‘Undocumented’ with Documents
Immigration newspeak causes linguistic embarrassment
By Robert Law on June 7, 2021
The first piece I wrote for the Center in January introduced the concept of “immigration newspeak”, meaning the decades-long war on immigration terminology by advocates of open borders and unlimited immigration to deceive the public about their policy intentions. The specific focus of that post was the animosity the Biden administration has to the term “alien” and the desire to replace it in our immigration laws with the catchall “noncitizen”. As a reminder, section 101(a)(3) of the Immigration and Nationality Act defines the term “alien” as “any person not a citizen or national of the United States.”
https://cis.org/Law/Undocumented-DocumentsAs I touched on in that piece, before alien became “dehumanizing”, the advocates long ago started targeting illegal or unlawful as a descriptor of an alien violating U.S. immigration law. In an effort to obscure the lawlessness of the alien, these advocates engaged in an orchestrated marketing campaign to rebrand them as “undocumented”.
This notion of being “undocumented”, of course, is preposterous. In fact, every illegal alien in the country is very much “documented”, even if they disposed of said documents in the course of their unlawful entry or overstaying a visa. A non-exhaustive list of documents that an illegal alien in the country might possess (or possessed at some point in time) includes: (1) a birth certificate from the home country; (2) a passport, driver's license, or some other form of identity document from the home country; (3) a notice to appear (NTA) issued by U.S. immigration officials upon detaining the alien; (4) a visa permitting the alien into the U.S. of which he or she subsequently violated the terms of admission; (5) a fake U.S. passport, driver's license, or other identity document; (6) a stolen U.S. passport, driver's license, or other identity document; (7) an arrest record; or (8) a conviction issued by a U.S. judge.
