"Referring to other people as illegal is grammatically incorrect. Otto Santa Ana, a linguist and professor in UCLA’s Department of Chicana/o Studies explains “’[w]e don’t call pedestrians who cross in the middle of the street illegal pedestrians’… ‘A kid who skips school to go to Disneyland is not an illegal student. And yet that’s a sort of parallel.’”^[3] There are many linguists who argue against using the phrase “illegal immigrant” because it is neither “‘accurate nor neutral’” and other people who break laws are not referred to as “illegal.”^[4] Such language is dehumanizing and used to make it easier to justify harmful and dangerous policies against a group of people. The phrase “illegal immigrant” was not popularly used until World War II when it was used to describe Jewish refugees who fled to Palestine without authorization.^[5] Elie Wiesel, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor, once said, “know that no human being is illegal. That is a contradiction in terms. Human beings can be beautiful or more beautiful, they can be fat or skinny, they can be right or wrong, but illegal? How can a human being be illegal?”^[6]

- Isabel Johnston, excerpt from her article titled - Words Matter: No Human Being Is Illegal

Want to learn more about why it is harmful and inaccurate to refer to a human as illegal? Check out this amazing article here: https://lawblogs.uc.edu/ihrlr/2019/05/20/words-matter-no-human-being-is-illegal/

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