I am an immigrant. I came to the UK 20 years ago from the US to teach philosophy at the University of Sheffield, where I am now a professor. My American accent remains very strong. I used to be surprised when, despite hearing me speak, people would express anti-immigration sentiments to me, with a clear expectation of agreement. I would tell them that I am an immigrant. “I don’t mean you”, they’d respond, surprised that I count myself as an immigrant.
This shows that seemingly neutral words – like “immigrant” – are not always used in a neutral way. The supposedly neutral word “migrant” is increasingly used by the media to describe the large numbers of desperate people travelling into and across Europe, fleeing war and persecution.
But this use has recently come under attack.
To some, this attack is baffling. A migrant is just a person who migrates, surely, and these people are migrating. What can be wrong with this truthful description? One thing that might be wrong with it, however, is that, according to the UN, that’s not what a migrant is:
The term ‘migrant’… should be understood as covering all cases where the decision to migrate is taken freely by the individual concerned, for reasons of ‘personal convenience’ and without intervention of an external compelling factor.
While maybe among the desperate risking their lives to escape places like Syria and Afghanistan, there is a person or two who has joined them for reasons of “convenience”, these people are surely vanishingly rare. According to the UN, then, it is simply factually wrong to call these people migrants.
But why, a more compelling objection goes, should we even care about language? People are dying and need help, and there goes the left again worrying about words. The reason to care about language is that the language we deliberate in shapes our deliberations. We’d see this without hesitation if racial slurs were being used to describe these people. And few people of good will would defend Katie Hopkins’ use of the term “cockroach”. We know all too well how such clearly dehumanising words help put in place patterns of thought that make genocide possible. But “migrant”? “Migrant” is not a slur.
Those who study the intersection of language and politics, however, have become increasingly aware that terms that seem innocent, like “migrant”, can do some of the worst damage. This is because we are not aware of the ways that they are affecting our thought. Almost all of us, below our consciousness, are prone to ugly biases that we would reject if we were conscious of them. We see this in studies showing that people presented with the same CV judge it to be less attractive if the name at the top is a typically black one.
Apparently innocent words can come to function as dogwhistles, speaking to our unconscious in ways that our egalitarian conscious selves would reject if only we realised what was going on.
In America, the apparently race-neutral term “welfare” has come to be so strongly associated with black people that attitudes to any policy described using this term correlate with racial attitudes. Fascinatingly, adding an explicit reference to race removes this effect – if it’s too obvious, our conscious egalitarian selves step in. And this is why a seemingly neutral term like “migrant” is so potentially pernicious: it is not, as the UN recognises, actually a neutral term. But it seems like it is – which means we don’t take the kind of care we should in assessing its effect on us.
The suggested alternative terms are “refugee” – which calls attention to the fact that these people are fleeing intolerable conditions of violence; and the simple “human being” – which reminds us of our moral obligations. Either of these is an improvement on the inaccurate “migrant”, which threatens to distort our discussions without our even realising it.
Professor Jennifer Saul is from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Philosophy.
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