Immigration and Euphemisms on Breitbart

Today’s top story on right wing news network Breitbart concerns June’s surge in arrests and detentions of immigrant families entering the US from the southern border. The article points out that while numbers of immigrants have fallen in recent months overall, June saw a relative increase in the number of families with children attempting to enter the US — most of these were from Central America, particularly El Salvador and Guatemala.

Cover image from today’s story

Most of the text is dedicated to numerical rundowns of how many people were apprehended in recent fiscal years. The only break from the article’s dry tone comes while explaining the “surge” of arrests which occurred just before the 2016 Presidential election, leaving a right wing reader to decide for themselves whether immigrants “rushed” to enter the US in fear of a coming Trump administration or expecting leniency from a Clinton presidency. It is a technical piece.

Throughout, the article refers to immigrants as “illegal aliens,” families as “Family Unit Aliens, or FMUA’s,” and children as “minors.” While we should not be surprised that Bretibart, and indeed many news sources and political groups across the right use euphemisms to refer to human people, we can’t let our lack of surprise become complacency.

Dehumanization is an important first step in developing and defending inhuman methods of control and repression. For examples we needn’t look to the extremes of fascism or enslavement — though they should always be on our minds in this context — other instances of this crowd US and world history. Political activists in the 1960’s became dissidents, immigrants from East Asia to the Americas become irredeemable “savages,” enemies of governments in 70’s and 80’s South America become disappeared non-persons. A story like today’s in Breitbart should remind anyone who has had the privilege to forget that words and names have real social impacts.

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Daily analysis of the contemporary right from a PhD candidate in History at UC Berkeley

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