The Damaging Civic Consequences of Illegal Migration, Pt. 3: Sowing Deliberate Euphemistic Confusion

By Stanley Renshon on July 16, 2014

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

       — Attributed to Sigmund Freud

Language is the key to human insight, but also a key culprit in undermining it.

It is a primary vehicle by which we can name what we see, think further about it, and understand it better. Yet it is also, paradoxically, the vehicle of our own undoing as we misname and therefore obfuscate what we would prefer not to see. Freud built his monumental life's work on that insight, developing theories of why we prefer not to see the truth and the mechanisms we use to help us avoid it.

Were he alive today to analyze the way contemporary "comprehensive" immigration policy is discussed by its advocates, he would certainly recognize the effort to distort reality. What might have surprised him, though, is the efforts of organized advocacy groups to systematically obscure and minimize the immigration realities that many ordinary Americans clearly see, even if they have conflicted feelings about what to do about it.

The effort to evade reality in our immigration debate takes many forms. One form, taken by the president and his supporters, is to narrow the focus of immigration enforcement until those efforts are directed against only the most violent and criminal immigration offenders, and this not even effectively. This leaves the vast majority of immigration violators free from any consequences for their law-breaking. Mass illegal migration thus becomes a consequence-less offense, which sends a signal of encouragement to potential immigration law-breakers.

This overwhelming failure to enforce our immigration laws must, of course, be rationalized and explained. "Setting priorities" with limited resources is the major rationale put forward. This rational assumes that: 1) the president couldn't ask for and get more money to bolster enforcement; 2) most criminal illegal aliens did not start out as ordinary illegal aliens, and then commit serious crimes while they are here; 3) the government actually did deport all those who absconded and failed to appear at their legal hearings; 4) criminals held in local and state jails were turned over to federal authorities for deportation; 5) the public didn't care to have the country's basic immigration laws enforced, even if a person has not been convicted of a major felony or capital offense; and 6) that this failure has no impact on the public sense of the U.S. government's legitimacy, performance, and trust.

All of this assumes that the president actually cares about immigration enforcement in a way that is consistent with what ordinary Americans think of when they use that term. There is not much evidence that he does.

Texas Governor Rick Perry said on the Sunday news program "This Week": "I don't believe he particularly cares whether or not the border of the United States is secure."

That's a strong charge. However, the president's record on narrowing and limiting enforcement over the five-plus years of his administration would seem to support it.

However, the Obama administration has what seems, at first glance, an equally strong response — to wit: "[T]oday border security is stronger than it has ever been."

The phrase "stronger than it has ever been" is a rhetorical device and a part of speech you probably never studied in high school English class. I call it the indefinite comparative and its function is to seem to convey a positive, empirically based metric suggesting that the president has addressed or resolved a problem, when in fact he has done nothing of the sort.

Next: The Damaging Civic Consequences of Illegal Migration, Pt. 4: Rhetorical Slights of Hand