Immigration Newspeak II — USCIS Edition
By Robert Law on February 16, 2021
[This page has been updated to include links to the USCIS memo.]
As I previously wrote, open borders advocates vehemently oppose the use of precise legal terms found in U.S. immigration law. The recent "dehumanizing" strawman term is "alien", which is defined in statute at section 101(a)(3) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) as: "The term 'alien' means any person not a citizen or national of the United States." The Biden administration particularly despises the term and devotes an entire section of its mass amnesty bill to replace "alien" with "noncitizen" throughout the INA. While this legislative change is silly and unnecessary, if it becomes law then so be it, that is the proper way of making change.
However, Biden's deputies at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have taken it upon themselves to preemptively trash statutory language in favor of the activists' preferred lingo. Unexpectedly, the first change occurred at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) where agents were ordered to discontinue using "alien" and "illegal alien" and instead use "undocumented noncitizen" or "undocumented individual". Further exposing the absurdity of this linguistic gymnastics, ICE agents were ordered to replace "aslyee" with "asylum-seeker". When I worked at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the term "asylee" was largely understood to mean an alien who had established eligibility for asylum. Under the Biden "newspeak", legitimate asylees have now been demoted in reference to speculative asylum seekers. DHS justified this change as "an effort to align with current guidance and to ensure consistency in reporting". But, as my colleague Art Arthur pointed out, the term "noncitizen" inherently defines someone by what he or she is not — a citizen.
https://cis.org/Law/Immigration-Newspeak-II-USCIS-Edition
