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REAPPROPRIATE ‘ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT’ TO SHINE A SPOTLIGHT ON INJUSTICE OF U.S.
IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONS

 * Agustina Vergara Cid
 * PUBLISHED: June 18, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. | UPDATED: June 18, 2023 at 7:01 a.m.
 * Categories: Opinion

Angel Vargas, left, who is an undocumented immigrant, speaks at a rally outside
the office of Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Corona, at Corona City Hall on Friday, May 20,
2022. The approximately two dozen protestors demanded an end to Trump-era
immigration policies. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

Ana, a frontline nurse during the pandemic, spent over two years singularly
focused on providing the best care possible for her patients and staying updated
on scientific research surrounding Covid. Despite her exhaustion, she was happy
to work.

Ana had put herself through nursing school and graduated with honors. She now
devotes herself to her work and to building the best life possible for herself.

Originally from Central America, Ana decided to leave her country a few years
ago. By her late teens, cartels had taken over her city. Cartel feuds, extortion
and murder made it extremely unsafe, especially for a young woman. It was hard
to focus on her education while her family faced demands from a cartel to use
their business as a front to sell drugs. This environment of rampant violence
and economic chaos made it impossible for an ambitious person like her to
thrive.



Ana knew the ideal place to live was the U.S. because, while visiting a relative
here years ago, she had seen America with her own eyes: the busy streets, the
number of prosperous businesses, the safety, the abundance in the supermarket,
the potential for growth — her home country paled in comparison. In America, she
realized, someone like her could make the most out of life.

By any reasonable standard, Ana is an admirable person: she takes her life
seriously and works hard to pursue her values. But there’s one more thing to
know about Ana: she’s in the U.S. after overstaying her tourist visa. Some
people call her an illegal immigrant.

But should we call people like Ana “illegal immigrants” — a term loaded with
shame?




The anti-immigrant camp uses that term in an attempt to smear immigrants. Many
like to paint a picture of illegal immigrants as gang members who jump the
border to smuggle drugs and commit heinous crimes. But the reality is that most
illegal immigrants are peaceful, hard-working people like Ana. A majority enter
the U.S. on a temporary visa (which means they’ve been previously vetted like
Ana), and decide to stay beyond their allotted time—which violates U.S.
immigration laws.

Because of the pejorative intent of the term, it is understandable that people
who think of themselves as pro-immigrant see it as offensive. Being staunchly
pro-immigration, I too resisted using it, preferring euphemisms like
“undocumented” or “unauthorized.” But I’ve changed my mind.



The term attempts to shame people like Ana, who come to America to work, to earn
their own way, to build a better life. But the shame doesn’t lie with her—it
lies with the system that is designed to keep her out.



If we rethink and repurpose the term “illegal immigrant,” we can use it to
re-orient attention to this unjust system. We can use it to highlight the fact
that our immigration system criminalizes the moral decision to come to America
in pursuit of happiness, a system that treats wanting to work as a vice instead
of a virtue. A system that criminalizes millions of people for wanting to make
something out of themselves by working—something that is otherwise rightly
admired in America – is un-American.

Related: Open the borders to those seeking a better life

Some people will ask: “why didn’t Ana come here legally?” Because the U.S.
immigration system is designed to keep productive would-be immigrants like Ana
out. Ana would have had to try to get a loan to pay thousands of dollars in fees
and other visa requirements, wait out the process in her cartel-infested country
and wander for years through a multilevel bureaucratic maze. And then she’d be a
citizen, right? No, that’s just to gain authorization to study and work in the
U.S. temporarily. And that’s only if she manages to qualify for one of a narrow
list of visas in the first place. When I tell Americans about my own legal
immigration story and what I had to go through, their jaws drop. The process is
not feasible for a vast majority of productive people who want to live and work
here, so it’s unsurprising that ambitious individuals like Ana end up
immigrating illegally.



A lot of peaceful, courageous people are eager to immigrate to the U.S. in order
to work to make their lives better, but the immigration system locks them out.
Those who dare to come anyway are made to live their life in the shadows and in
fear, because their actions are illegal.




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We should abandon the euphemisms like “undocumented immigrants” and
“unauthorized workers.” Those euphemisms imply that people like Ana have in fact
done something wrong and only help mask the real problem: that these individuals
are being criminalized by unjust laws for a moral decision that they made.



“Illegal immigrant” works as a smear because what it actually means is rarely
put out in the open — that the presence of peaceful, hard-working people is
illegal in America. It’s time we confront this shameful fact and bring clarity
to the debate by using the term in the appropriate way. Repurposing it is about
illuminating the injustice of the U.S. immigration system, not about abusing
immigrants.



Next time you hear the term “illegal immigrant,” don’t think of gang members or
think it’s derogatory to call a hard-working immigrant that. Think of Ana and
just how moral and brave her decision was to come to America, and how shameful
it is that our immigration laws brand her a criminal.

Agustina Vergara Cid is a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. You can
follow her on Twitter @agustinavcid



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