The (Il)logic of 'Illegal'

After reading my column this week, "La Nueva Estrategia del Sur," check out Lawrence Downes' hilarious and poignant column in The New York Times: "What Part of 'Illegal' Don't You Understand?"

Downes rebuffs the kind of stopgap rhetoric we've heard time and time again on the JFP blog: illegal is illegal, period. End of discussion. He explores why we apply this logic to immigration, and immigration only (with the possible exception of murder and sex crimes). For example, is someone who has earned parking tickets an "illegal driver," even when he's out walking? The analogy to immigration is appropriate because neither crime is violent. However, unlike someone who's parked illegally (or even, say, used drugs illegally), an illegal immigrant's crime is inseparable from his identity--even when he's doing something other than crossing the border or waiting for a visa (e.g. working, raising a family-- you know, things people would otherwise consider 'legal'). As I point out in my column, this sudden obsession with the law often has everything to do with race: "illegal immigrant" has become exchangeable with "Latino worker," and the unprecedented vitriol that's directed toward the former (often from people who suffer no tangible effects from a broken immigration law), cannot be separated from fear and hatred of the latter.

From Downes' column:

America has a big problem with illegal immigration, but a big part of it stems from the word “illegal.” It pollutes the debate. It blocks solutions. Used dispassionately and technically, there is nothing wrong with it. Used as an irreducible modifier for a large and largely decent group of people, it is badly damaging. And as a code word for racial and ethnic hatred, it is detestable.

“Illegal” is accurate insofar as it describes a person’s immigration status. About 60 percent of the people it applies to entered the country unlawfully. The rest are those who entered legally but did not leave when they were supposed to. The statutory penalties associated with their misdeeds are not insignificant, but neither are they criminal. You get caught, you get sent home.

Since the word modifies not the crime but the whole person, it goes too far. It spreads, like a stain that cannot wash out. It leaves its target diminished as a human, a lifetime member of a presumptive criminal class. People are often surprised to learn that illegal immigrants have rights. Really? Constitutional rights? But aren’t they illegal? Of course they have rights: they have the presumption of innocence and the civil liberties that the Constitution wisely bestows on all people, not just citizens.