By Aly Colón
How we identify people who enter the United States without following proper immigration procedures has become almost as complicated as the immigration issue itself.
A variety of descriptions appear in print, online and on the air. Here are just a few:
- “Illegal immigrant”
- “Illegal alien”
- “Undocumented immigrant”
- “Illegals”
Ted Vaden, a staff writer for The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., tackles this issue in a thoughtful column. He pegs his piece to his paper’s recent coverage of “students without documentation” and the question of whether they should be entering the community colleges and universities of North Carolina.
Vaden identifies the terms, looks at his paper’s style guide, interviews others facing similar labeling challenges and quotes the N&O‘s front page editor’s defense of the term “illegal immigrant.” He writes:
Vaden then offers his own view, which would “loosen the style manual to allow undocumented and unauthorized.”
I can understand Merelman’s view, and I appreciate Vaden’s flexibility.
As a journalist who has written about and edited many stories involving diverse issues and people from different backgrounds, my inclination is to avoid labels as much as possible. Try to describe as accurately as you can the people you are covering. The more specific, the better. What we, as journalists, think we save by using a label and fewer words, we more than make up for in confusion, bias, prejudice and distortion. Labels limit us. And they limit the reality we see.
