So I was thinking about “immigration reform.” I’m sure I’ve griped about this before (and someday, when I finally manage to put labels on my posts, I’ll be able to pull up these prior posts), but consider the fact that immigration-expansionists have managed to control the vocabulary around the topic:
First, newspapers decided that “illegal immigrant” was verboten, and took to using terms such as “undocumented” or “without proper papers” (which implies that it’s just a bureaucratic lapse or, a more sinister connotation, that they’re treated as unjustly as Nazi victims being asked, “your papers, please”). Now no reference to status is permitted except for a convoluted “immigrants without work authorization” or the like, and the general practice for sites like CNN is to simply report that these are “immigrants.”
We also had the label “path to citizenship” which the media adopted to refer to legalization programs.
But it’s more than that: immigration-expansionists have now claimed the term “immigration reform” and defined it exclusively to mean support of the Senate “Gang of 8” bill, or of legislation which provides for immediate legalization of illegal immigrants, whatever the particulars may be. Is this the only possible type of immigration reform? No, of course not. If we built a fence and fully implemented e-verify, and only then (or even not at all) provided a legalization process for some, many, or all illegal immigrants it would still be a reform of the system. But expansionists have taken the term “reform” and used it to create a false choice: either we do nothing, or we implement full and immediate legalization.
It’s not just “immigration reform,” of course.
“Health care reform” was defined very early on in the process of legislating and implementing ObamaCare/the ACA to refer specifically to this legislation.
Does “Social Security reform” have a inappropriately-narrowed meaning? I’m not sure, actually. Does it connote benefit cuts, retirement age increases, tax hikes, all of the above, or merely indicate the desire to make some unknown set of changes, via consensus, to make the system sustainable?
Tax reform? I imagine it implies to most people a combination of tax rate reductions and elimination of deductions, but I’m not sure — perhaps there are those who see this as elimination of deductions combined with “Buffet-rule”-type tax hikes?
So what do you think? Where has “reform” been co-opted, and where not?
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