The Associated Press has changed its stylebook entry on the term “illegal immigrant.” It now reads, in part:
“Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant.”
The new usage should quickly become apparent to readers of the thousands of newspapers and news web sites that follow, or try to follow, the AP’s rules.
Advocates for immigrants are celebrating the change. They hate the phrase “illegal immigrant,” which they see as loaded, imprecise, insensitive and fuel for immigrant-bashing. “No human being is illegal,” many of them say.
But not everyone’s happy. Some on the right are accusing the AP of giving in to political correctness. They say that “illegal immigrant” is already a euphemism, and prefer to use “illegal alien,” “illegal” as a noun, or more vivid terms like “illegal invader.”
I’d like to assure both sides of this debate that The AP is not trying to please or anger anybody. It wants no part in any culture wars; it’s a wire service. Plain, just-the-facts journalism like The AP’s has deep roots in our history, dating to the Civil War, when newspapers pooled resources to file reports from the field. There was no place in such a system for the ideological slants — left, right and wacko — that marked the journalism of the day. This is how straight-down-the-middle reporting became more or less the rule in America — on TV, too, until Fox News came along.
I imagine that The AP probably would have liked to keep on using “illegal immigrant” as a compact, more-or-less-accurate, inoffensive term — because there are no better short alternatives (“Undocumented” is vague and euphemistic. “Unauthorized” is clunky. And so on.)
But fairly recently, “illegal immigrant” stopped sounding inoffensive — because so many people started taking offense. That’s not the AP’s fault. Its style editors didn’t want to risk seeming out of touch, insensitive, unfair and — God forbid — partisan.
Other news outlets, like The Los Angeles Times, are weighing in on the debate. The New York Times is considering its own changes, which I’m told will appear soon. Anti-“illegal immigrant” activists, savoring victory at The AP, are keeping up the pressure on The Times.