Some progress, long overdue
by digby
The Associated Press, the largest news-gathering outlet in the world, will no longer use the term “illegal immigrant.”
The news came in the form of a blog entry authored by Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll on Tuesday afternoon, explaining that the decision is part of the company’s on-going attempt to rid their Stylebook of labels.
“The Stylebook no longer sanctions the term ‘illegal immigrant’ or the use of ‘illegal’ to describe a person. Instead, it tells users that ‘illegal’ should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally,” Carroll wrote.
The company’s decision comes after years of controversy over the term. Fusion, the ABC-Univision joint venture, does not use “illegal immigrant” because we believe it dehumanizes those it describes and we find it to be linguistically inaccurate.
It’s the same logic that finally persuaded them to stop calling children “illegitimate.” Just as there are no “illegitimate” people, there are no “illegal” ones. Every person is legitimately and legally … human.
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