In Immigration Debate, Time to ‘Drop and Leave’ Loaded Language

by Roberto Rodriguez

The dictionary definition of insanity should be changed to spell A-R-I-Z-O-N-A and its state capitol building should be designated as a home for the criminally insane. But lest we kid ourselves, this Arizona insanity has now spread nationwide. Let’s take a tour of the [police] state.

On the educational front, Tucson Unified School Superintendent, John Pedicone, has managed to militarize school board meetings. He has done this because several weeks ago, the high school group UNIDOS, tired of having their Mexican American Studies program targeted for elimination, chained themselves to the school board members chairs, prompting the board to cancel its meeting. For this, the students and others have received death threats. At the subsequent May 3rd meeting, officially, some 100 police officers were deployed to the TUSD headquarters. However, on top of TUSD security guards, including those staffing metal detectors, along with bomb squad officers, helicopters, plus riot squad officers deployed inside and around the building and neighborhood, it is likely that the officers totaled closer to 200.

At this meeting, seven people were arrested for the criminal act of attempting to speak to the board. One elderly and disabled professor, Lupe Castillo, 69, was arrested by some 20 helmeted and shielded officers for attempting to read ”A Letter from the Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King Jr. The others arrestees were [secretly] sent to two jails before they were booked and released. In the action inside, dozens of riot squad police physically threw other people out the building, including elders, this while hundreds of MAS supporters outside stood their ground. Then later, the violence, caught on videotape, started behind the building. Police officers in full riot gear began throwing young students, parents and other community members around like rag dolls. Officially, the officers did a great job, commended by the chief of police.

All this is the calm before the storm, precipitated by a 2010 law (HB 2281), purportedly inspired by Martin Luther King Jr, that has declared the teaching of Ethnic Studies illegal. This week, an audit ordered by the state schools superintendent, John Huppenthal, who ran on the campaign to “eliminate La Raza” (the Mexican people) – is scheduled to be released, with expected pre-ordained findings that will declare Tucson’s highly successful MAS program to be out of compliance.

That’s from the sane part of the state. Now, from the insane sector:

This past week, the governor signed SB 1404, a law that attempts to wall the state from the rest of society. Not satisfied with the federal walls that line the U.S./Mexico border, Arizona will soon be embarking upon creating its own wall along the Arizona/Sonora border, financed through online donations and built by prison labor. Being that imprisoning migrants is a growing multi-billion dollar industry, look for the state to employ incarcerated migrants to attempt to build it.

Beyond the state’s 2010 (SB 1070) racial profiling law, this year, state legislators attempted to pass nearly two dozen even more stringent laws, including one that would overturn birthright citizenship as guaranteed by the 14^th Amendment.  Legislators also attempted to pass two other laws that can only be construed as attempts to secede from humanity; SB 1443 and SCR 1010 were attempts to exempt the state from federal and international laws, respectively.

Most of this legislation is designed to incarcerate migrants and to enrich the private prison industry. The mastermind of most of this legislation is state senate president, Russell Pearce, who in addition to facing a recall, is also embroiled in the Fiesta Bowl “gift” scandal that threatens to bring down he and many of his associates.

And then there’s Maricopa County’s unindicted Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who continues to thumb his nose at the feds with his ongoing racially motivated mass dragnet raids. Recent investigations have found that in eight years, his department has misspent close to $100 million, and that his top commanders targeted “enemies,” confirming he is the most corrupt Sheriff in America. Federal investigations into his activities continue.

Outside of the state, the governor of Georgia recently signed HB 87, joining Arizona, Utah and Indiana in implementing anti-immigrant racial profiling laws. Twenty other states are pursuing a similar return to the 19^th century. The good news is that Utah’s HB 497 anti-immigrant law, was recently blocked by a Utah judge, and the DREAM ACT has again been introduced in Congress.

Given recent dramatic events on the international front, it is generally thought that the president can now restore sanity and actually bring about actual immigration reform. Regarding Ethnic Studies, not sure he can do anything about those intent on “eliminating La Raza.”

by Gabriel Thompson
 

In June of 2009, Sen. Charles Schumer took the stage in front of a capacity crowd at the Georgetown Law Center. The event was billed as “Immigration: A New Era,” and Schumer, who chairs the Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security, was on campus to unveil his seven principles for a reform bill.

The first principle set the tone for his speech. “Illegal immigration is wrong, plain and simple,” he said, before moving on to a linguistic primer for attendees. “People who enter the United States without our permission are illegal aliens. When we use phrases like ‘undocumented workers,’ we convey a message to the American people that their government is not serious about combating illegal immigration.”

In total, Schumer used the term “illegal” 30 times and “alien” 9 times. It was a far cry from just three years earlier, when Schumer instead talked repeatedly about “undocumented” immigrants when speaking to a group of Irish Americans. But as the senator explained in 2009, he’s choosing his words more purposefully these days.

And he is not alone. In the decade since the September 11 attacks, there has been a steady increase in language that frames unauthorized immigrants as a criminal problem. References to “illegals,” “illegal immigrants” and their rhetorical variants now dominate the speech of both major political parties, as well as news media coverage of immigration.

In fact, Colorlines.com reviewed the archives of the nation’s largest-circulation newspapers to compare how often their articles describe people as “illegal” or “alien” versus describing them as “undocumented” or “unauthorized.” We found a striking and growing imbalance, particularly at key moments in the immigration reform debate. In 2006 and 2007, for example, years in which Congress engaged a pitched battle over immigration reform, the New York Times published 1,483 articles in which people were labeled as “illegal” or “alien;” just 171 articles used the adjectives “undocumented” or “unauthorized.”

That imbalance isn’t coincidental. In the wake of 9/11, as immigration politics have grown more heated and media organizations have worked to codify language they deem neutral, pollsters in both parties have pushed their leaders toward a punitive framework for discussing immigration. Conservatives have done this unabashedly to rally their base; Democrats have shifted rhetoric with the hopes that it will make their reform proposals more palatable to centrists. But to date, the result has only been to move the political center ever rightward—and to turn the conversation about immigrants violently ugly.

Calling someone “illegal” or an “alien” has a whole host of negative connotations, framing that person as a criminal outsider, even a potential enemy of the state. But it does more, by also setting the parameters of an appropriate response. To label unauthorized immigrants as criminals who made an immoral choice suggests that they should be further punished—that their lives be made harder, not easier. Not surprisingly, then, as rhetoric has grown harsher on both sides (or “tougher,” in the words of pollsters), legislation has followed suit. Border walls have been constructed, unmanned drones dispatched. Deportation numbers have continued a steady, record-breaking climb, while states pass ever-harsher laws.

These policy developments reflect—and find reflection in—a segment of the broader culture that is struggling with uneasy feelings about race and the ongoing transformation of the nation. When immigrants are targeted and murdered because of their status, and politicians joke about shooting them as livestock, we’ve moved to something beyond a simple policy debate. And at its swirling center is “the illegal”—a faceless and shadowy character who, it can be hard to remember, is actually a person.

The Language of Lawmaking

The art of choosing words has become big business in politics, for good reason. How a problem or solution is framed can be key to its chances of success.

Take, for example, Bush’s plan in 2005 to privatize Social Security. Republicans trumpeted the idea, with Bush repeatedly referring to the creation of private accounts for individuals. Democrats campaigned vigorously to label the proposal as too risky and support for the idea plummeted; privatizing Social Security, it turned out, made Americans uneasy. The Republicans then switched words. They talked about personal rather than private accounts and called media outlets to complain when they didn’t adopt the new language. But by then it was too late and the proposal died.

That a single word can reframe an entire debate points to the power of language in evoking broad, often unexamined feelings. A public library or park may sound like a welcoming place to pass an afternoon; a government (or even worse, government-run) library or park, on the other hand, can bring to mind images of dull texts and rusty equipment.

“Words have entire narratives that go with them,” says Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at University of California, Berkeley. “Government has acquired negative connotations, so public is what we call government when we don’t want to say ‘government.’ “

When President Obama unveiled his health care proposal, he was careful to call the creation of a government-managed plan the “public option.” As Republican strategist and pollster Frank Luntz told Fox News, “If you call it a ‘public option,’ the American people are split,” but “if you call it the ‘government option,’ the public is overwhelmingly against it.”

Tea party protesters in 2010.

While language is always important, it has a special prominence when the discussion turns to immigration—and race. As Nunberg noted about the charged vocabulary around the topic: “The words refuse to be confined to their legal and economic senses; they swell with emotional meanings that reflect the fears and passions of the time.”

Wetback. Alien. Illegal immigrant. These are powerful words, each of which has, at different times in our recent history, been the most popular term used to describe unauthorized immigrants. And while some anti-immigrant activists claim that words like “alien” or “illegal immigrant” are neutral, each conjures up a whole host of associations. Nunberg noted that in 1920 a group of college students was asked to define the word alien, and what they came up with—“a person who is hostile to this country,” “an enemy from a foreign land”—hardly qualified as meeting its legal definition.

The same dynamic occurs today with illegal, especially when used to define a person rather than an action, such as working in the U.S. without authorization. “When two things bear the same name, there is a sense that they belong to the same category,” Nunberg told me. “So when you say ‘illegal,’ it makes you think of people that break into your garage and steal your things.”

“These are not small questions,” agreed Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice, a prominent immigrant advocacy group that has been a key player in Washington, D.C.’s word games. “The language, and who wins the framing of the language, likely will win the debate.”

Prop 187: Before and After

The widespread belief that there is an “illegal immigrant” problem is a relatively recent phenomenon, according to Joseph Nevins, author of “Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the Illegal Alien and the Making of the US-Mexico Boundary.” As Nevins notes, the national platform of the Republican Party didn’t mention a concern over “illegal immigration” until 1986. The Democrats—characteristically late and in a reactive mode—followed suit in 1996, adopting a similar stance as their counterparts.

That’s one of the key patterns to understand in immigration debates over the past 15 years: Republicans take a stand; Democrats respond by agreeing with the critique but offering a slightly less harsh solution; Republicans get most of what they want.

It wasn’t always that way. Back in the 1970s, the Carter administration, under INS Commissioner Leonel Castillo, sent out a directive forbidding the use of “illegal alien” and replaced it with “undocumented workers” or “undocumented alien.” But as Nevins writes, “that linguistic sensitivity quickly disappeared.”

The most significant turning point came in 1994 with the debate over California’s Proposition 187, which barred undocumented immigrants from public schools and non-emergency health care. Today, Prop 187 is best remembered for propelling Republican Gov. Pete Wilson into the national spotlight, but what’s often overlooked is the Democratic response to the immigrant-bashing ballot measure—and the party’s striking departure from Carter’s framing of the debate.

First Democrats ignored Prop 187, then came out against it without much conviction. “I simply do not believe it will work,” California’s Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein explained. President Bill Clinton, fearing that he could lose the crucial state of California in 1996, responded to Prop 187 by dramatically beefing up border security and promising to crack down on “illegal aliens,” while Feinstein proposed a toll for legal crossers and made repeated visits to the border to highlight her determination in sealing it.

A look at the Los Angeles Times’ archives during the years of this debate shows an eruption in the use of “illegal” and “alien” to describe immigrants themselves. In 1994, the year Californians voted on Prop 187,  the Times published 1,411 articles that labeled people “illegal” or “alien,” either as an adjective or, in some cases, as a noun—as in “illegals.” The same year, the Times published just 218 articles that used “undocumented” or “unauthorized” to describe people living in the country without papers.

When the Prop 187 dust settled, the immigration reform landscape had been dramatically altered. The law did not stand up to court challenge and was ultimately thrown out without being implemented. But the framework it ushered in proved lasting.

“The fact is, they agreed on all of the fundamentals with the Republicans,” Nevins says of the Democratic response. “If you accept the framing that your opponents put forth, then you’ve lost the debate. And this helped lay the groundwork for the situation in which we find ourselves today.”

Within two years, Clinton had signed two sweeping bills into law that would do “much of what Prop 187 called for,” according to Andrew Wrote, author of “The Republican Party and Immigration Politics: From Proposition 187 to George W. Bush.” The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act was enforcement-only legislation that, among other things, vastly expanded the grounds for deporting immigrants with legal status. The second bill, the Welfare Reform Act, stripped all non-citizens of many federal benefits. The pragmatist could argue that Clinton got in front of the issue by adopting harsh language and signing the bills; the pragmatist would also have to acknowledge, however, that Clinton got in front of the issue by signing strikingly anti-immigrant legislation.

Fifteen years later, President Obama, like Clinton, is still trying to appeal to the center by proving that he is serious about securing the border. In 2010, he sent 1,200 members of the National Guard to the border and signed a bill allocating $600 million to border enforcement, adding another 1,500 agents along with additional surveillance drones. At the same time, he has deported a record number of immigrants—many of whom have either no criminal record of low-level offenses, such as a traffic violation. And many of the enforcement tools Obama is currently flexing—from partnerships between ICE and local police to the flawed E-Verify program—actually have their roots in Clinton’s 1996 bill.

“Changes on enforcement is the medicine that folks on our side have to accept,” says Jeffrey Parcher, the communications director for the Center for Community Change, which helped coordinate an ultimately unsuccessful grassroots reform campaign in 2010. “The current narrative is that amnesty is some kind of gift, and in exchange for the gift we have to have enforcement. That is not a frame that we agree with, or that we endorse. But in the universe in which enough legislators sit in that box to prevent anything from passing, it’s what we have to work with.”

If true, it’s a deliberately constructed universe. “Amnesty” became a bad word and “illegal” a good one because strategists on both sides of the partisan isle assigned them those meanings.

‘Words That Work’

For supporters of immigration reform, there was some reason for optimism during President George W. Bush’s second term. Despite the House’s passage of HR 4437 in 2005—a harsh bill introduced by Wisconsin Republican James Sensenbrenner that would have turned all unauthorized immigrants into felons—there was momentum among key Republicans for a comprehensive solution.

In 2006, the Senate passed a reform measure that offered a path to citizenship for most undocumented immigrants, provided that they enrolled in English classes and paid fines, as well as back taxes. The citizenship provisions, which did not include unauthorized immigrants who had been in the country for less than two years, were coupled with significant enforcement measures, including the doubling of border patrol agents within five years and more than 800 miles of border fencing and vehicle barriers. Among the bill’s supporters were 23 Republicans.

Vocal members in the House, though, were quick to criticize the bill’s citizenship provisions, limited as they were. ”Amnesty is wrong because it rewards someone for illegal behavior,” said Sensenbrenner. ”And I reject the spin that the senators have been putting on their proposal. It is amnesty.” The House stuck to its talking point, killing the measure and seeing Bush sign instead a bill adding 700 miles of border fencing.

“The right was defining the debate; the amnesty charge just killed us,” Sharry concludes. “Their top line beat our top line. We said fix a broken immigration system and they said amnesty rewards lawbreakers. They had a visceral argument and we had something wonkish. We came to a gunfight with a knife.”

A 2005 memo by GOP strategist Luntz perfectly captures the talking points relied upon by anti-reform Republicans to kill any reform measures. Luntz is known as a word genius for popularizing terms like “death tax” for estate tax and turning oil drilling into the friendlier-sounding “energy exploration.” In his immigration memo, he instructed Republicans to “always refer to people crossing the border illegally as ‘illegal immigrants’—NOT as ‘illegals.’ ”

This was a nod to the long-term danger Republicans faced in demonizing undocumented immigrants: losing the Latino vote. As Luntz wrote, “Republicans have made significant inroads into the Hispanic community over the past decade, and it would be a shame if poorly chosen words and overheated rhetoric were to undermine the credibility the party has built within the community.” (Remember, this was 2005—pre-Tea Party.)

Such niceties aside, Lunzt’s memo was otherwise unrestrained in its attack on undocumented immigrants. In segments he labeled “Words that Work,” he counseled Republicans to emphasize the following points:

Let’s talk about the facts behind illegal immigrants. They do commit crimes. They are more likely to drive uninsured. More likely to clog up hospital waiting rooms. More likely to be involved in anti-social behavior because they have learned that breaking the law brings more benefit to them than abiding by it.

Alabama Gov. Robert Bently signed the nation’s harshest anti-immigrant bill in summer 2011. (Photo/Jessica McGowan for Getty Images)

Here was the Prop 187 argument rehashed, with an added pathology—that undocumented immigrants were prone to even broader criminal behavior. And now, one could also throw in the fear of terrorism. Another talking-point section advised Republicans to use the following phrases: “Right now, hundreds of illegal immigrants are crossing the border almost every day. Some of them are part of drug cartels. Some are career criminals. Some may even be terrorists.”

The 25-page document is full of the same “overheated rhetoric” Luntz cautioned against and, importantly, became a playbook for Republicans’ immigration politics moving forward. “If it sounds like amnesty, it will fail,” promised Luntz—and he was right. He was also right to be concerned about just how far his party would go with his vitriolic ideas about brown-skinned immigrants.

But notably, Luntz’s message is also the lesson many pro-reform politicians and advocates took from the 2006-2007 debate. Sharry joined forces with John Podesta at the Center for American Progress and enlisted a crew of top Democratic pollsters to work on messaging. Their first report, “Winning the Immigration Debate,” was based on polling by Guy Molyneux of Peter Hart Associates and shared with politicians in 2008.

The report argued that Democrats should adopt a tougher tone when discussing reform. Instead of “offering a path to citizenship,” which sounded to some like a giveaway, Democrats should use more coercive terms: immigrants would be required to pay taxes, learn English and pass criminal background checks. As the report states: “This message places the focus where voters want it, on what’s best for the United States, not what we can/should do for illegal immigrants.”

“Rather than educate [the public], you can convince them to do the right thing if you call it a requirement,” Cecilia Munoz of the National Council of La Raza, told the Huffington Post. Her statement amounted to a strategic retreat: Democrats ought to focus less on challenging anti-immigrant claims (educating) and instead use messages that implicitly reinforce those claims (co-opting).

Sharry and Podesta also enlisted Stanley Greenberg to hone the message. Greenberg, a former Clinton pollster and influential Democratic strategist, was initially skeptical: in 2006 and 2007, his polling had shown that when Democrats discussed immigration reform they were vulnerable to attack. But the new framework, when presented to center and center-right voters, seemed to diffuse the amnesty charge.

Another person involved in the framing was Drew Westen, a psychology professor at Emory University and director of Westen Strategies, a messaging consulting firm, who was brought in by Media Matters for America. One of his conclusion’s echoed Schumer: Democrats should drop the words “undocumented worker” from their lexicon and instead use “illegal immigrant.” Westen, who didn’t respond to requests for an interview, told Politico that his advice to progressives is, “If the language appears fine to you, it is probably best not to use it. You are an activist, and by definition, you are out of the mainstream.”

After the polls and focus groups, the messaging was in place. Democrats should lead with border security and enforcement, frame the legalization process as a requirement, and call people “illegal immigrants” instead of “undocumented.” It was to be tough but not “overly punitive”—and it was notable in that it made no reference to any positive attributes undocumented immigrants might bring to the country.

Not everyone was pleased with the new framework. “This is oppressive language—punitive and restrictive,” says Oscar Chacon, executive director of the National Alliance of Latin American & Caribbean Communities. According to Chacon, the 2008 report was “nothing but an effort by D.C. groups to justify their views with a public opinion survey” and it highlighted the Democrats’ tendency to “accept more and more of the premises of the anti-immigrant lobby.”

“We should be trying to change the way people think about the situation,” contends Chacon, “instead of finding a way to make anti-immigrant sentiments tolerable.”

Even among people involved in the Beltway Democrats’ polling project there was dissension. “It’s one thing to say that enforcement has to be a part of the solution, and another to say we have to call people illegal,” says David Mermin of Lake Research Partners, who has been polling on immigration for a decade and worked with Sharry on honing the message. “We think there’s a more nuanced way of saying it.”

Journalism’s Objective Bias

Whatever nuance is possible, it’s increasingly missing from the public conversation on immigration.

A major turning point in news media’s own language came in the wake of the September 11 attacks, as editors for the first time looked closely at how their publications described immigrants. Until then, the Associated Press Stylebook—a language bible for newsrooms—didn’t have any entries related to unauthorized immigrants. But in 2003, reflecting government concerns about border security following 9/11, the AP determined it needed to come with up a specific term. According to AP Deputy Standards Editor David Minthorn, the organization underwent extensive discussions, which included “reporters specializing in immigration and ethnic issues who are versed in the positions of all groups,” as well as an overview of government and legal terminology. The AP settled on “illegal immigrant” as the “neutral” and preferred term, while noting that “illegal alien” and the shortened term of “illegal” should be avoided. Interestingly, that’s precisely the message Luntz suggested in 2005.

The AP’s decision locked in an industry standard for so-called neutral language on unauthorized immigration—and it focused on the person, not just the act. The Los Angeles Times’ style book, for instance,  calls for “illegal immigrant” as “the preferred, neutral, unbiased term that will work in almost all uses,” as assistant managing editor Henry Furhmann recently explained to the paper’s ombudsman. As a consequence, that “unbiased” language dominates news coverage of big immigration battles. In 2010, as Congress debated the DREAM Act and immigration became a leading issue in midterm elections, four of the five largest-circulation newspapers published a combined 1,549 articles that referred to people as “illegal” or “alien” in the headline or at least once in the text of the story; they published just 363 articles that referred to “undocumented” or “unauthorized” immigrants. (The four papers, in order of 2011 circulation numbers, include USA Today, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post; we did not search the archives of the Wall Street Journal, which is the largest paper, because it does not make the full text of its archives available on the database we used.)

In recent years, there has been push back on the criminalizing framework from journalists of color. In 2006 the National Association of Hispanic Journalists launched a campaign pressuring media agencies to stop using the term “illegal” to describe unauthorized immigrants. It was a time of raucous protest, with millions of immigrants across the country marching against Sensenbrenner’s draconian House bill. (Notably, the bill’s title—the Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act—perfectly captured the conflation of undocumented immigrants with terrorists that became common after 9/11.)

“Politicians and others were taking the rhetoric of the anti-immigrant groups, and using ‘illegal’ as a noun,” says Ivan Roman, NAHJ’s executive director. “We don’t like the term illegal alien and we prefer not to use illegal immigrant—we prefer undocumented immigrant. And we think the news media needs to think critically about the terminology they use.”

A more recent campaign, Drop the I-word, is being coordinated by Colorlines.com’s publisher, the Applied Research Center. The campaign, which asks news organizations to not use the term “illegal” when discussing unauthorized migrants, finds inspiration from Holocaust survivor Ellie Wiesel’s phrase “no person is illegal,” which he coined during the 1980s Central American sanctuary movement. (The British were the first to use “illegal” as a noun to refer to people, when describing Jews in the 1930s who entered Palestine without official permission).

“Getting rid of the i-word is about our society asserting the idea that migrants are human beings deserving of respect and basic human rights,” says Mónica Novoa, coordinator of the campaign. She says she has been disappointed with the number of otherwise sensitive journalists who continue to use the word, which she argues “points to how normalized the language has become.”

And as the language has normalized, the broader public dialogue has grown increasingly harsh—and dangerous.

Part of the shift can be seen in the way formerly moderate Republicans have begun navigating political waters using the Tea Party as their compass.

In 2007, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham was adamant in his support of reform, arguing that, “We’re not going to scapegoat people. We’re going to tell the bigots to shut up.” By last year, however, he’d moved to discussing an overhaul of the 14th Amendment to end birthright citizenship for U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. Sen. John McCain has undergone a similar transformation: once a key proponent of reform, earlier this year he blamed wildfires in Arizona on undocumented immigrants, an absurd claim quickly refuted by the U.S. Forrest Service. Longtime hardliners like Rep. Steve King of Iowa, who has called immigration a “slow moving Holocaust” and compared immigrants to livestock, are now finding more friends in Congress.

Stills from Sharon Angle’s 2010 senatorial campaign commercial.

The new batch of Tea Party members openly use threatening images of brown-skinned immigrants to rally their base—in just the way Luntz warned against as he crafted the language politicians now hurl at immigrants. Sharon Angle, in an infamous commercial from her 2010 campaign against Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, featured Latinos (“illegals”) sneaking along a border fence “putting our safety at risk” and labeled Reid as “the best friend an illegal alien ever had.”

Angle lost, due in large measure to the Latino vote. But her campaign waged an unexpectedly meaningful threat to the long-term senator and Democratic leader. More and more people seem to believe that, with “illegals putting our safety at risk,” drastic words (and actions) are needed.

In March, Kansas State Rep. Virgil Peck, during a debate about the use of gunmen in helicopters to kill wild hogs, suggested that such a tactic could also be a solution “to our illegal immigration problem.” His statement was followed by Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, who made repeated calls for doing “anything short of shooting” undocumented immigrants.

In November 2008, that’s just what a group of Long Island, N.Y., teenagers did when they stabbed Marcello Lucero to death. Lucero, an undocumented immigrant from Ecuador, was the target of what the teens called “beaner hopping”—in which they roamed the streets searching for Latinos to attack. In the wake of the murder it was discovered that other immigrants had been beaten but not come forward due to fears about their immigration status. Another streak of violence targeting Latinos occurred in New York City’s Staten Island in 2010, which included 10 attacks within a six-month period.

As the situation in Long Island attests, taking an accurate stock of hate crimes is a difficult task, as many undocumented immigrants are hesitant to report crimes to authorities. Existing statistics do point to an increase in attacks on Latinos during much of the last decade: from 2003-2007 the FBI reported hate crimes against Latinos increased by 40 percent, and last month California released data showing anti-Latino crimes jumped by nearly 50 percent from the previous year.

For Novoa, these types of statistics highlight the urgency behind the call to stop using “illegal” to describe unauthorized immigrants. “We need to change the current debate. It’s hate-filled, racially charged, and inhumane—and it’s driving up violence.”

And all of this points to perhaps the greatest weakness in the Democratic response to Luntz’s message. When one side is framing immigrants as criminals and potential terrorists, with some “joking” about slaughtering them like hogs, the other side likely needs to do more than co-opt poll-tested talking points. There’s more at stake than votes. The Democratic strategy also holds a contradiction at its core: The more focus that is placed on the illegality of immigrants and the problems they cause, the less it makes sense to offer a path to legalization.

“All of that [polling] work is based on an assumption that this is a policy argument,” Sharry acknowledges. “This is looking more like a front in a culture war, in which a rabid, well organized part of the Republican Party wants to expel millions of brown people from this country.”

Gabriel Thompson is currently working on a biography of legendary community organizer Fred Ross. He is the author of “Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do,” just released in paperback from Nation Books.

Research for this article was provided Colorlines.com’s Drop the I-Word campaign.

by S. Leigh Thompson

Although the Associated Press updated its stylebook last week, they still insist on using the i-word to define people. While many reporters and editors are re-evaluating how they describe undocumented immigrants in a way that does not dehumanize them or compromise constitutionality, accuracy and professional journalistic ethics, the change from the AP still falls short.

But with your help, we can change that.

The Associated Press is looking ahead to the 2012 edition of the AP Stylebook and would like to hear from readers. This is the perfect time to tell the AP to drop the i-word and to let them know “illegal immigrant” is dehumanizing, racially charged, inaccurate, not legal terminology and not conducive to understanding the immigration debate.

CLICK HERE NOW TO TAKE ACTION (http://www.apstylebook.com/?do=social_media) and let them know that use of the i-word is indefensible. Deadline for submissions is Tuesday, Nov. 15. Sample text to use is below.

When you’ve sent your submission you will be sent a confirmation email. Be sure to follow through and click on the link within the email to complete the action!

Sample text:

Dear AP Stylebook editors,

Even back in the 70s, the Carter administration did not use the terms “illegal immigrant” or “illegal alien.” And now, Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justice Sotomayor don’t use the terms. “Illegal immigrant,” oversimplifies the complexities of immigration. Using the word “illegal” to describe an immigrant puts journalists in the position of being judge and jury. It casts all immigration cases as black and white and leaves little room for this most complicated law’s nuances.

Here is an example of a different policy: Never use the shorthand “illegals” as a noun. Do not use the terms “alien,” “criminal alien,” “illegal immigrant,” “illegal worker,” or related terms except in quoted matter; the terms are pejorative, incorrect and biased. Do not use the slur “anchor baby” to refer to a child of immigrants. Use accurate and nuanced descriptors that are specific to the stories of the people you are writing about. Preferred terms include:

Immigrant
Undocumented immigrant
Unauthorized immigrant
Immigrant without papers
Immigrants entering without inspection
Immigrant seeking status
Citizen child of undocumented immigrants
It is acceptable to use migrant or foreign national; when possible use a specific reference to nationality (e.g.: Briton, Cambodian, Canadian, Jamaican, Mexican, Pakistani).

The Society of Professional Journalists recently passed a resolution for members to stop using “illegal alien” and to re-evaluate use of “illegal immigrant” which the SPJ’s diversity committee advises against using because it is unconstitutional, offensive and dehumanizing to the people it describes. Plus, several papers have already dropped the i-word, including: The Miami Herald, The San Antonio Express News, New Haven Register, Middletown Press and The Register Citizen.

by Marc Lacey

PHOENIX — In a harshly worded critique of the country’s best-known sheriff, the Justice Department accused Joe Arpaio of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office of engaging in “unconstitutional policing” by unfairly targeting Latinos for detentions and arrests and retaliating against those who complain.

After an investigation that lasted more than three years, the civil rights division of the Justice Department said in a 22-page report that the sheriff’s office has “a pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos” that “reaches the highest levels of the agency.” The department interfered with the inquiry, the government said, prompting a lawsuit that eventually led Mr. Arpaio and his deputies to cooperate.

“We have peeled the onion to its core,” said Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, noting during a conference call with reporters on Thursday morning that more than 400 inmates, deputies and others were interviewed as part of the review, including Mr. Arpaio and his command staff. Mr. Perez said the inquiry, which also included jail visits and reviews of thousands of pages of internal documents, raised the question of whether Latinos were receiving “second-class policing services” in Maricopa County.

The report stems from a civil inquiry and Mr. Perez said he hoped that Mr. Arpaio would cooperate with the federal government in turning the department around. Should he refuse, a lawsuit will be filed and his department could lose millions of dollars in federal funding, Mr. Perez said.

A separate federal grand jury investigation of Mr. Arpaio’s office is continuing, focusing on accusations of abuse of power by the department’s public corruption squad.

Mr. Arpaio was singled out for criticism in the report, which faulted him as distributing racially charged letters he had received and helping to nurture the department’s “culture of bias.”

Asked at a news conference about Mr. Arpaio’s role in the department’s problems, Mr. Perez said: “We have to do cultural change and culture change starts with people at the top.” Mr. Perez made a point of reaching out to Mr. Arpaio’s underlings. “These findings are not meant to impugn your character,” he said to the department’s deputies.

Mr. Arpaio, 79, who calls himself “America’s toughest sheriff,” did not immediately respond to the charges but he has brushed off similar accusations in the past.

Long a lightning rod for controversy, Mr. Arpaio looms large over Arizona and beyond. His turf, Maricopa County, with 3.8 million residents, is one of the country’s largest counties in terms of both area and population. Republican candidates clamor for his backing, aware that he has become a potent symbol of the antipathy many Americans feel about illegal immigration.

Before he endorsed former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas for president last month, Mr. Arpaio was courted by much of the Republican field, including Representative Michele Bachmann, former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Herman Cain, a businessman who has since suspended his campaign.

The findings, which Mr. Arpaio is sure to contest, paint a picture of a department staffed by poorly trained deputies who target Latino drivers on the roadways and detain innocent Latinos in the community in their searches for illegal immigrants. The mistreatment, the government said, extends to the jails the department oversees, where Latino inmates who do not speak English were mistreated.

“The absence of clear policies and procedures to ensure effective and constitutional policing, along with the deviations from widely accepted policing and correctional practices, and the failure to implement meaningful oversight and accountability structures, have contributed to a chronic culture of disregard for basic legal and constitutional obligations,” the report said.

The report said that Latino drivers were four to nine times more likely to be stopped in the sprawling county, which includes Phoenix and its environs, than non-Latino drivers. The expert who conducted the study called it the most egregious racial profiling he has ever seen in this country, said Mr. Perez, the prosecutor.

The report said that roughly one-fifth of the traffic-related incident reports generated by the department’s human smuggling unit contained information indicating the stops may have been conducted in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable seizures.

The report also suggested that Mr. Arpaio’s well-publicized raids aimed at arresting illegal immigrants were sometimes prompted by complaints that described no criminal activity but referred to people with “dark skin” or Spanish speakers congregating in an area. “The use of these types of bias-infected indicators as a basis for conducting enforcement activity contributes to the high number of stops and detentions lacking in legal justification,” the report said.

Mr. Arpaio has insisted that he is just enforcing the law and has mentioned in previous interviews that he has adopted grandchildren who he is fond of who are Latino and black. He has responded to past criticisms with another high-profile raid. In the last three years, he has sent deputies into 56 Phoenix-area businesses, resulting in several hundred arrests for identity theft.

The report is likely to increase calls for the resignation of Mr. Arpaio, whose fifth term ends next year. He has vowed to run again. The sheriff, who has won election by wide margins even while riling critics, has seen opposition to his leadership increase in recent months with reports that his department misspent county money and failed to adequately investigate more than 400 sexual-abuse cases, many involving illegal immigrants.

On Wednesday, Mr. Arpaio’s critics took their case to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which controls the sheriff office’s purse strings. The board heard a heavy dose of criticism of Mr. Arpaio but also present were some of the sheriff’s backers, who praise his no-tolerance approach toward illegal immigrants. “Police officers make mistakes,” Jerry Sheridan, Mr. Arpaio’s chief deputy, said at the meeting in defense of the department.

The report quotes from some people characterized as victims of the department’s overzealous ways. It cites the case of a Latino driver who won a $600,000 legal settlement after a deputy intentionally struck the man with his patrol car during a traffic stop.

In another case, a female inmate was not allowed to use another inmate as an interpreter to tell a detention officer that her sheets were soiled. She was told she had to make the request herself in English, even though she did not speak the language well.

After Mr. Arpaio received a letter complaining that employees of a McDonald’s in Sun City, a retirement community, did not speak English, the sheriff forwarded the letter to a top aide, who mounted an immigration raid in the area.

Copyright 2011 The New York Times
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The Comic Roots of Romney's Ironic Racism

by Robert Mackey

While the Republican presidential candidates have now moved on to Nevada, the brief campaign for Florida did introduce many Americans to a new concept: “self-deportation.”

Last week, when Mitt Romney was asked how he planned to repatriate millions of illegal immigrants without the use of force, he suggested that the ideal solution was to encourage them to “self-deport,” or return voluntarily to their countries of origin. That immediately inspired a wave of mockery from pundits and bloggers who thought the idea sounded like a joke, but, as my colleague Julia Preston reported, the concept of making life in the United States so uncomfortable for those who came here illegally that they might leave “is central to tough laws passed in Arizona, Alabama and South Carolina, among other states.”

Still, there is something undeniably comic about a term that combines the concepts of being compelled to leave a country and choosing to do so, and it turns out that buried deep in the etymology of “self-deportation,” there is indeed a joke.

As the radio program “This American Life” reminded its audience on Tuesday, there is an argument to be made that the term self-deportation was invented in 1994 by two Mexican-American satirists, Lalo Alcaraz and Esteban Zul. That year, “sickened” by a ballot initiative known as Proposition 187, which aimed to prohibit illegal immigrants from using state-run hospitals and schools in California, the comedians began posing as conservative activists who backed the measure.

The two men started a satirical media campaign to support the initiative, faxing radio and television stations a fake news release that touted the benefits of “self-deportation centers” and invited reporters seeking more information to call a Latino Republican and “militant self-deportationist” named Daniel D. Portado. Eventually the men founded “Hispanics Against Liberal Takeover,” or Halto, and produced a mock radio ad, in which Portado claimed to support “California Gov. Pete Wilson’s self-deportation message.”

Apparently unaware that Portado was a fictional character, in Nov. 1994 the Spanish-language channel Telemundo invited him to appear on television defending the proposed ballot initiative just days before voters went to the polls. The comedians accepted the invitation, and Mr. Alcaraz showed up, pretending to be Portado, with Mr. Zul at his side, playing the part of the conservative activist’s bodyguard. In an e-mail to The Lede on Tuesday, Mr. Alcaraz recalled, “I was in character at the Telemundo show, and neither the participants nor the producers were aware of our true identity.” Two years after the event, Mr. Zul told The Chicago Reader, “It was the longest half-hour of my life.”

Mr. Alcaraz, who is now an award-winning editorial cartoonist and the editor of the Chicano humor site Pocho.com, is convinced that California’s governor at the time only started using the phrase self-deportation after it was injected into the body politic by the satirical news releases.

It is hard to say for sure if that is true, but the first news release using the term was distributed on Sep. 16, 1994; according to the Nexis database, the first printed record of Mr. Wilson using it was in a conversation with The New York Times Op-Ed columnist William Safire that took place in mid-November of that year. Asked about the goal of Proposition 187 (which was approved by voters that year, only to be overturned by the courts later), Mr. Wilson told Mr. Safire: “If it’s clear to you that you cannot be employed, and that you and your family are ineligible for services, you will self-deport.”

As his Twitter feed — and that of his old alter-ego, Portado, and a new one, Mexican Mitt Romney — makes clear, Mr. Alcaraz has been closely following this year’s Republican primary campaign, particularly as it moves to states like Florida and Nevada that have significant Latino populations.

In a recent interview with KPCC, a public radio station in Southern California, Mr. Alcaraz said the 2012 campaign “has been a blessing” to comedians, particularly Mr. Romney’s efforts to connect with Latino voters by raising the fact that his father was born in Mormon colony in Mexico.

Asked what he thought when he heard Mr. Romney advocate the idea of self-deportation during last week’s debate in Tampa, Fla., Mr. Alcaraz told The Lede: “I felt like the world had stood still.”

Copyright 2012 The New York Times
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