The Biden administration's long omnibus immigration bill, displayed on the first full day of his presidency, starts with a full-scale assault on the English language.
As my colleague Jessica Vaughan has reported, the president has "abolished the use of the word 'alien'".
The word substitution is an attempt to distort the conversation about the 11 million illegal aliens in the country, fuzzing matters by dropping the word "alien" for the blander, vaguer term "noncitizen".
If we use a comforting term like noncitizen, maybe we won't worry too much about the devastating impact illegal aliens have on our society, notably on the most vulnerable members of it, the ones who lose jobs to the illegals, and those on our welfare systems.
The problem is that the term "noncitizen" covers a multitude of statuses, including:
- Illegal aliens;
- Legal nonimmigrants (such as foreign students, tourists, and workers);
- Asylees;
- Refugees;
- Those in Temporary Protected Status;
- Conditional permanent resident aliens such as those in the immigrant investor (EB-5) program and new spouses of citizens and green card holders; and
- Permanent resident aliens (those with green cards).
Blurring all of these statuses together is a deliberate, bad public policy.
For years, if not decades, the Left has been deliberately blurring migration statuses, using the term "immigrants" to cover all manner of aliens in this country.
Now the Biden administration is doing the same thing for the same reason: to lull us into passivity.