What Does "Illegal" Actually Mean?

And why the word is a lie

When you hear the word “illegal” you think of something bad. It could be anything from shoplifting to speeding to stealing a car to murder. You don’t have to have any other words around it to give it context. The word by itself means something is bad.

The thing is, the word isn’t real. If you took every thing on earth both living and immaterial, then sifted through every single “thing,” you would never find “illegal.” It’s something that exists only in discourse.

“Illegal” is a social construct. It is something that creates or reinforces a category within human thinking and social parameters. It is subjective and changes from time to time and place to place.

That also means that because your mind is preprogramed to think “illegal=bad” it makes for perfect empty rhetoric. If I was a propagandist or a politician and I wanted you to think something was bad, all I would have to do is label it “illegal.” I don’t have to have any legal support behind my argument. I don’t have to be consistent in how I use the terminology. I don’t even have to be able to defend my position.

All I have to do is slap the label onto whatever I want you to hate. The more I use the label, the more believable and acceptable it becomes. The more hate I can build up in your mind and in your community.

Once you’ve accepted the legitimacy behind the label, I can then expand the scope of the initial propaganda, thus expand the scope of your hate.

This is what the Trump administration has been doing for years. Of course the rhetoric usage far predates Trump. It has been a golden classic for the GOP for decades.

Except now we are seeing the scope broaden.

Calling people “illegal” is by far one of the mot dangerous forms of rhetoric in a politician’s briefcase. The entire goal behind the term is to dehumanize a specific group of people by making another group (usually the dominant culture) hate them.

Now being undocumented in America is a misdemeanor, not unlike speeding or petty theft. But we don’t label speeders as illegal. You take your ticket, you pay your fine, and you go about your day. We aren’t rounding up people and throwing them in a concentration camp in the Everglades because they were caught going 80 on a 70mph highway.

In her tweet, Laura Loomer let the secret slip.

There are not 65 million undocumented migrants in the US. There are, however, 65 million Latinos.

It takes one tiny baby step to move from calling undocumented migrant “illegal” to slapping that label onto all Hispanics.

But again, it doesn’t stop there.

Political Opponents

Mamdani is brown. He is Muslim, and he is a Democrat. He makes the perfect stepping stone to go from “brown people are illegal” to “political rivals are illegal.”

Soon, it will be illegal to be a democrat. Or to oppose the president in any form. To undermine his authority or the appearance of his authority. To report anything negative about him.

Political opponents, allies that have enough of a backbone to push back, journalists….

He’s going to start calling them illegal so they can be deported. Send them back to the countries they came from.

But therein lies the second lie.

I want to call everyone’s attention back to day 1 of this administration. I know, it feels like 84 years ago, but bear with me.

Back on day 1, the day of the inauguration, we had the situation with Bishop Budde. Budde was the Episcopalian bishop who ran the prayer service and who preached about having mercy on marginalized communities. She courageously spoke mercy to the powerful.

It was a very powerful sermon.

But of course, it caused significant backlash among the GOP. Immediately, prominent conservative voices began calling for her to be deported.

She was born in New Jersey.

You can’t deport people who were born in the US.

(Well, you aren’t supposed to be able to deport citizens. They have deported American born children along with their foreign born parents, thus making the child undocumented in the home country of their parents.)

But this what MAGAs have yet to figure out:

“Illegal” and “deportation” are codewords. When the administration calls someone “illegal” what they really mean is “undesirable.” This is a person you are supposed to hate in order to justify what comes next.

You have to hate them before you will allow the government to eradicate them.

Migrants, racial and religious minorities, the LGBT+ community, and political opponents. The next step in the rhetoric game is to label them not just as illegal, but as animals. In Germany, the Jews were called rats. In Rwanda, the Tutsis were cockroaches. You don’t murder rats. You gleefully exterminate them.

Trump will cross that line and I suspect he will do it soon and he will do it to every group he sees as undesirable.

First, they came for the migrants. Then they moved down the list.

Trump isn’t going to have any of them deported. He’s going to have them slaughtered.