The ostensibly right-leaning Wall Street Journal further curtailed its own writers’ freedom of speech, dictating that none of its staff are to use the phrase “illegal immigrant,” as reported by Breitbart.
The change was announced in the Journal’s newly-updated style guide, where it specifies that, although writers are still allowed to refer to the process itself as “illegal immigration,” the words “illegal” and “illegal immigrant” are no longer allowed to be used in any of its articles, as they claimed that this amounts to “labeling people.”
The guide tells writers that “when describing a broad category of immigrants, use alternatives such as ‘immigrants who entered the country illegally’” or “‘people living in the U.S. unlawfully or without the legal right.’” The guide further went on to claim that “illegal immigration is a highly charged issue that must be covered with precision and sensitivity, without taking sides or resorting to perjorative labels or euphemisms.”
This change follows an ongoing trend in the mainstream media, which has sought to demonize terms such as “illegal immigrant” and “illegal alien,” even though they are accurate phrases for describing the hordes of illegals who are currently flooding the southern border. The Associated Press was one of the first publications to do so, banning its writers from using the same two phrases back in 2013.
More recently, the Left and the mainstream media have attempted to describe these groups as “undocumented immigrants” or “the undocumented community,” in an effort to eliminate the stigma of illegal immigration and portray these people as simply underprivileged and discriminated groups, rather than the criminals that they are by definition.