Oh my.

Not surprisingly, the ad and the related propaganda from its sponsoring organizations like the American Immigration Control Foundation and the Federation for American Immigration Reform continues the trend of dehumanizing people trying to immigrate to the U.S. from Mexico. With language that minimizes the social context and pumps up the fear factor (“we don’t have the capacity to assimilate the newcomers”… “adds a large burden”… “excessive legal quotas”… “lawlessness”… “threatens the American way of life”…), it encourages us to forget about why someone might be immigrating, or what happens to them once they get here, and instead focus entirely on what an inconvenience it might be to our daily lives. “I don’t want to sit in traffic any more than I need too, not with gas prices the way they are! Darn Mexicans!”

But more disturbing and a bit more surprising to me is the attempt to tie something like traffic congestion to a single factor like the number of people entering the country illegally over the Mexico border, and to brazenly suggest that we can hold off traffic congestion just by addressing that issue. They even go on to suggest that economic prosperity in many southern cities is threatened by traffic congestion because it makes it harder to attract new business. Oh, and it’s an significant environmental issue too…the immigrants are basically choking the spotted owl with their own bare hands.

This is too much. I understand that for many political players, they know they can’t win an argument about an issue unless they force us to look at it at such a macro level that removes all notion of humanity and relationship from the picture. But to plant the insidious seed that uses the difficulties that come with higher oil and gas prices and the ridiculousness that is the U.S. transportation system and car culture against the people who wish to cross our borders is a kind of twisted tactic at a whole new level.

Of course, since so many people in this country do externalize the responsibility to make our daily commutes faster, cheaper, easier, this tactic just might work. We want the government and other entities to “do something” about gas prices, about traffic congestion, about economic vitality of our cities. If the magnifying glass focuses in on a single factor that can be addressed with such apparent ease and moral clarity (“just shut down the border…it’s our country!”), we might just latch on to that and run with it.

But we’d be forgetting that even with high gas prices, we continue to produce more and more vehicles to the point where we almost have 1 car for every 1 person in the United States, the most in the world. We’d be forgetting that we continue to shun the construction or revitalization of mass transit options so that we can instead preserve the individual freedoms and seeming divine right to drive any where at any time. We’d be forgetting that we don’t zone or plan our cities and communities to be walkable, bike-friendly, or even generally easy to get around in a car, further necessitating longer trips in the car just to get to basic services. We’d be forgetting that we’ve ignored or downplayed the implications of increasing carbon emissions and energy consumption long before the immigration issue was such a focus point in U.S. politics.

I think we should talk about the increasing population in the U.S. and the troubles it creates when unchecked. I think we should talk about traffic congestion and transportation issues here. And I think we should talk about U.S. immigration policy. But these are complex issues with many influences at work, and it’s disingenuous at best to shift the singular blame for any of them onto people who are immigrating to this country; they likely have the least amount of responsibility and power to solve the problems that we created for ourselves long before they thought about coming here.

This is made even worse when stereotypes are perpetuated about the group, and negative but finely detailed false images of them are painted by those who would pursue particularly harmful or discriminatory practices against the group. Come on, you’ve heard them: “all illegals are…” and “the gays just want to…” and “the homeless won’t even…” and “liberals don’t know how to…”, repeated over and over again. This is how we learn to disrespect entire populations, ethnicities, and world-views without really knowing anything about them. This is how we learn to hate.

How does it change the conversation, then, when we say “illegal immigrants”?

Or when we say “people who are immigrating illegally”?

Or “men and women and children who are crossing the U.S. border illegally”?

Or “men and women and children who are crossing the U.S. border in hopes of finding something better for themselves and their families, in spite of attempts by others to keep them out”?

The more clear we are about the real human beings we’re discussing, and the motivations involved in their actions, the better discussion we can have about the issues at hand. And difficult though it may be, the more likely we are to be affected by the real people involved, instead of distanced from them through the use of an all-encompassing label. Yes, it’s harder and takes more thought and doesn’t sound as snappy in an article, but words matter, and I think we owe it to our fellow humans to be more precise.

I also think it’s a basic responsibility of the men and women who create the news media we consume to expose this disingenuous and harmful use of language; they certainly shouldn’t be perpetuating it themselves.