Sailorman, the problem with the use of the term “undocumented [whatever]” is that it would exclude illegal immigrants with matricula consulars, with fake documentation, or with documentation (birth certificates, expired visas, student visas by non-students, etc.) that properly describe the holder but does not give them legal status to be in the United States.

but that’s igniring common usage. although one can theoretically append all sorts of adjectives to immigrants (from “beautiful immigrant” to “lonely immigrant” and so on) that is unusual–”beuatiful” and “onely” have no particular connectino to “immigrant”. “Legal immigrant” and “Illegal immigrant” make sense and have IMO essentially become two separate two-word nouns.

I don’t see the word wars stopping any time soon. And seeing as the pro-illegal-immigration crowd has been pushing its own lingo (”undocumented” and so on, to replace “Illegal alien”) it’s not clear taht the conservatives are really to blame. After all, the best way to get someone focusing on the word “illegal” is to claim that there’s nothing illegal at all, no sirree, nothing to see here.

Perhaps we can all agree on “undocumented alien”? that gets rid of “illegal” (to make some folks happy) and adds back “alien” (to make other folks happy).

We’re in the dining hall at camp. It’s dinner, and there’s an Order of the Arrow ceremony that night. OA members wear a white sash with a red arrow on it. Mr. Mischief is fooling around with some salad dressing, that gloppy orange “French” stuff. A small gob of it ends up on an OA member’s sash. He gets quite upset, and complains vociferously. Mr. Mischief says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that.” And I’m sure he didn’t. However, Mr. OA is still sitting there with an orange gob on his sash.

I ask Mr. OA to hand me his sash. I get up and tell Mr. Mischief to accompany me - we’re going to fix Mr. OA’s sash. Mr. Mischief says, “But I didn’t mean to do it - why are you punishing me? I apologized?”

Mr. Mischief accompanies me to the washhouse, where the staff’s washing machine and dryer are. Under my direction, Mr. Mischief wipes off the gob, rubs some detergent and water on the spot, cleans it off, rinses it, and throws it in the dryer. Meanwhile, I explain that simply tossing off “I’m sorry” isn’t an apology. If you’re really sorry, you not only say “I’m sorry”, you do whatever you can to fix the situation, regardless of what inconvenience it may be to you (such as interrupting your dinner). You also take responsibility for your actions, and that responsibility attaches no matter what your intent was; if you are waving a spoon with salad dressing around, you are reponsible if it ends up on someone’s clothes even if you didn’t intend for that to happen. It’s not punishment! It’s doing your duty.

Mr. Mischief likely didn’t completely absorb that lesson, but at least he understood what I meant. But that’s what “apology” means to me. Saying “I’m sorry” is part of it, but not the whole deal; you have to take responsibility for what you did, and that includes dealing with the consequences as well. But our politicians and other public figures want to get the credit for an apology while denying any responsibility, like they were a 12 year old kid.

Although that may be unfairly smearing the average 12 year old ….

I’ve lost track of what apologies mean anymore.

President Clinton “apologizes” for slavery. Southern newspaper editors “apologize” for their predecessor’s fomenting race riots. An apology used to mean, “I am personally responsible for a wrong, and am very sorry that I did it.”

When every wrong demands an apology (irrespective of the actual wrongdoers are still alive) the very term “Apology” has been stripped of the implication of admitted wrongdoing. Why should it surprising that after the meaning of a word has changed, people will start using it with the new meaning.

I wasn’t meaning to suggest that you can ACTUALLY determine class based on names; I do think that most people use names as a proxy for both class and ethnicity until they get more information.

I think, though, that you think about class differently than I. You say, “the experiment…does control for social class because they hold the level of education constant.” I think of class as family culture and connections and to some extent wealth–not education, and certainly not income. I would think grandparents’ education level would be a much better proxy for class than education level.

I would not be at all surprised if they did not do the same for high schools, and instead submitted whatever high school was correct for the putative address of the applicant.

You can’t determine social class purely based on names. I hope you are not suggesting such, but the experiment you are referencing does control for social class because they hold the level of education constant in the sample resumes they sent. I would image that they also did the same for the high schools they are list of the resumes (as neighborhoods are also used by employers as a marker for class).

I’m responding to the question you asked RonF–what would a study have to show to convince you that a study shows a racial preference? I’ll second Robert’s answer–it needs to look at outcome variables that make sense. “Young men pay twice as much for auto insurance as young women” doesn’t show a preference; “the claims ratio (claims/premiums) for young men is much lower than for young women” probably would.

Second, I would like (a pet peeve of mine) some control for class and class markers; Antwan Jones should probably be compared to Dwayne McAlexander, not Franklin Cubbage.

Goodness, Robert, would you be a Pournelle fan?

You are, of course, welcome to your opinion, but it makes little sense to me. “Dehumanizes”? Not that I can see. It simply describes, and makes the important differentiation between people who are in the United States legally and those who are not. It’s gentler than the actual legal term, “illegal alien”, which even I’ll grant is sounds somewhat dehumanizing to someone not familiar with it, although “illegal immigrant” makes a presumption that “illegal alien” does not.

I mean, who would ever want to associate with an illegal, much less help or understand it?

Observation shows that lots of people would. Their employers, for those that are employed, who are legion. Then there’s all the people providing them social services, banks that knowingly lend them money for cars and houses, the government entities they deal with that either ignore their legal status or even deliberately refuse to do anything about it, the various governmental and business entities that accept the matricula consular instead of asking for a passport or green card, etc., etc.

I could, but it would be waaaay easier to wait for Rachel to post her thoughts and then attack them savagely, unhindered by previous commitments.

(Oops, I was supposed to just think that, not write it.)

Offhand, it isn’t a question of what a study has to control for, it’s what a study has to show. “Whatever difference is left after we control for everything we can think of must be discrimination” isn’t a valid approach, I don’t think, when there are so many things out there which we don’t know to control for.

It’s seemingly fairly easy to show discrimination on an individual basis. Submit a resume to the HR department with the name “Jamal Malawi” on it, and then submit the same resume with only neutral wording changes and the name “Franklin Morgan Pierpont”, and see if you get a differential response.

On the other hand, even that kind of simple test can hit some icebergs. I recall there have been lending studies that seem to show discrimination against black borrowers - ie, same broad characteristics on the loan application, but higher approval rates for whites. Such discrimination would strongly imply that a black loan candidate needs better qualifications than a white candidate to get the same loan response. But when you check that by looking at default rates, we find exactly the same default rates among white and black borrowers, which in turn strongly implies that the borrowers who were approved were of identical creditworthiness, which presumably means that the decisionmakers on the loans were accurately assessing some borrower characteristic(s) not reflected in the hard data that the study has access to.

On the gripping hand, banks and other institutions do have histories of intentional and overt discrimination, i.e. redlining and other practices, so we can’t really rule out intentional discrimination in these cases.

It’s tricky, in other words, to anticipate what will or won’t prove discrimination. I can promise to show good faith in assessing whatever Rachel, or others, come up with, though. I spent a good bit of my childhood in Mississippi; I’m not laboring under a pure-libertarian delusion that racial discrimination is a thing of the past.

This simple word tells me volumes about the speakers position regarding immigration.

It completely dehumanizes the immigrants and reduces them to a single, non-refutable bad entity.

I mean, who would ever want to associate with an illegal, much less help or understand it?

Trying to get law enforcement agencies to do what the INS is assigned to do, when most of them have enough on their plates and the vast majority of people who commit crimes are U.S. citizens. This keeps undocumented immigrants from reporting crimes to police, which may make an entire community including citizens and documented immigrants unsafe as well.

With California becoming increasingly Latino, you see more concern about building a wall along the border, passing legislation like 187, 209 and 227. And you’ll see more of the same.

If that was deliberate and was the only way in which opposition to illegal immigration was expressed I’d agree with you. But there are many ways in which opposition to illegal immigration is expressed that has nothing to do with sanctioning (accidentally or otherwise) American citizens.

I didn’t say that they were discriminatory and should be dismantled. I only said they are discriminatory. The former does not imply the latter. Discrimination can be evil or it can be good, or it can be neutral (as in a matter of taste); it depends on what is being discriminated against, and why. The proponents of affirmative action hang their logic on the latter point; that it is reasonable to discriminate in favor of minorities in certain circumstances so as to ameliorate the effects of past discrimination in favor of whites and against blacks.

Well, Decnavda, if you’re going to accuse the majority of people who are anti-illegal immigration of being motivated by racism, it seems that you should have to offer some kind of evidence if you want to be taken seriously.

If round-ups of “illegals” that pick up legal immigrants and actual citizens based on ethnicity doesn’t convince you, then you are unpersuadable, which makes this comment grade A bad faith trolling.