"Undocumented Worker": The Left's Preferred Expression for "Illegal Alien" Is False and Misleading

Opening with the words, "The Battle of the English Language continues", and with help from Bill O'Reilly, Professor Jacobson points out that it is nonsense to refer to the expression "illegal alien" as racist, since the expression applies as much to the red-haired Irishman with pasty skin as to the dark-haired Mexican with olive skin (gracias para Instapundit).

It turns out that that the preferred expression of the Applied Research Center (and its spokeswoman, Mónica Novoa) is no better.

Indeed, "undocumented worker" is worse. It is false and it is misleading.

As I wrote exactly two years ago, it so happens that every illegal alien in America already does have papers.

To use the examples brought up by Professor Jacobson and Bill O'Reilly, every foreigner in America has documents.

Every Mexican has an identity card. (It is a Mexican identity card.)

Every Asian has papers. (Papers from his respective country in Asia.)

Every Russian has a passport. (It is a Russian passport.)

Every Irishman has documents. (They are Irish documents.)

And to bring the French left's similar use of sans-papiers into the equation, every Algerian has an identity card. (It is an Algerian identity card.)

(Of course, a given individual may have waylaid his papers, or left it home in Chihuahua — deliberately or otherwise — before crossing the Rio Grande, but that in no way invalidates the proposition that he is a person who indeed does have documents and who does indeed have the right to documents.)

The liberals' trick — a deliberate trick or an unconscious one (due to a lack of thought) — is to make Americans think that through some tragic and unforeseen disaster, not of their making — not of anyone's making, or any country's making — the illegal aliens (if you will pardon the expression) find themselves in some kind of Kafkaian legal limbo, a truly hellish situation where nobody has any way out, a situation that they could in fact easily get out of if only Americans decided to forgo their racist attitudes and become decent human beings and to hand those innocent victims the papers that they have been begging for and that all human beings, everywhere on this planet, deserve.

Wake-up call: You can call the fact that I am going to tell you
as being as heartless as you want, but it remains that
what I am going to tell you now happens to be an incontrovertible fact:
The Mexican citizen has a perfectly legal status.
That is, back in his home country.
So does the Asian, the Russian, the Algerian, and the Irishman.

Whoever said that a Mexican, an Irishman, an Algerian, a Russian, a Filipino deserve some type of American identity card — solely by virtue of their being in los Estados Unidos?! Any more that an American, a Dane, or a Frenchman would deserve a Mexican, an Irishman, an Algerian, a Russian papers simply by virtue of living in their countries — especially after breaking the law by crossing their borders stealthily and undetected?

Everybody has the right to papers, but everybody does not have the right to American papers!