At IQLatino, we have written about the need to reform our immigration terminology in order to rid our federal laws of the term “alien” to refer to foreigners in the United States. We applaud the Biden administration’s proposal to remove this term from U.S. immigration laws and replace it with the less dehumanizing term “noncitizen.” Here’s why:
The term “alien” comes from the Latin word alienus, which means “stranger” or “foreigner.” At the end of the 18th century, “aliens” were people born outside the domain of the King of England. In 1790, the term “alien” was included in the U.S. Naturalization Act, approved by President George Washington, the first document that established norms to grant American citizenship to “free, white aliens.” In 1798, President John Adams passed the Alien and Sedition Act, which authorized the President to expel “aliens” who were deemed dangerous to the peace and security of the United States.
Laws like these continued to appear for decades to come: Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which prohibited immigration of working classes from China. In 1924, the country instituted a nationality quota system, giving preference to immigration from western and northern Europe and assigning visas based on national and racial desirability. In 1965, ironically under the Statue of Liberty, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which for the first time restricted immigration from countries in the Western Hemisphere. A modified version of this document is now Title 8 of the United States Code, and contains the immigration laws that cover “Aliens and Nationality.” Since 1940, when Congress passed the Alien Registration Act, the Department of Homeland Security assigns to all non-citizens of the United States a series of numbers preceded by the letter “A” for “alien.”
Under the previous administration, the use of the term “alien” was encouraged. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions regularly used the phrase “illegal alien.” He even instructed prosecutors under the Justice Department to adopt this phrase instead of using the term “undocumented.” The former president also invoked the term frequently, often warning of an “invasion” by immigrants. In his 2017 rallies alone, he used the term “alien” over 200 times, along with the terms “animal” (34), “criminal” (189), “killer” (32), and “predator” (31) to refer to immigrants. In one of his last speeches as president at the U.S.-Mexico border, he used the word “alien” at least five times.
The results of the last four years, as we know, were a magnified resentment against immigrants and foreigners, with tragic events like the El Paso Massacre by people who view immigrants and asylum seekers as “invaders” of the United States marking our recent history.
Evidently, the term “alien” is an outdated word with a racist and xenophobic past and dehumanizing connotations, and yet it remains, currently, the legal term most used by U.S. immigration agencies to describe immigrants or foreigners in the United States. The Biden administration’s move to reform our immigration terminology is long overdue.
“The term ‘alien’ is used as a dehumanizing slur, and should be removed from the language in our statutes. This change might seem symbolic, but it’s an important step to restore humanity after years of demonization,” Representative Joaquín Castro said of the proposal in a statement to NBC News. Representative Castro has been at the forefront of terminology reform for years. In 2015, he introduced, without success, a bill to eliminate the use of the word “alien” in federal law and by U.S. immigration agencies.
Individual states, like California and New York, have been successful in this effort. In 2017, California passed a law that removed the word “alien” from the state’s labor code, recognizing that the word “alien is now commonly considered a derogatory term for a foreign-born person and has very negative connotations.” The New York City Commission on Human Rights in 2019 approved a new guideline that outlaws the use of the terms “illegal alien” or “illegals” with the “attempt to degrade, humiliate or harass a person,” with fines of up to $250,000. Even the Associated Press updated its rules in 2013 to stop sanctioning the use of phrases like “illegal alien,” explaining that the word “’illegal’ should describe only an action, not a person.”
But federal institutions, so far, had been slow to act. And it’s not the first time that American legal terminology has fallen behind popular usage and appropriate standards—derogatory terms such as “negro” and “oriental,” for example, remained in federal law until 2016. Under the Biden administration’s immigration reform bill, the term “alien” would be removed from U.S. immigration laws altogether, and replaced with the term “noncitizen.” Though the bill’s proposals to provide a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants and other important provisions have largely captured the country’s attention, it’s worth noting the importance of this seemingly small yet incredibly significant change. Immigrants are not aliens, and it’s about time our federal laws reflected their dignity and humanity.