Would you say "illegal immigrants" or "undocumented" ?

[Igel]

50. Lots of things are deeply offensive.

You should see the look in a student's eyes when I say he'ss cheated on a test and proven it. He's horribly hurt. They're outraged and offended if you catch them lying and call it "lying" and, if they do it repeatedly, let the only accurate word hanging in the air: "liar". If it's the truth, then it's the truth.

At least we're past the idiocy of "undocumented worker," which is where it began. I completely refused to call a group of illegal aliens or illegal immigrants "undocumented workers" when it included small children and infants. That entailed thinking of small children and infants as first and foremost labor. "Hey, you there, yeah, you, the 17-month-old worker, that's you."

I don't shorten it to just "illegal."

As for the difference between "illegal person who has immigrated" versus "person who has illegally immigrated," that's like saying it really doesn't matter if I say "It's a bad student that was tested" versus "It's a student that was badly tested." Meh. It's just language, and language doesn't. (And if it doesn't matter, then we have two choices. Either "spic" also doesn't matter. Or flibble triminy huring pintum.)

Most of it is framing for political purposes, which mean manipulation. Some is for honor. If a person illegally immigrated, then they should be held accountable. If somebody just forgot to pick up their documentation, then it's a minor oversight. It's the same with "deportation splits up families" and if the family reunifies in the other country (let's say, Greece) then the kids born here have to learn Greek--horrors! And the poor things have to return or move to hell-holes (and all the white Americans wrinkle up their noses because, well, living in *that* country ... worse than daily caustic enemas. But immigration is good, even if immigration splits up families and many immigrants leave family behind. And when they're reunited here, the kids born there have to learn English (let the angels sing). The assumption is that only remaining and reuniting in the US is worthwhile; and learning English is good while learning other languages is horrible. Much of the argument relies on American ethnocentrism and implicit racism. But since most immigrants do so for money, that's a price to pay--and people who insist on moral purity can stand the taint of hypocrisy and a bit of banking on jingoism and racism.