from “migrants” but from big shipments in big trucks searched at official ports of entry. No matter. The Border Patrol has been hugely expanded in past decades, and high walls have been erected during Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Vast technologies of surveillance have been installed, including products supplied by a subsidiary of the Israeli-owned company Elbit, and used by Israel to control Palestinians. The number of immigrants who have perished trying to avoid this ever-increasing technology has shot up in recent years. 

Amid this mega-expansion, Republicans have been banging a verbal drum that’s drowned out the Democrats, perhaps even brainwashed them. In the second quarter of this year, the latest period with available data, GOP candidates and political action committees ran 196 anti-immigrant ads that were viewed over 1.6 billion times. The ads’ top buzzwords were “border,” “crime,” “wall,” and “fentanyl.” During the same period, Democrats’ output on the same topic was anemic: 17 ads with 296 million views. 

Rather than defend or humanize immigrants, Democrats are trying to outdo Republicans in paranoia and militarism.

An LA Times analysis of political ads found Democrats in key swing districts going on the offense on border security. Democrat Will Rollins, running for Congress out of California, brags that as a federal prosecutor he put away drug lords and Mexican mafia members. One of his videos cuts to a Republican campaign sign that reads “Secure the border!” and Rollins criticizes his opponent for voting against a bill that would have increased the number of agents at the border. In Arizona, Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego launched an ad for his Senate campaign that opens with a sheriff next to a border wall and concertina wire, praising Gallego for “fighting for solutions — better technology, more manpower, so people like me can do our jobs.” In Washington state, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s ad promises to cooperate with Republicans to secure the border. That ad, too, features sheriffs touting her.

Is it any surprise, then, that people in general are susceptible to the outrageous claims about immigrants’ perfidy — and many Democrats are also credulous?

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s ad about immigration does nothing to improve things. Never does she draw a direct line between immigration politics and the fact that both of her parents were immigrants, from Jamaica and India — people who, like virtually all immigrants now and in the past, have come to America with stunning energy, industry, and creativity, no matter jobs they’ve held. Instead, when speaking of immigration, Harris’s ad says only that “as a border state prosecutor, she took on drug cartels and jailed gang members for smuggling weapons and drugs across the border.” It further notes: “As vice president, she backed the toughest border control bill in decades. And as president, she will hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking.”

Her speech at the Democratic National Convention repeated these dark saws and worse. She promised to bring back a bipartisan immigration legislation that gives immigrants nothing, and which Harris dubbed the “toughest border control bill in decades.” It calls for “more border security” when border security is nothing more than border security theater: a true Klemperer lexeme. As for her platform, the only thing Harris offers to immigrants is “an earned pathway to citizenship.” 

That might sound hopeful at first glance, but a portent of what “earned pathway to citizenship” actually means comes from a bipartisan House bill co-sponsored by Reps. Maria Elvira Salazar, R-Fla., and Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, who’s from the U.S.-Mexico border city El Paso and is a co-chair of the Harris campaign.

The bill would offer immigrants without documentation who have lived in the United States for at least five years a four-year, quasi-legal status possibly leading to a green card — but only if they accede to the implication that they’ve robbed Americans and should be fined for it. To enroll, applicants must pay $5,000. They must also agree to have 1.5 percent of their wages garnished for years. All that money would go to a fund to compensate American workers for the jobs they’ve supposedly lost to immigrants. The bill calls immigrants “aliens.” And “migrants.” 

Escobar knows full well that immigrants who lack documentation do not steal Americans’ jobs — in fact, they create them. Her own parents came from a family of immigrants who built up one of the biggest dairies in El Paso. Now their children are eminent public servants. I know all this because Escobar began her civic life as an immigrant rights activist, in an immigrant rights NGO that I founded. 

Do Democrats these days really have to use malign old language and make new terms to win elections? Their own loyal constituency likes immigrants. According to a joint Chicago Council on Global Affairs/Ipsos survey conducted earlier this year, over 80 percent of Democrats want to legalize the immigration status of people not authorized to live in the U.S., and 85 percent favor encouraging them to become citizens. Over 8 out of 10 want to make it easier for people fleeing violence to come to the U.S. and about three-fourths want more legal immigration. Most oppose deporting more people, and most oppose installing additional walls and similar barriers at the border. 

And this is Democrats in general, without age-cohort breakdowns. Younger voters are more likely than their elders to be pro-immigrant — and they are a key demographic whom Democrats say they need to win in November. Are they shooting themselves in the foot with their fear of Trumpism, their unwillingness to use truthful language about immigration?