That is why I sincerely cannot understand the support that some organizations and politicians are giving to bills in Congress that are primarily focused on enactment of legislation designed to maintain a cheap labor force that is kept waiting. Continue reading
Article on meatpacking industry and its needs for immigrant workers. The article focuses on workers in the Greeley area — an area where I grew up — and where I organized after graduating from the University of Colorado. Continue reading
President Obama will be coming to Los Angeles on June 7th and we’ll be rallying to greet him with a clear message: Not1More Deportation! Continue reading
Sacramento – Today, Assembly Bill 263 authored by Assembly member Roger Hernández passed the Assembly Floor on a 52-22 vote. Continue reading
I have great news for all our supporters. After constant battle in the Assembly Transportation and Appropriations Committees, AB60 finally made it to the floor for a vote. Continue reading
The passage of AB 60 out of the appropriations committee with no provision for having marked driver’s licenses for undocumented is one more reason for meeting this Saturday in a dialogue sponsored by the Latino and Latina Roundtable Political Action and Immigrant Rights Committees to discuss pending immigrant rights legislation on a state level and federal level. Continue reading
Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, wrote two of the bills supported by immigrant rights groups. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press / May 16, 2013)
By Patrick McGreevy
May 20, 2013, 10:24 a.m. Continue reading
HuffPost Latino Voices
The Associated Press dropped the term “illegal immigrant” from its style guide Tuesday, handing a victory to immigration rights advocates and Latino media organizations who have pressured the news media for years to abandon a phrase that many view as offensive.
The news was first announced in a statement from AP’s Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carrol on the wire service’s blog, who said the change resulted from conversations with people who opposed the term, as well as a commitment to eschew labels.
“Our goal always is to use the most precise and accurate words so that the meaning is clear to any reader anywhere,” Carrol said.
AP will also avoid sweeping labels like “undocumented” or “unauthorized” used by some in the news media who avoid the term “illegal immigrant.”
“Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant,” the style guide update says. “Except in direct quotations, do not use the terms illegal alien, an illegal, illegals or undocumented.”
Instead, the AP styleguide instructs reporters to specify how someone entered the country. Those brought to the country as minors “should not be described as having immigrated illegally,” the guide says.
The National Association of Hispanic Journalists first pushed the news media to stop referring to immigrants without lawful immigration status as “illegal” in 2006, arguing that the term criminalizes people rather than their actions. Almost half of likely Latino voters find the term “illegal immigrant” offensive, according to a Fox News Latino poll published last year.
The NAHJ was later joined by the Applied Research Center and its publication ColorLines, which pressured the media to “Drop the I-Word,” calling it a “racially charged slur used to dehumanize and discriminate against immigrants and people of color regardless of migratory status.”
But pressure to drop the term “illegal immigrant” ramped up last year, as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and immigrant rights activist Jose Antonio Vargas and ABC/Univision News openly challenged the New York Times and the Associated Press to change their stylebooks. At the time, the AP said it would restrict its use of the term illegal immigrant without dropping it entirely, while the New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan said she continued to view it as the appropriate word choice.
“It is clear and accurate; it gets its job done in two words that are easily understood,” Sullivan wrote in October. “The same cannot be said of the most frequently suggested alternatives – ‘unauthorized,’ ‘immigrants without legal status,’ ‘undocumented.'”
Vargas welcomed AP’s decision to strike the term entirely.
“This was inevitable. This is not about being politically correct,” Vargas said in an interview with Poynter.
The AP’s new policy leaves the New York Times increasingly isolated. Several news organizations, particularly in television, have abandoned the term “illegal immigrant” — an editorial decision likely prompted by networks’ efforts to attract the growing U.S. Hispanic market. CNN, ABC News, and NBC News have all excised the term in recent years, according to ABC/Univision News. Fox News Latino, a digital property of the Fox News empire, uses the term “undocumented” to refer to those without legal immigration status.
The Huffington Post uses the term “undocumented immigrant” to refer to those without lawful immigration status.
UPDATED: The New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan writes on her blog that the paper is also considering changing its stylebook. She writes:
The Times, for the past couple of months, has also been considering changes to its stylebook entry on this term and will probably announce them to staff members this week. (A stylebook is the definitive guide to usage, relied upon by writers and editors, for the purpose of consistency.)
From what I can gather, The Times’s changes will not be nearly as sweeping as The A.P.’s.
Read the rest of the explanation at the New York Times.
This post was updated at 5:10 p.m. on Tuesday, April 2, 2013.