It didn't take Justice Sonia Sotomayor long to stir the rhetorical pot with her colleagues on the U.S. Supreme Court. She got right down to business last week in her very first opinion. Weighing in on the case, Mohawk Industries v. Carpenter, Sotomayor used the term "undocumented immigrant," instead of the term that other justices on the high court have typically used — "illegal immigrant." According to press reports and a review of the legal database, this was the first time that a Supreme Court justice had ever done such a thing.
And, given that many Americans on the right and the left have a hair-trigger when it comes to the immigration debate, that's all it took to spark a firestorm of both praise and criticism. The right-wing group Judicial Watch complained that Sotomayor was "keeping with her race-conscious and activist judicial philosophy" and conditioning her colleagues to refer to illegal immigrants "in a more friendly and politically correct way." But left-wing blogs applauded Sotomayor for adding what one site called "humanitarian language" to the court's proceedings.
Technically, Sotomayor was probably correct.
Those who enter the country without the proper documents aren't always committing a crime, that is, doing something illegal. Often, it's merely an administrative violation, which is why the remedy isn't jail but deportation to one's home country. Other times, depending on the circumstance, it could be a misdemeanor or — if someone returns after being deported — even a felony. So perhaps "undocumented" is the most accurate term, regardless of how angry it makes some people to hear it.
But the larger issue here is that this shouldn't be much of an issue in the first place. Whatever we call these people — whether it's "illegal immigrants" or "undocumented immigrants" — it doesn't change the fact that there are millions of them here and the country needs to find a way to deal with that fact in a firm but compassionate way. Let's not get hung up on the language. Let's find a solution to the problem.
REPRINTED FROM THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE.
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
