Biden’s “an illegal” misspeak was bad … but not entirely his fault
When you lead a xenophobic country, sometimes you end up talking like xenophobe.
Let’s start with the positive: A huge thanks to everyone who came out to see the sold-out, Barrymore-recommended inaugural run of The Angry Grammarian: A New Musical, presented by Pier Players Theatre Company. The response was overwhelming in the best way, and we were thrilled with the ecstatic reception the show received.
To everyone else — including those who heard about our show in The New Yorker or on the BBC (relevant interview starts at 44:23) or in Billy Penn or Broad Street Review or South Philly Review or one of the other wonderful places that covered it, and the show was sold out before you could get tickets — stay tuned. We’re actively working to figure out where and when we can stage the show next, and we have some exciting things cooking.
While we were using saucy double entendres to hammer home the difference between lie and lay — two words that our audience members will never again confuse — President Biden was misspeaking. Badly.
During the president’s March 7 State of the Union address to Congress, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene goaded Biden into referring to the accused killer of a Georgia nursing student as “an illegal.”
Oof.
It wasn’t a good look. He later apologized. But it’s more indicative of how poisoned immigration dialogue has become than it is of any official administration policy.
It’s worth unpacking why the adjective illegal is bad, why the noun illegal is worse, and how we got here.
While we can’t easily track how often illegal is used as a noun vs. as an adjective, we can see that the plural noun illegals (which can’t be an adjective) had the most spikes in Google lookups from roughly 2016 to 2020.
Why then, do you think?
A minefield of negative associations
The common definition of illegal — against the law — goes back precisely 400 years; its first recorded usage was in 1624, and was (perhaps unsurprisingly) ignominious: “It is reported of the Emperour Caligula, that he had not onely illegall and incestuous conuerse with his three naturall sisters.” Ew.
But it’s only in the last century or so that the word has become so tied up with immigration. When paired with immigrant, the adjective illegal has antisemitic roots: According to the OED, before World War II, the term illegal immigrant originally referred to “a Jew who entered or attempted to enter Palestine without official permission during the later years of the British mandate.”
Illegal immigrant exists in many dictionaries as its own entry, including some, like Merriam-Webster, that pair it with entries for illegal alien. Alien carries its own negative connotations, including, in the OED, the clarifiers “hostile, repugnant.”
The upshot: Anytime you’re talking about immigration, the language is a minefield of words with negative associations. This is partly how we’ve come to view all immigration, both legal and not, with such toxicity.
As challenging as illegal is as an adjective, it’s worse as a noun.
In most writing, we’ve seen a recent positive shift toward what’s known as person-first language, which recenters people’s humanity in order to avoid defining them by a single characteristic.
For example, this term is person-first language: people experiencing homelessness. This term is not: the homeless.
It’s a subtle difference, but it acknowledges that a person experiencing homelessness might also be a mother and a poet and a Pisces and a George Harrison fan and an avid user of em dashes. Non-person-first language ignores the other elements of an individual’s humanity.
Sometimes, the dehumanization is the point
To use the term an illegal, as Biden did — when he was, it’s worth noting, repeating what Greene said — is decidedly not person-first. It reduces that person to a single descriptor, one that defines the circumstances under which he came to the United States.
We don’t refer to shoplifters or speeding motorists or insurrectionists as “illegals,” despite the fact that they too have committed illegal acts. Why do we reserve this harmful term for immigrants? The toxicity of our immigration dialogue is pervasive.
As with all people in the country illegally — from alleged murderers to the workers who cooked the dinner that you ate out this weekend — for people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the dehumanization is the point. It makes policies like family separation — an especially heartbreaking read is in The New York Times this morning — easier to justify.
To Greene and her ilk, what’s better than relentlessly using illegal as a noun?
Getting so many people to do so that it affects the speech of the leader of the free world — who knows better.
This is the same president, who, in the weeks following his 2021 inauguration, implemented a host of language changes in official government documents to explicitly and implicitly undo his predecessor’s linguistic legacy of hate. Included in those edits: The Department of Homeland Security now refers to noncitizens instead of illegal aliens and criminal aliens, phrases the Trump administration used over and over again to literally alienate those from another country.
But Biden, like all of us, reflects back at us the language we hear every day. Hear terms like an illegal enough, and even the most careful speaker is apt to slip up.
Biden has been accused of many things, but being a careful speaker isn’t typically one of them.
It should go without saying that a president who accidentally slips into harmful language is worlds better than one who consistently uses harmful language as a weapon. According to Factba.se, which tracks every word that presidents say in speeches and in writing, the State of the Union speech was only the second time Biden used the term illegals.
Donald Trump is at 153 and counting.
How many crimes does Trump have to be convicted of before we start calling him “an illegal”?