There’s a new slur on the horizon: “migrants.” Or at least that’s what I’m hearing from the familiar genre of busybody liberal whose politics mostly revolve around language policing. And though I have no doubt that we’ll soon be told that “migrant” has been a slur since time immemorial, the fact is that no one had a problem with it as recently as a few years ago.
Look at this article No Person Is Illegal — The Language We Use for Immigration Matters. It was written by Erica Bryant, who works for an immigration nonprofit and who “aims to use the written word to drive change in…immigration systems.” If anyone were attuned to the new taboo against “migrant” you’d think it would be Bryant — and yet in the very first paragraph, we see that she has no problem with it.
Far too often in political discourse and media accounts, human beings seeking food, shelter, and safety are described as “natural disasters.” Dehumanizing metaphors applied in reference to human beings, like “flood” and “surge,” unfairly paint migrants as dangerous, uncontrollable, and destructive.
But it was right around then that I started noticing the change. That’s when you started seeing statements like this from High Representative of the European Union Josep Borrell:
There are a lot of civilian casualties and the flow of exiled people – do not call them migrants…I insist – do not call them migrants.
Why not? Lorenzo Rilasciati, in Don’t call them migrants:
Too often, migrants and refugees have been described as a “swarm” massing at borders, threatening the hosting communities’ way of life… The very term “migrant” is toxic and no longer fit to describe the horror of people looking for shelter escaping the war…
Compare Bryant’s statement with Rilasciati’s and you should be able to see what’s going on here. For years, the right has used all kinds of dehumanizing metaphors to describe migrants, comparing them to disasters or animal-like swarms. Advocates like Bryant argue that we should fight this by avoiding and criticizng these metaphors when describing migrants. Rilasciati, however, has decided that the damage is done: the metaphors have successfully attached “toxic” connotations to the once-neutral word migrant, so we just can’t use it anymore.
From a purely linguistic perspective this is fascinating. The toxic connotations that Rilasciati sees in “migrant” aren’t somehow an intrinsic property of the word; etymologically, it just comes from the Latin migrare which means something like “to move or relocate.” These connotations only exist insofar as some people have mentally associated them with “migrant”; when Rilasciati thinks of the word, the dehumanizing metaphors that the right aims at it come to his mind.
But because people like Borrell and Rilasciati are in positions of power and influence, they may be able to create a taboo against “migrant” even though most people don’t think of it like they do. Some people will read their comments and decide that this is just what migrant means now, even though it didn’t mean that before they read the article. Other people will say “no, migrant does not necessarily have those connotations, so it is not a slur”; but then they will be attacked and criticized by people who disagree until they accept the word’s new status. Borrell thinks that he is declaring that migrant is a slur because that’s what it is; but perversely, migrant is only becoming a slur because people like him have declared it one.
One can see, in the slurrification of migrant, how strict language norms so often emerge among elite liberal activists. Instead of emerging organically from the bottom up, they are dictated from the top down; some academic or NGO apparatchik decides that we should all be using Latinx from now on, and that mandate gets promulgated throughout their professional networks and then imposed on everryone else. This imposition creates all kinds of popular resentment of course, because people don’t like being told how to speak, especially when the new rules are so capricious and detached from how ordinary people use language.
There is, however, another way. Instead of letting the right turn migrant into a slur, we can insist that no, there is nothing wrong with being a migrant; no, all those dehumanizing metaphors you try to attach to the word do not apply to it; no, we will not let you have this word. This cannot be done with most slurs whose meaning have by now been long entrenched; but it plainly can be done with “migrant,” where the meaning is still being actively contested. I say we fight for it.
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