The left secured a linguistic victory last week when the Library of Congress decided to remove the terms “illegal immigrant/alien” and “illegal immigration.” Replacing the extricated terms will be “noncitizen” and “unauthorized immigration,” respectively.
No replacement term describing persons whose ongoing presence is unlawful has been provided, as the Library of Congress has decided to only described the behavior as “unauthorized,” rather than the persons committing the act.
“For Illegal aliens, the meeting decided that a heading referring to the act of residing in a place without authorization should be used rather than a heading that describes the people as illegal or unauthorized,” states the Library of Congress.
Explaining its decision to change its language policy, the Library of Congress claimed that “illegal” had become “pejorative” when describing either the persons or the act of illegally entering and/or residing within the country. The term “alien” was said to be often misunderstood as describing extra-terrestrials.
Drawing on the style guide of the Associated Press, the Library of Congress noted that the left-wing wire news service had decided to purge the terms “illegal immigrant/immigration/alien” from its reporting outside of direct quotes.
The decision was made following protests by the American Library Association, which initially sought to implement usage of nonsensical leftist term “undocumented immigrant.” The Library of Congress pedantically explained its decision against using the term by writing, “Not all ‘undocumented’ people are, or intend to be, immigrants, and many of them do in fact have documents of some type.”
Representative Joaquin Castro, a support of Hillary Clinton, introduced legislation last October to remove the term “alien” from federal law when describing foreigners illegally in the country. He dubbed the proposed bill, the “Correcting Hurtful and Alienating Names in Government Expression (CHANGE) Act.”
For the purpose of accuracy, “unauthorized” is a less accurate term than “illegal” to describe the act of illegally entering and/or remaining within the country. Stylistically, the term “unauthorized” has a less severe tone than “illegal.”
H/T – Michelle Moons at Breitbart
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