'Going Home,' or How Restrictionists Can Win the Linguistic Battle

By David North on September 12, 2010

"Going home" has a pleasant overtone. "Being deported" does not.

Unfortunately the open borders people have totally outmaneuvered the restrictionists linguistically. They have caused the media to use soft words to describe the lawbreakers, like "unauthorized immigrants" and "undocumented workers," while using harsh words like "arrest" and "deportation" for normal enforcement actions.

Similarly, whenever a useful, careful migrant-screening operation is being dismantled, we hear such positive terms as "streamlining." Releasing illegal aliens from the deportation process is commended as an "appropriate adjustment of priorities."

They have Woody Guthrie's "Deportees" as verbal ammunition; we have nothing comparable.

Today's suggestion is simplicity itself. Let's call deportation a "trip home."

Let’s think in terms of giving illegal aliens "a ticket home."

The trip back, in contrast to, say, a trip north over the Arizona border in the summer, is a piece of cake. A nice, safe ride in an air-conditioned plane. This aspect of migration control is rarely mentioned.

The pleasant travel, after all, is a government-subsidized "homecoming."

As I noted earlier, a solved crime (like a bank robbery) usually results in two outcomes; there is a jail sentence and the restitution of the stolen funds. Deportation is not a punishment, it is merely restitution, re-arranging matters to the way they used to be. A ticket home is simply the restoration of the status quo ante.

It might be carrying matters too far to start referring to DHS detention officers as "travel agents," or changing the signs on the front of the Border Patrol's buses to read "Homeward Bound," but you get the idea.