From “Illegal” to “Undocumented”: Reactance against a Pro-immigrant Lexical Shift

• In Event: Immigration Attitudes & Beliefs

Abstract

Linguistic anthropologists, psychologists, neuroscientists, sociolinguists, and historians of genocide and torture have long noted how politicians and the media have successfully reduced the empathy people feel towards subaltern populations by using dehumanizing language to describe them. Prior political scientists have also found even a single word can matter (Blinder and Jeannet 2018; Masuoka and Junn 2013; Merolla, Ramakrishnan, and Haynes 2013). I conduct a brief archeology of how politicians and journalists have used the term “illegal immigrant” and “illegal alien” in the United States since 1776, the gradual emergence of the term “undocumented immigrant” in the 20th century, and a recent political campaign to drop the “I-word” that culminated in the Associated Press Style Guide in 2013 banning its journalists from using the term “illegal immigrant” on technical grounds. Although activists developed such a campaign to humanize immigrants, I hypothesize that an individual’s may perceive such a ban or a term like “undocumented” as annoyingly “political correct” or “woke”, manipulative, and/or a threat to freedom of speech, resulting more hostile views toward those whom the ban seeks to protect due to the psychological phenomenon of reactance. Reactance is the contrarian resistance to any external pressure or persuasion that compels an individual to do something in a way that the individual perceives as depriving them of their autonomy (DeFranza et al. 2020). Such reactance may interact with the plethora of mis/disinformation about controversial subjects like immigrants or immigration to trigger more negative elite and/or non-elite public opinion toward immigrants among journalists and the public who view this lexical shift as constraining their freedom of speech.
I test this hypothesis in two ways. First, I examine the frequency of “illegal immigrant” and “undocumented immigrant” used by journalists of major newspapers through 2013, when Associated Press (AP)—a major source of new stories for elite newspapers—revised their Style Guide so that journalists could no longer refer to immigrants as “illegal”. A content analysis reveals heterogeneity in how the ban repressed the use of “illegal immigrant” but did not substantially raise the use of “undocumented immigrant” in national-wide newspapers with editorial boards that banned the term “illegal immigrant” (Los Angeles Times), discouraged the term (the New York Times and the Washington Post), and endorsed the term (the Wall Street Journal), and four locally distributed newspapers that took no particular editorial stance (the Arizona Daily-Star News, the Austin-American Statesman, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Star-Tribune (of Minneapolis)).
Second, to better understand how this lexical shift has impacted non-elite public opinion about immigrants, I conduct an online survey experiment on over a thousand Mechanical Turk participants that randomly assigns the word “undocumented” or “illegal” in front of the word “immigrant” in all U.S. General Social Survey questions about immigration. Results reveal how participants who see the word “undocumented” instead of “illegal” in front of the word immigrant are statistically more likely to think that immigrants will increase crime, national unity, and unemployment. I test for interactions between the word “undocumented” (rather than “illegal”) and party membership, ideology, and media diet to reveal heterogeneous treatment effects. Predicted marginal estimates show that those who encounter the word immigrant are significantly more likely to think “undocumented immigrants” than “illegal immigrants” decrease national unity, reduce the number of jobs, demand too many rights, receive too many favors, and contribute to crime—but, as hypothesized, the treatment effect of the term “undocumented immigrant” is larger for those prior research suggests hold an ensemble of traits prior research suggests are associated with moderate views toward immigration, than those who hold pro-immigration or anti-immigration perspectives. This study reveals how new terms like “undocumented” designed to humanize immigrants and less offensive can have unintended, reactant consequences of triggering anti-immigrant sentiment among much of the U.S. population, but more so for those who have moderate than strongly anti- or pro-immigrant points of view. The results provide insights into how progressive lexical shifts (“Negro” to “Black” and “African-American”, “homosexual” to “gay/queer”, “handicapped” to “disabled”) may affect public opinion about other marginalized populations like immigrants about which people have much disinformation/misinformation. This calls for researchers to attend to how such disinformation/misinformation may interact with discursive frames in ways the architects of frames had not planned, particularly in societies like the U.S. that strongly value freedom of speech and are wary of efforts to control it.

Author

• Jacob Richard Thomas, Corvinus University