In their own words...

Maintaining Dignity through Language

During class one of our group members shared an experience from her field study site, the Opportunity Center in El Paso. One day at the homeless shelter a pastor of a church had delivered a donation of food and was about to leave when he told the volunteers that he had recently been in Mexico and had lost his passport in a Wal-mart. Within an hour it was recovered but he remarked “For that hour I felt like some of those illegals over here in the U.S.”

Ironically the homeless shelter that he and his congregation had made a donation to, uses a “don’t ask, don’t tell policy regarding the U.S. legal status of their clients. Quite a few possible illegals would benefit from his contribution.

Despite the fact that this comparison between a lost passport of a privileged American and a lack of documents for a migrant coming to the U.S. is completely unfounded, the most striking part of the story was the language used, illegal.

Here on the Border and especially at my field study site Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services, a nonprofit organization offering free and low cost legal aid to migrants and refugees, there is a great intention to substitute terms such as illegal and alien, which have been accepted by our government and society as acceptable terms to label migrants, for terms such as undocumented and EWI ____________.

During detainment and deportation proceedings each undocumented migrant is given an Alien Number which is always referred to solely as their A-number at DMRS. This intentional change in language is to help our clients maintain their dignity through the adjustment status process which labels them with terms that undermine their dignity.

However, not only are derogatory terms changed but even the term immigrant is not used among people working with the population moving from Mexico to the United States. The term migrant is used to refer to those people in the process of migrating to the U.S. and the term immigrant is used to refer to those people already settled in the U.S. who migrated from a different country.

Though it is seems important only to refer to these terms when addressing migrants and immigrants in the United States concerning their status, these terms help shape the ever changing and conflicting identities of the Border people on both sides and therefore, that much more significant.

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