“We don’t call pedestrians who cross in the middle of the road illegal pedestrians,” said Otto Santa Ana, a linguist and professor in UCLA’s Department of Chicana/o Studies. “A kid who skips school to go to Disneyland is not an illegal student. And yet that’s a sort of parallel.”

Santa Ana is among many linguists who argue that the phrase “illegal immigrants” is neither “accurate nor neutral”. Other law-breakers are not referred to as illegal, making immigrants an outlier in the naming system, he said…

The term “illegal immigrant” wasn’t widely used to describe a population of people until the second world war, when the media began ascribing it to Jews fleeing to Palestine without authorization. In fact, it was Holocaust survivor and Nobel peace prize winner Elie Wiesel who first framed the debate: “You who are so-called illegal aliens must know that no human being is illegal.”

Beyond being inaccurate, the current vocabulary used to describe immigrants is polarizing, with politicians on the right preferring “illegal” and those on the left opting for “undocumented”, Santa Ana said. Instead, he advocates for “unauthorized”, which he says “underscores that they should not be here without highlighting criminality”, or simply describing the person’s immigration.