WASHINGTON, DC -- (Marketwire) -- 09/15/09 -- As the heated debates over health care and
immigration reform collide, the National Association of Hispanic
Journalists calls on our nation's news media to stop using the dehumanizing
term "illegals" as a noun to refer to undocumented immigrants.
NAHJ has long advocated for accurate terminology in news coverage of
immigration. NAHJ is concerned with the increasing use of pejorative terms
like "illegals" -- which is shorthand for "illegal aliens," another term
NAHJ objects to using -- to describe the estimated 12 million undocumented
people living in the United States.
Using "illegals" in this way is grammatically incorrect and crosses the
line by dehumanizing and criminalizing the person, not the action they are
purported to have committed. NAHJ calls on the media to never use
"illegals" in headlines and in television news crawls.
"We continue to see 'illegals' used as a noun seeping from the fringes into
the mainstream media, and in turn, into the mainstream political dialogue,"
said NAHJ Executive Director Iván Román. "Using these terms not only
distorts the debate, but it takes away their identities as individuals and
human beings. When journalists do that, it's that much easier to treat them
unfairly and not give them an equal voice in the controversy."
By incessantly using metaphors like "illegals," the news media is not only
appropriating the rhetoric used by people on a particular side of the
issue, but also the implication of something criminal or worthy of
suspicion. That helps to predetermine the credibility or respect given to
one of the protagonists of this debate, which is not conducive to good
journalism and does a disservice to the principles of fairness and
neutrality.
In addition, NAHJ has always denounced the use of the degrading terms
"alien" and "illegal alien" to describe undocumented immigrants because it
casts them as adverse, strange beings, inhuman outsiders who come to the
U.S. with questionable motivations. "Aliens" is a bureaucratic term that
should be avoided unless used in a quote.
NAHJ also calls on editors and journalists to follow generally accepted
guidelines regarding race and ethnicity and refrain from reporting a
person's legal status unless it is relevant to the story in question. The
public in certain regions of the country have pressured news media to
publish the legal status of any Latino who appears in the newspaper or on
television, regardless of the story's subject.
Doing so contributes to the growing trend of profiling Latinos as
non-Americans or foreigners and using them as scapegoats for a variety of
society's ills, a tone that has become more pervasive in the public
dialogue over the past few years. Few now doubt that this helps create a
fertile environment for hate speech which we have seen can lead to
discrimination and a growing number of hate crimes in the U.S. against
Latinos.
As the U.S. tackles immigration reform in the future, NAHJ believes that
responsible, fair, and non-simplistic coverage of this complex issue is in
order. The words used can be part of the problem or can contribute to fair
coverage and a fruitful public debate.
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