[Ads-l] newly "offensive" term

Fri Feb 16 01:19:11 UTC 2018

On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 2:22 PM, Peter Reitan <pjreitan at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 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]
>
>
Sooo, and after your "end", Gjelten continues a little bit. (Emphasis
mine.)

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.* You can say it in a neutral way or you can say it -
it all depends on context and tone. When President Trump says it's
horrible, you know, that sounds pretty bad.*
The point was never that no one ever used the term with a value-neutral
intention or in a non-pejorative sense: obviously, it has been used this
way. Mostly at low volume by sociologists and wonks, who handle a lot of
terms that, when looked at closely, are maybe not completely ideally
selected - jargon is that way. When it showed up in the widely visible
policy debates, it's also been criticized for badly representing the
underlying reality (of family networks lending useful, though sometimes
limiting, structure to immigration trends). But some found it suitably
neutral to use in books, fine. (I'd also be highly unsurprised to learn it
has been an underground hate term for natalists and xenophobes for a while,
but we haven't seen examples of this.) The point is that its use, by some
of the most powerful and most widely amplified speakers has been in a way
to link it with ideologically charged negative visions of immigration, and
it was clearly understood as such by those hostile to immigration in
general, including the racist natalist strata (who cheer at the "Norway
better than shithole nations in Africa" trope).

It seems completely clear to me who won out - just do a Google Image
search, or a Twitter search, or sift through any of the other firehoses
that concentrate part of US social sentiment: it's all about masses of dark
bodies pressing their way into a helpless country (sometimes assisted by
perfidious Democrats). So even though the underlying reality has in the
past, or is in parts of the population, flavored positive (because, if X is
a sutiable immigrant, than their sibling might be, too, and anyhow, that
sibling would start out in the new country with a support structure already
in place - win-win!), this potential connotation was swept away by the use
the term has been put to on the right. Also, it's not really surprising,
because in its administrative flavorlessness, combined with the word
"chain" that in itself leans more to the negatively than the positively
connoted side, the term "chain migration" seems to me much more likely to
be latched on as a focal point of rejection rather than acceptance.

For the third time, I think: these connotations aren't inherent in the term
- as Gjelten says, too, it's a property of the term in context. In a
different time and place, say, a country in which immigration isn't a
hotspot of populist sentiment, but as boring as the regulations about beef
provenance labeling, I could totally see the term to be used as boring,
descriptive jargon. But that would be cloud-cuckoo-la-la-land.

As for the US, are you seriously surprised that, seeing a bunch of vaguely
threatening white people yell "stop chain migration"  in the direction of
random brown people, African-Americans point out that they'd rather not
hear the word "chain" associated with "migration" out of the mouths of such
anti-immigration activists? (No, in cloud-cuckoo-la-la-land that wouldn't
happen either - people there will just think of chains of neurotransmitters
hopping from synapse to synapse when they hear "chain migration".)

>
> 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.
>

You're subsequently going off on a really steep tangent here. I was the
one who questioned your use of (not) pejorative, after you said that
someone (AILA) "does call it a 'myth' designed to scare people, but that's
not the same as being perjorative" and I remarked (I paraphrase) that words
designed in dishonest ways ("myth") to scare people would fall under
"pejorative" for me. I'm thinking for example of calling Jewish people
well-poisoners, or another thread the example posted by Ben Zimmer, about
the origin of "bulldozer" (a word that has lost its pejorative and racist
connotation, as far as I can tell).

Given all the above, it seems to me that you, and a few other ADS-L people,
think that those of us who think of policies that offer opportunities to
apply for an immigrant status in positive terms (either from a human-rights
POV, or based on sociological arguments, or just because it feels like good
and humane policy) should just pretend as if we were in a completely
different historical time and place, acknowledge that in
cloud-cuckoo-la-la-land there is a chance "chain migration" could find
widespread use as a boring, slightly misshapen descriptive term for a
vaguely beneficial sociological fact, ignore the term's use as a weapon in
the propaganda struggle waged by natalist & racist anti-immigrant activists
and treat it as a neutral term, even though in real life, here and now, it
clearly isn't? Why? As far as I'm concerned, it can burn in the fires of
hell.

Chris Waigl

>
>
> 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?
>
>
> ________________________________
> 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
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Chris Waigl <chris at LASCRIBE.NET>
> Subject:      Re: newly "offensive" term
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> -------------------
>
> 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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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

-- 
Chris Waigl . chris.waigl at gmail.com . chris at lascribe.net
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net . http://chryss.eu

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