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Faulty discourse on ‘illegal immigrants’

BY OTTO SANTA ANA

The news media regularly report that President Bush is snubbed by members of his own political party when he states a truism: “Immigrants are hard-working, decent human beings.” Because politics so often hinges on the emotional appeal of words, many conservatives want to retain firm control of the immigration issue by sticking to a discourse that disparages immigrants. I believe the news media support this partisan way of speaking.

In my research, I engage UCLA students to help me analyze news stories on the political aspects of issues ranging from gangs to environmentalism. We subject reportage on these topics to rigorous critical discourse techniques. The media images are often not only chilling but arguably impart partisan views to readers/viewers. On the issue of immigration, for example, we have found a key public discourse image: immigrants as animals.

During the 1992-1994 anti-immigrant Proposition 187 campaign in California, the Los Angeles Times reported that then-Governor Wilson said he believed “public benefits are a lure to immigrants.” In other instances, the paper unintentionally (but still derogatorily) depicted immigrants as animals that can be chased and eaten: “The truth is, employers hungering for really cheap labor hunt out the foreign workers.”

The conventional metaphors in this deplorable discourse are negative. Immigrants continue to be depicted as invading soldiers, flooding tides, overgrown weeds and criminals. During the Proposition 187 years, the effect of such degrading imagery in the news media was that the electorate came to view immigrants poorly and voted accordingly.

Bush’s words, first articulated with astonishing compassion during his 2004 reelection campaign, may alter the playing field by effectively legitimizing the use of a new — and categorically humane — discourse to frame the current policy debate. Unfortunately, the media aren’t helping to further this conciliatory discourse.

In a LexisNexis review of stories on immigration from March 24 to April 3, 2006, I found that 898 newspaper articles used the criminalizing term “illegal immigrant,” while only 54 used the term “undocumented immigrant.” (However, those 54 articles also used the term “illegal immigrant.”)

Following the massive March 25 demonstration in Los Angeles, the Times, too, employed both the “illegal” and “undocumented immigrant” terminology. This was in marked contrast to 1994, however, when the paper overwhelmingly alluded to immigrants as “illegal,” thereby contributing to the passage of Proposition 187 (which the Times had pointedly opposed and which was subsequently overturned).

Using the word “illegal” as an adjective — or “illegals” as a noun — is the linguistic equivalent of a lynch mob. After all, we don’t call a jaywalker an “illegal pedestrian.” Dysphemisms (the opposite of euphemisms) like “illegal immigrants” bolster a partisan position on an issue vital to the entire nation.

The connotations of criminality in the term “illegal immigrant” won’t change easily over time. All the more reason for the news media to realize that their responsibility to be unbiased outweighs the criteria of both common use and concision. Only then can American journalism positively encourage public reflection about one of the most pressing issues of the 21st century.

Santa Ana is associate professor of Chicana and Chicano studies.