On Immigration-bill Terminology

Just a few thoughts for Monday morning:

We need to adjust the terminology around immigration. The left has taken over the narrative here: “immigration reform” means a legalization program. “Amnesty” has disappered from the reporters’ stylebook, to be replaced by, fairly universally, a “path to citizenship” for those “without papers.”

Here are the definitions we need to start using consistently:

“Amnesty” means the government promising not to assess penalties for misdeeds of some kind. A “book fine” amnesty from the library means, “please return the books, no questions asked, and we’ll remove the fines from your record.” A parking ticket amnesty means, “please pay the ticket and we’ll remove the obligation from our records without applying the fines.” An amnesty in the bigger sense of a civil war is generally, “lay down your weapons and return to civilian life and we won’t jail you.”

In no other sense does amnesty mean, “keep what you’ve acquired illegally,” does it?

A truer immigration-related amnesty would be to remove the various penalties that attach to illegal entry that prevent individuals from applying for residence, should they later have grounds for an application. Periodically the Tribune features a so-called “mixed status” family divided because dad’s been deported and banned from applying to return, and mom raises the kids alone. An amnesty would remedy their situation.

An amnesty would have also remedied the situation of the “hard case” so-called Dreamers — the ones who the Trib would occaisonally profile, bright, talented, ready to conquer the world — and who would have been eligible for a student visa for studying, and could have applied for an H1-B visa afterward.

What “immigration reform” advocates are after is a full-scale legalization program, and I’d like to see “our side” call it that consistently. “I support waiving penalties for those whould would now otherwise be eligible to apply for permanent residence, but I don’t support a large-scale legalization program.”

“Path to citizenship”? Even for a left-leaning profession, it’s dismaying that journalists have so eagerly seized upon this euphemism, given that the key to these proposals is not the 13 years to citizenship but the fact that legalization happens immediately, and that’s the far more consequential action.

And “immigration reform” grates on me too — why should the Left be able to call their proposals “reform”? Could we not call a border-and-internal enforcement “reform”? It’s not dissimilar from “health care reform” now being defined as ObamaCare.

So, to sum up: I support amnesty, a waiver of fines. I could support a partial deferred legalization program, but not a large-scale immediate legalization. Telling me how long it takes from legalization to full citizenship doesn’t matter a whit.

And now I’m officially running out of steam on immigration, because to really do it right requires a significantly greater command of facts than I have without doing fairly time-consuming research.