Illegal Alien

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Weijin Chang calling from San Diego.

Hi, Weijin. Welcome.

How are you doing?

Great.

How can we help you?

Well, I have a question that has come up on a number of occasions between my wife and myself. My wife is a law student at USD, and I’m a teaching attending at UC San Diego. The question has also come up on rounds.

And the question is, what’s the most appropriate way to refer to an individual who is either what we’d call a legal alien or undocumented individual? I know that there are legal terms that are most appropriate, but that may not necessarily be the most respectful or appropriate term to use in day-to-day conversation, or in our case, on rounds in the hospital.

So these are people who’ve come to the United States. They are not naturalized. They are not here with their official immigration paperwork. Somehow they are here without the permission of the federal government.

That is correct.

And are you usually speaking about using this expression with the individuals themselves? Are you talking about them to somebody else?

Talking about them, yeah.

To colleagues?

Correct. So, I mean, how this oftentimes comes up on rounds is in discussing funding for their care. And sometimes the difficulty of obtaining outpatient services for them. And so it’s, you know, I think sometimes people outside of the medical setting find it amazing that we talk about these things in our care, and it’s not necessarily to provide different care, but actually to try to ensure that they do get the best care after they leave the hospital.

Sure.

Well, that’s an interesting question. What does your wife have to say about this from a legal perspective?

Well, I think from her perspective, she feels like that these individuals oftentimes are referred to as illegal aliens in sort of legal terminology. But she agrees that what could be an appropriate legal term is not necessarily the best term or the most respectful term to be used in day-to-day conversation or on medical rounds.

That’s a very good point. I think she’s come right to the crux of this issue. It’s interesting. Brian Garner, who is a legal terminology expert, he’s written style guides and usage guides, both for mainstream English and for the legal profession, and edited Black’s Law Dictionary, makes a point of saying in all of the books that he’s edited that a legal alien is the best term in the legal profession.

And your point is that that might be a little off-putting, both to the patients themselves and to other people who may say, well, how can you mark this person as only being a legal alien? That’s not their primary state of being. This is not the most that they’re about, right? Is that kind of what you’re saying?

Yeah, and you want to show a little humanity there because both of those words, illegal and alien, even though they’re terms of art within the legal profession, outside that profession, they have mainstream lay meanings that are kind of offensive, frankly.

True.

Lay meanings and layers of meanings.

Yeah.

Right.

Interesting.

Martha, what would you do if you were in this position? If you had to speak to your colleagues about somebody who is in the country without the proper paperwork, what would you do?

I like your use of the term individual, and I like your use of the term person, especially in a context that’s a medical context where you’re worried about preserving the humanity of an individual. I think casually I would say something like individual or person, maybe undocumented.

Is undocumented the word?

They may be documented.

Yeah, I know.

It gets tricky.

Yeah, what if their papers are expired? They actually had them, but they overstayed.

Right.

Or their applications were rejected. They’re in the system as a person with an identity.

Well, I think we can probably all agree that using illegal as a noun is not something that you want to do.

Right. And that’s something that really is jarring, I think, especially in political discourse, you know, from my perspective anyway. I know that the AP Stylebook, at least the last time I checked in the news media, uses illegal immigrant. But then the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the last time I checked, uses undocumented immigrant or undocumented worker.

And that’s a different field, but they have the same kind of concerns that doctors would. They are talking about people as human beings and not as pawns to be pushed through the legal system one way or the other.

There’s almost no way to handle this without somebody taking some kind of offense somewhere along the way, right? Either the people who are in this country with the dubious circumstances, either the people on the political spectrum who don’t think they should be here at all, the people who think that it’s fine for them to be here and they should be helped to stay here.

Somebody’s going to take offense at pretty much any one of these, and you can’t win except to be sensitive to the audience that you’re speaking to at the particular moment. My advice for you is, in the same way that the journalists have gotten together, the Society of Professional Journalists earlier this year talked about this as a body and came up with some resolutions where they prefer to avoid using illegal alien and they recommended using illegal immigrant.

But I would recommend that perhaps it’s time for you to organize a mini conference in your hospital of doctors and professionals who work with these patients and to see what you can come up with as a consensus. And then you at least would know amongst your colleagues that you are all on the same page or mostly on the same page.

That’s a great idea, actually. And certainly something I can maybe even do myself or better yet, assign to a medical student.

Even better, free labor. There you go. Yeah. And then lock the door and say, nobody leaves until we resolve this.

Right.

Your grade depends on this.

Yeah.

Oh, there you go.

And if you do have this meeting or when you have this meeting, doctor, let us know and just share it with all of our listeners, all right?

Oh, yeah, definitely.

Thanks very much for the question. And thanks for letting us kind of hash this out. I know we didn’t really reach an answer, but I think we’re on the road to coming up with something that you can be more comfortable with.

Sounds good.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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