Context matters. “John Smith, a jaywalker, cured cancer today,” is an idiotic lead. “John Smith was the latest jaywalker to be hit by a bus on Main Street today,” makes more sense.

It’s absolutely true that it is unfair to summarize a person’s life by his status as an illegal immigrant. Illegal immigrants can be fathers, mothers, artists, comedians, scientists, etc. But in a discussion of illegal immigration, it’s hardly preposterous to describe someone as an illegal immigrant…

In my experience, legal immigrants in particular respect the “stigma” against illegal immigration, which helps explain why they came here legally in the first place. If I were to write about a “pedophile football coach,” I suspect that very few people would assume I was stigmatizing all football coaches.

Moreover, “stigma” is the wrong word. Stigma implies social condemnation, a public disgrace or reputational stain. “Illegal” is a legal term, meaning, er, illegal. For some reason, a lot of people insist that the “illegal” in “illegal immigration” is in effect an unfair slander. But we live in a country where illegal and immoral only occasionally overlap in the popular mind. How immoral it is to immigrate illegally to the country is debatable, but that it’s illegal to do so isn’t debatable, it’s axiomatic.