Let's Talk About how Illegality Is an Excuse: Confronting Injustice in 'Dear America' Meghan Edwards College

The phrase, “you’re not supposed to be here” echoes throughout the lives of undocumented Americans. Immigration discussions dominate the media with the so-called border crisis at its forefront alongside the question of who deserves to have a place in America and who does not. With this, comes a bombardment of intentional diction used to cloud the veracity of the discussion and negatively influence the American perspective. However, this manipulation directly exasperates biases and thus further complicates and strains the lives of undocumented immigrants. One of these Americans is Jose Antonio Vargas, an openly undocumented journalist and advocate for immigration reform. His memoir, Dear America, Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, implicates the powerful effects of politically charged language in regards to immigration. The word “illegal” is at the center of immigration debates and acts as a trigger word to perpetuate a fictitious separation between humanity and immigration in order to galvanize American ideas of nationality while consequentially advancing a racially-motivated anti-immigration political platform.

Illegal is an innately political term typically used to describe the criminality of an action, yet is used...