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the difference between referring to this population as undocumented workers as over against illegal immigrants should be obvious.
if amongst documented migrant populations the reverse rates are around 80% (in the aggregate) then it follows that the people who are coming into the states aren't moving here permanently; they're coming here to work and leave again.
this is not at all what the term "illegal immigrant" implies.
in other countries, there have been considerable political conflicts over this sort of naming: in france in particular the question of how this largely imaginary category (not in the sense of having no empirical correlate but in the sense of being a relatively empty signifier which people fill in with projections) gets named is a pretty accurate indicator of where one falls on the left/right scale, with the discourse of "illegal immigration" being pretty firmly front national (neo-fascist) territory. and you can see how it plays out all over the place in writing that's either done by fn people or which is influenced by it (check out brigitte bardot's last autobiography so far with its hallucinations about france being invaded by mosques as if mosques are like kudzu)...groups like sos racisme have done enormous political work trying to shift the way in which undocumented folk are talked about over to the sans papiers (without papers) or a variant.
fact is that you can't really mobilize ultra-right folk on the basis of some nationalist paranoia if you're talking about transnational labor flows. it doesn't ring the same way.
that's a difference.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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