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WASHINGTON, DC--(Marketwire - September 15, 2009) - As the heated debates over health care and immigration reform collide, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists calls on our nation's news media to stop using the dehumanizing term "illegals" as a noun to refer to undocumented immigrants.
NAHJ has long advocated for accurate terminology in news coverage of immigration. NAHJ is concerned with the increasing use of pejorative terms like "illegals" -- which is shorthand for "illegal aliens," another term NAHJ objects to using -- to describe the estimated 12 million undocumented people living in the United States.
Using "illegals" in this way is grammatically incorrect and crosses the line by dehumanizing and criminalizing the person, not the action they are purported to have committed. NAHJ calls on the media to never use "illegals" in headlines and in television news crawls.
"We continue to see 'illegals' used as a noun seeping from the fringes into the mainstream media, and in turn, into the mainstream political dialogue," said NAHJ Executive Director Ivan Roman. "Using these terms not only
distorts the debate, but it takes away their identities as individuals and human beings. When journalists do that, it's that much easier to treat them unfairly and not give them an equal voice in the controversy."
By incessantly using metaphors like "illegals," the news media is not only
appropriating the rhetoric used by people on a particular side of the
issue, but also the implication of something criminal or worthy of
suspicion. That helps to predetermine the credibility or respect given to
one of the protagonists of this debate, which is not conducive to good
journalism and does a disservice to the principles of fairness and
neutrality.
In addition, NAHJ has always denounced the use of the degrading terms
"alien" and "illegal alien" to describe undocumented immigrants because it
casts them as adverse, strange beings, inhuman outsiders who come to the
U.S. with questionable motivations. "Aliens" is a bureaucratic term that
should be avoided unless used in a quote.
NAHJ also calls on editors and journalists to follow generally accepted
guidelines regarding race and ethnicity and refrain from reporting a
person's legal status
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