[Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively on VDARE.com]
In a recent post , I discussed an article by Adam Ellwanger, Professor of English at the University of Houston. Professor Ellwanger tracks the way we have, across the years, most commonly referred to illegal aliens.
He reports that we started by referring to them as, duh, ”illegal aliens,” a straightforward and precise term used in federal legislation. However, it turned out that some high proportion of Americans thought that the word ”alien” was a synonym for ”bug-eyed monster,” so we switched to ”illegal immigrant.”
But hey, no human being is illegal! Only acts can be illegal: larceny, forgery, assault, etc. So we switched to ”undocumented persons.”
That prefix ”un-” is kinda negative, though... so after wrestling with our national conscience a few more years we ended up, in the Obama Administration, with ”migrant workers.” Professor Ellwanger writes:
A ”migrant” is just someone who moves around, and Americans highly value freedom of movement. But what are they doing while they move around? Working! The Protestant work ethic that has been at the core of American identity insists upon the virtue of hard work. Thus, the ”illegal alien” is reconstituted as a paragon of industry and individualism. Is it any coincidence that as we softened and neutralized this terminology, and thereby valorized the persons to whom it referred, our nation became less and less able to meaningfully address the problem of illegal immigration? Rhetorical manipulation is a power that the Left has applied to issue after issue, and it is a gambit that we need to grow more courageous in resisting.
[“‘Sex Work’” and the Language Games We Play, August 14, 2023]
This is a powerful and important piece that Prof. Ellwanger has written, reminding us that:
There is something to be said on the other side, though.
Yes: Those with authority in the public sphere will steadily shift and twist the language of public discourse to make the positions that they favor sound more agreeable—more just, moral, and proper.
However, when they have got the language the way they want it, they will carve it on slabs of stone, never to be changed.
Sure, the fluidity of political language is nicely illustrated by that wandering track from ”illegal alien” to ”migrant worker.”
But in among all that fluidity, there are islands of stasis—words and phrases held to be sacred across the years.
Here is one of those islands of stasis: the phrase ”our broken immigration system.” If you are at or near a computer that has a search engine installed, just type in that phrase and hit Enter.
I just did it with Google Chrome. I got ”about 97,800” hits, just short of a hundred thousand. If you use Google’s book search, and select 20th Century, you can find instances of it going back to 1979.
So that phrase, ”our broken immigration system,” has been on the tongues of politicians and opinion-formers for at least 40 years, through seven presidencies. (There are 149 instances of “broken immigration system” on VDARE.com, quoted from MSM sources, but unlike the MSM we have nine references to our broken deportation system.)
And it still has legs. If I limit my search to just this last week I get 30 hits, with a note from Mr. Google telling me these are only the 30 most relevant to my query.
Quoted using the phrase were: U.S. Senator Krysten Sinema of Arizona; Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida; Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director for America’s Voice; U.S. Representative Adam Smith of Washington State; DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the American Hotel & Lobby Association; Jay Ruais, who is running for Mayor of Manchester, New Hampshire; U.S. Representative Michael Lawler of New York; … and other politicians and opinionators from all over: Democrats, Republicans, an Independent, and Unknowns.
Did I say that the phrase ”our broken immigration system” has legs? It’s a frickin’ centipede.
There are other similar phrases carved in stone and not to be doubted. There is, for example, the phrase ”eleven million.” For how many years have we been hearing that given as the number of illegal aliens among us? I’m pretty sure it’s at least twenty years.
And it’s still current: a Google search brought up dozens of references dated as late as two weeks ago: Three-day, 40-mile walk to be held in support of immigration bill, Devan Markham, NewsNation.com, August 4, 2023.
Truly amazing that the number could be so stable across twenty years.
Going back to the phrase ”our broken immigration system,” though: What does it mean? What’s actually broken about our immigration system?
As you may have divined, I’ve taken a deep dive into this. I’ve read several thousand words about that phrase and its meaning.
Here is the most concise answer I have found to the question I just posed. It’s from an opinion piece [No, our immigration system is not broken] by Byron York at the Washington Examiner, dated August 27, 2014—just nine years ago next week. Here are the relevant two paragraphs:
Of all the arguments made in the long and contentious debate over immigration reform, the one heard most often, from all sides, is that our immigration system is ”broken.” President Obama, John Boehner, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, Chuck Schumer, John McCain, Dick Durbin—just about every politician who has ever weighed in on the issue has said it.
The only problem is, our immigration system is not broken. The part of the system that lets people into the United States is working—not without flaws, of course, but successfully managing the country’s immigration needs every day. And while the part that keeps people out of the country, or expels them if they overstay their permission to be here, is not working very well, it’s not because the system is broken, but because Congress and the president do not want it to work.
That really sums it up.
I doubt that Byron York and I would agree on what our country’s immigration needs are, but we have a system that manages legal immigration, as defined by law, approximately well, whatever you may think of the actual law. Illegal immigration, however, is not managed at all, because no power center—no one of any political weight—wants it to be.
Illegal immigration means entry into our country, or staying in our country, contrary to federal laws—laws passed by the people’s elected representatives in Congress assembled.
We can read the laws for ourselves, they are on the internet.
Here, for example, is Title 8 of the U.S. Code, Chapter 12, Subchapter II, Part VIII, Section 1324. Among many, many provisions there is one in Subsection (a), Paragraph 3, Subparagraph (A), that says
Any person who, during any 12-month period, knowingly hires for employment at least 10 individuals with actual knowledge that the individuals are aliens described in subparagraph (B) shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned for not more than 5 years, or both.
The ”aliens described in subparagraph (B)” are of course illegal aliens.
So you can be fined or imprisoned for up to five years for employing illegal aliens.
Yet we all know that illegal aliens are widely employed. Every landscaping firm on Long Island employs them. Why aren’t there prosecutions?
Well, let’s see. Here’s a document dated December 7, 2011, the third year of the first Obama administration. It’s a “Memorandum of Understanding,” which is to say an agreement. It’s an agreement between the federal Department of Labor and the federal Department of Homeland Security, signed by principals of both departments.
What was it the two departments agreed to back there in 2011? Well, the Memorandum is five pages of officialese, but the gist of it is that the DHS, actually its enforcement arm ICE, will not take any action against a firm accused of employing illegal aliens until the DOL has conducted a thorough inquiry [Revised Memorandum of Understanding between the Departments of Homeland Security and labor Concerning Enforcement Activities at Worksites].
At the speed federal departments move, that DOL inquiry will take a couple of years; by which time the firm under investigation is well aware of it and has sent all its illegal workers back to cadging cigarettes in the Home Depot parking lot.
Here’s another document from the feds, this one much more recent: September 30th, 2021, a few months into the Biden administration. It’s a memorandum from DHS Secretary Mayorkas to Tae D. Johnson, the Acting Director of ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Subject: Guidelines for the Enforcement of Civil Immigration Law.
Mayorkas’ memo leans hard on the issue of prosecutorial discretion. Sample sentence:
The fact an individual is a removable noncitizen therefore should not alone be the basis of an enforcement action against them.
The gist of the thing is, that ICE should not enforce the law on employment of illegal aliens—assuming, that is, that the 2011 agreement with the DOL gives them the chance to—unless someone’s assembling nuclear weapons or running a major international drug ring.
So yes: the people’s elected representatives in Congress assembled write and pass laws. Then federal government agencies subvert those laws to make sure they won’t be enforced.
But doesn’t that make the people’s elected representatives mad, that their designs have been thwarted?
Not at all. They knew they would be. In fact, they help the process. I’m reliably informed that that 2011 ”Memorandum of Understanding” between the departments of Labor and Homeland Security was pressed on the DHS by congresscritters as a condition of DHS getting the funding they wanted.
OK, OK, but I talked about ”power centers” back there, and referred to ”the people’s elected representatives.” Aren’t we, the people, a power center?
If our elected national legislature passes a law, presumably because we want them to, and then colludes with federal agencies to subvert that law, shouldn’t we be mad as hell?
To that, I’m afraid the only response I can give is some words I wrote twenty years ago in a column about my own experience as an illegal alien.
Nations, like individuals, have their own ineradicable quirks of personality. It is a peculiarity of Americans that they cannot be brought to think seriously about immigration. The two best immigration-restrictionist books of recent years have been by Peter Brimelow, who is an immigrant from England, and Michelle Malkin, daughter of recent Filipino immigrants. If you have been through, or sufficiently close to, the immigration experience, you think about it a lot. Otherwise, you don’t think about it at all, and can’t be made to. Take it from me, a sometime illegal immigrant: getting this nation to concentrate on immigration reform is going to be hard work all the way [I Was An Illegal Alien, National Review, March 24, 2003].
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
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