Should Joe Biden Be More Careful about How He Refers to Illegal Alien Murderers?
His apology for using the term ‘illegal’ is absurd.
His apology for using the term ‘illegal’ is absurd.
W ell, Joe Biden stepped in it. He used the term “illegal” to refer to the illegal immigrant who allegedly murdered 22-year-old Laken Riley in Georgia.
This has made for the one discordant note in the otherwise over-the-moon reception by the Left of the president’s State of the Union address.
Sure, the president has supposedly vanquished the age issue, energized his campaign, and put Donald Trump on his back foot, but he used what polite opinion considers an antiquated, offensive word to refer to the legal status of a brutal killer. He really should be more careful next time.
It’s almost as if the president used the phrase “colored people” when he meant “people of color,” or “the blacks” when he meant “Black.”
Biden has bent to his critics, first backing off his use of the term before going all the way to say he regretted it. “I shouldn’t have used ‘illegal’; it’s ‘undocumented,’” Biden told MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart over the weekend, amending his description of Jose Antonio Ibarra to “undocumented person.”
Biden, surely, didn’t mean to make any sort of statement with his verbiage in his impromptu riff during the State of the Union. Under prodding from a heckling Marjorie Taylor Greene, he reverted to a word that he must have used repeatedly over the past 30 years without anyone rebuking him.
Back in 2012, a decade and an eon ago, the New York Times believed that “undocumented immigrant” was a euphemism and that it wasn’t its role to adopt cutting-edge terms in its coverage of the news.
Since then, the media has universally buckled to the pressure to make “undocumented” the correct and official term. Of course, it is a loaded word, pushed by activists for a very long time to take the sting out of illegal immigration. Biden’s back-off was couched in the same assumptions as those of the people who insist on the term.
First, when initially asked about his use of the word “illegal,” Biden said that the alleged murderer was “technically not supposed to be here.” Why technically? This makes it sound like there was some bureaucratic mix-up; that Ibarra was supposed to have been allowed in but authorities botched it and denied him his rightful legal status.
“Technically, he shouldn’t have parked in the loading zone” is an appropriate sentiment; “technically, he shouldn’t have violated our laws to come here and commit heinous acts of violence against our citizens” is not.
Then, the president was more fulsome with Capehart. “Look, they built the country. The reason our economy is growing. We have to control the border and more orderly flow, but I don’t share his view at all,” Biden said of Trump.
Illegal immigrants, overwhelmingly, work once they get here; it’s why they come in the first place, after all. But the idea that a fraction of all immigrants, whose numbers have only drastically increased the past couple of decades, “built the country” is a ridiculous fabrication and a profound insult to American workers, past and present.
Prior to today, the highest percentage of all the foreign-born in the U.S. population was 14.8, around the turn of the 20th century. Roughly one out of seven people obviously weren’t responsible for the construction of America.
Biden is exaggerating, too, when he suggests that the economy is growing only because of illegal immigrants. But it is true that legal and illegal immigrants have made an outsized contribution to recent economic growth.
According to BLS data, which aren’t flawless but capture the big picture, the total number of employed people in the U.S. increased by 2.3 million between February 2020 and February 2024. Over those four years, the foreign-born employment level increased by 3.3 million, whereas the level of native-born employment is still down by a million.
Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that roughly half of those immigrant jobs are going to illegal immigrants.
Needless to say, this isn’t the political bragging point that Biden might think. “Bidenomics — it’s been great for immigrants regardless of legal status” is not a slogan the president should want to use in a campaign against Donald Trump.
As for the nomenclature, “illegal immigrant” is a succinct, correct, descriptive term. “Undocumented” is an evasion. Someone doesn’t have documents exactly because they are illegal. They also probably do have various documents — either bogus ones or others that don’t directly involve their immigration status in the United States. So, if we are making mincing distinctions among descriptions, “undocumented” isn’t even accurate.
“Newcomer,” which is beginning to make appearances, is even worse. It sounds like what a woke Mister Rogers would call illegal immigrants. It doesn’t distinguish between illegal and legal arrivals, and some illegal immigrants have been here a very long time.
In short, President Biden didn’t have anything to apologize for, especially when referring to a man whose other labels should include “murderer” and “monster.” By going out of his way to mention the Laken Riley case, he probably thought he was signaling his reasonableness and independence of thought on immigration. His apology tour has done the opposite.