Putting "illegals" on "probation"
Greg Sargent reports on how those GOP House members who want to pass comprehensive immigration reform intend to get enough of their caucus on board to do it. He includes their re-exploration of this doozy: keep the rough outline of the Senate’s path to citizenship, but require people to admit their guilt—and instead of calling the middle category “legal status,” call it “probation.” Problem solved: we’re still Tough on Crime!
Paul Waldman applauds this as “genius”—because semantics matter less than getting the thing passed—and I suppose he’s right. I know the line: linguistic framing matters a lot to conservatives, and Republicans are very, very good at it. This is what brought us such gems as the “death tax” and the “right to work.”
Still, this is kind of ugly stuff. It isn’t just about a preferred euphemism for selling a given policy. It’s about making immigrants self-identify in criminal terms. As Sargent notes, the admission of guilt would technically be civil, not criminal—being undocumented is a civil offense, not a crime—but “probation” is a word associated with criminal guilt.
