[Ads-l] newly "offensive" term

Thu Feb 15 23:22:59 UTC 2018

NPR correspondent, Tom Gjelten, who recently published a book outlining the history of American immigration policy, offered a non-defensive, non-aggressive justification of his use of "chain migration" throughout the book:

>From a transcript of an interview on Morning Edition:

INSKEEP: What exactly is chain migration?

GJELTEN: Well, when an immigrant comes here legally and  ultimately becomes a U.S. citizen, he or she has the right to bring  family members along behind, not just spouses or children, but parents,  even adult siblings and their spouses. And in time, those people can, of  course, then bring in their relatives, so one immigrant coming here  legally can set in motion a whole migration chain. And actually, this is  how about two-thirds of all legal immigrants moving to this country  come in now.

INSKEEP: Well, let me just ask you, Tom, if I say chain  migration, it sounds kind of bad, kind of unsavory, but can I call the  very same thing family reunification?

GJELTEN: You can. You know, in my book that you referenced, I'd  used the term chain migration throughout the book because I just thought  it was a descriptive pattern.
[END]

The piece may be interesting to people following this thread.  Gjelten describes a surprising origin of "family reunification" policy, sometimes called "chain migration".

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/11/577279617/what-does-chain-migration-mean-we-get-an-explanation

But without debating immigration policy, I think one problem in the discussion up to now is that I may not know what "pejorative" means, or what other people mean when they say it.

Merriam Webster's says, "having negative connotations (see connotation 1); especially: tending to disparage or belittle : depreciatory."

Someone who opposes "chain migration" might disparage or speak pejoratively about the policy, but does that make the name of the thing being disparaged a "pejorative" word?

Speaking pejoratively about a policy is not the same thing as speaking pejoratively about people who may or may not benefit from the policy.  I would not be surprised if people who generally speak pejoratively about foreigners would also speak pejoratively about the policy called alternatively "family reunification" or "chain migration."  I am also pretty sure that many (if not most and possibly a very large majority) of people who oppose the policy they call "chain migration" actually oppose the policy and do not think disparagingly about the people who may or may not benefit from the policy.

The same person would presumably speak pejoratively about the same policy if it were called "family reunification," it's the policy and its perceived effects that they oppose. Is not a thorn by any other name just as prickly?

Someone else who favors "family reunification" might speak favorably about the same policy whether termed "family reunification" or "chain migration," as was the case with an NPR correspondent who thought deeply enough about the issue to write a book about it.

If I say, "I hate cheese" - I would consider the word "hate" to be "pejorative," and I might be considered to be speaking pejoratively about cheese, but "cheese" would not therefore become a "pejorative word", except, perhaps, among a group of cheese-haters who use it that way.

Or am I missing something?

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From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Chris Waigl <chris at LASCRIBE.NET>
Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2018 7:50 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: newly "offensive" term

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Subject:      Re: newly "offensive" term
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The examples dug out by John Baker and David Wilton are great, and I hoped
this thread would move into calmer & more open-minded waters, after
inauspicious beginnings (exemplified by the scare quotes in the subject
header). But there are still a lot of defensive? aggressive? maybe
passive-aggressive responses, so to come back to it, one more reply.

On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 2:11 PM, Peter Reitan <pjreitan at hotmail.com> wrote:

> I agree that there is legitimate room for debate about whether "chain
> migration" accurately describes how current immigration policy works.

=E2=80=8BI'm not sure whether you're referring to my critical statement upt=
hread
"that's not how immigration policy works", the antecedent of "that" wasn't
"chain migration", but "one person lets in one close relative, who then
lets in another close relative, who then lets in an in-law, who then lets
in someone three degrees removed from the first person".

One of the stumbling blocks in this discussion is that the current, recent
use of "chain migration" and the use over the last few decade that has been
described as unobjectionable and harmless aren't really very close. I've
poked a little bit around Google Scholar to familiarize myself. There's
only very little that refers to immigration *policy*, and where it is
there, it seems more of the wonkish kind. A few cases where it sloshed out
into the "let's get the masses behind our policy proposal" debate are the
ones where earlier criticism of the term surfaces. But what I see mostly is
the use in immigration *sociology*, where you find the term interchangeably
with migration chains, migration network, and "analysis" stuck to them.
There seems to be a strong link with social capital theory. And definition
statements in that scholarly body of work talk about how "each act of
migration creates social capital among people to whom the migrant is
related, thereby raising the odds of their migration.=E2=80=9D Examples of =
studies
I've seen deal for example with how previous immigrants from the same
family or location are a resource for young immigrants when they make
college choices in America. Carried out among social scientists, within
scholarly norms that include attention to the ethics of their object and
methods of study, this all sounds pretty within normal academic activities
to me. Nothing grossly objectionable to see. (There's apparently also a
notion of chain migration of neurotransmitters (?) ... or something ... in
microbiology. Nothing to see here either.)

But that's not what we're dealing with as of 2018! Trump isn't going to
cite Bourdieu and present a social network analysis. The statements about
chain migration were accompanied by this figure:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/20171214_Chain-migrat=
ion_v2.png
(source: White House - see URL). The image makes the link between the term
"chain migration" and frankly pejorative immigration metaphors that have
been studied quite exhaustively: immigration-as-flood (natural disaster),
immigration-as-invasion etc. A cruder version of the same idea, now linked
directly to the question on the table, that of the regularization of
certain groups of unauthorized immigrants to the US, would be this:
https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/25659308_1698734953516526_813=
4030615096348297_n.jpg?oh=3Dbeb03200744f4ec9eff221b2172f0002&oe=3D5AD9BC0D
(Source: A group that wants to reduce migration levels to the US, called
NumbersUSA, which produces graphs that activate these kinds of metaphors).

So even if there was a largely unobjectionable use of the term "chain
migration", as far as the political discourse of the moment is concerned,
as carried out in the media and by political institutions and parties, I
completely maintain the tendentious, ideologically marked character of the
term.

> But being misleading (if, as some claim, it is misleading) is not the sam=
e
> as being perjorative, especially when it literally, if metaphorically,
> describes the pattern of immigration being criticized.
>
>
> I disagree that it is "certainly true" that "chain migration" is
> perjorative and not neutrally descriptive, as all of the examples (as I
> read them) I included in an earlier post were descriptive of certain
> migration patterns.  And the AILA policy excerpt cited by John Baker does
> not even suggest that it is perjorative.  It merely (as I read it) holds
> that the term is misleading and not descriptive of how immigration policy
> actually works.  It does call it a "myth" designed to scare people, but
> that's not the same as being perjorative.  And since the term long predat=
es
> the current immigration debate, and was used to describe actual patterns =
of
> immigration over several decades, I find it unlikely that the term was
> designed to scare people.
>
>
=E2=80=8BIf "a myth designed to scare people" doesn't imply something in th=
e
vicinity of "pejorative", you and I are using the word pejorative
differently.

Last, I don't care what the term was originally designed to =E2=80=8Bdo or =
mean.
(For all I know it was the microbiologists who invented it.) The German
words "Endl=C3=B6sung" and "Sonderbehandlung" were also completely fine
administrative or technocratic terms before the Nazis came along and used
them to mean "genocide" and "summary execution". Without the Nazis, we
could be talking in German about how to achieve the Endl=C3=B6sung of the
traffic problems around Munich airport or the Sonderbehandlung of clothes
items with tomato sauce stains. But we can't. Words don't come with
connotations, tendentiousness or, if you insist, offensive meaning in and
of themselves: these things are aquired in a context. As for "chain
migration", the context was provided by the speakers, their supporters and
the wider echo chamber.

=E2=80=8BChris Waigl=E2=80=8B

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