Politics and Prejudice: Using the Term “Undocumented Immigrant” over “Illegal Immigrant”

Adam Henry Callister, Quinn Galbraith () and Alexandra Carlile
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Adam Henry Callister: Brigham Young University
Quinn Galbraith: Brigham Young University
Alexandra Carlile: Brigham Young University

Journal of International Migration and Integration, 2022, vol. 23, issue 2, No 18, 753-773

Abstract: Abstract The presidency of Donald Trump and subsequent interest in issues related to immigration have created controversy regarding how to refer to immigrants living in the USA without documentation. The first part of this paper acts as an analysis of the growing use of the term “illegal immigrant” and the controversy around this term. Given the current debate over using the term “illegal immigrant” versus “undocumented immigrant,” we test the claim that the term “illegal immigrant” causes Americans to support more restrictive immigration policies and view immigrants less favorably. Using Amazon Turk, we distributed two sets of opinion surveys regarding unlawful immigrants. These surveys were identical except that one set used the term “illegal immigrant” and the other used “undocumented immigrant.” The differences in responses between these two survey sets were analyzed. While the term “illegal immigrant” is generally used in more negative contexts than the term “undocumented immigrant,” using one term over the other had little to no effect on how our study participants viewed immigration policy and immigrants themselves. Given prior research about the usage of the two terms, these results suggest that while the decision to use one term over the other is an indication of political ideology, attempts to sway opinion about immigration policy using only terminology may be less effectual than normally believed.

Keywords: Undocumented immigrants; Illegal immigrants; Corpus linguistics; Usage; Connotation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1007/s12134-021-00852-y

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