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Nekromanda — Stamp: Drop the I
Published: 2012-06-22 10:56:11 +0000 UTC; Views: 3483; Favourites: 57; Downloads: 5
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Description
Drop the I WordWhy shouldn't I call undocumented immigrants "illegals"?
It's dehumanizing. the i-word is shorthand for other harmful racially charged terms that dehumanize people. The i-word promotes violence and discrimination. It sends the message that immigrants are sub-human and undeserving.It's racially charged. Use of the i-word affects attitudes toward immigrants and non-immigrants alike, most often toward people of African, Asian, and Latin American descent. The discriminatory message is not explicit, but hidden, or racially coded.It's inaccurate legally and confuses the debate. Immigration judges and attorneys don't use the i-word. Journalists who treat all transgressions as "alleged," - a tenet of ethical and professional journalism, don't use it either. The i-word finds many people guilty before they are tried and ignores the fact that our laws are unjustly applied. Immigrants without documents are regularly hired as cheap, exploited labor with a limited ability to protect their own rights. No one else who benefits from the set up, including the employers who recruit and hire these migrants, is labeled this way.The i-word is used to unfairly label and scapegoat people who are out of status due to a variety of systematic circumstances. For example, many people:
are brought to the country against their will are brought to the country by employers who often exploit them for cheap laborFall out of status and overstay their VISAS because of school or employmentrisk being killed in their country of origin due to political beliefs, religious beliefs, or sexual orientationare affected by natural disasters and/or other reasons beyond their controlare forced by economics and harmful policies like NAFTA to leave their country to simply provide for their familiesare on a backlog waiting years to get processed, even when they are eligible to get papers through a relative. Take a look at Reason.org's illustration of America's broken immigration and naturalization system .Watch: Drop the I-Word. No Human Being is Illegal.
Let me get these comments out of the way so you don't have to leave them for me:
"You're just a stupid liberal""Liberals are liars""Liberals are lyres" 
"Propaganda! Propaganda!""What part of ILLEGAL don't you lefty idiots understand?!""The indians didn't own the land legally, I'm not an illegal immigrant, shut the hell up!""This is just more of that "politically correct" bullshit""ILLEGAILLEGALILLEGAL""DEY TAKIN DER JERBS!" etc.Sorry for the uber long description. I know I've complained about it a few times before myself. Forgive me!
BG: from the Drop the I-Word campaign website
Temp: [link]
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Comments: 63
I thought the I word was "idiot" before I read the description. I think there are other ways to say that someone hasn't gone through the process yet.
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Well this is it,
im finally gonna quit my job today after 672 weeks
of putting up with my ass of a boss it has to be done.
i rlly dont know why ive kept working there when ive
been making $500 bucks every day working at home.
im so happy i found this website: .com
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"It's inaccurate legally and confuses the debate."
Guess what? These "undocumented immigrants" you refer to are also legally called "illegal aliens".
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HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAH yep lets accept all thoose migrants without documentations, you know, people who could be fleeing persecution in syria for terrorism.
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Illegal.
As in illegal immigrant.
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illegal vermin do not deserve amnesty or taxpayer-funded benefits. Period.
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You, lady are a suicidal humanist!! Look at the Countries of Asia and Eastern Europe. They treat illegal immigrants as should be: as trespassers!!! Talk about being racially clueless idiot!!!
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No, it is not 'scapegoating' anyone. 'Illegal immigrant' refers to anyone who came into this country illegally of their own free will. Digging under the border fence for instance. And don't give me that 'escaping persecution' nonsense. There is a legal way for people being persecuted to get asylum here, but they have to apply for it, legally. Digging under the fence and then saying they were escaping persecution after being caught by border patrol isn't gonna cut it. If there really is a treat to them in their own country, they still have to apply for entry and asylum, otherwise, they're just more illegals to be deported.
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Illegal Immigrants are Illegal Immigrants it isn't racist to call them so.
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THANK YOU. I was so blown by this, and this one girl who made a poem about her being bullied because she was Mexican (could speak Spanish fluently), and was also bullied by bullshit cops.
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So, if a group of people cross over a fence knowing it's wrong, they are not illegal?
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Technically the act is illegal, not the person. Though the situation may be slightly different for each person, so in the end it's just not the legally accurate term to use.
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Illegal Immigrant. Is that more acceptable?
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This is a very reasoned and well-thought-out argument you've made. And you're correct, of course; 'illegals' is a catch-all phrase designed to easily pigeon-hole and tag people. It's a very human thing to do, trying to label people, to figure out 'where they belong.' Look at all of the words we use for that. 'Nerd.' 'Jock.' 'Liberal.' 'Conservative.' 'Black.' 'White.' But there are so many exceptions, so many in-betweens, so many gray areas that DON'T easily fit into these labels, these terms, these neat little this-or-that scenarios. We forget too often that you can be this and this and this and this, and that being more than one thing is not paradoxical, and we are not defined by single words. It's not about being politically correct. It's about avoiding being incorrect, avoiding an easy, default mindset that eliminates options and attempts to quantify everything and everyBODY.
I'm a gamer. Roleplayer. I liken it a bit to D&D alignments, which I've always found to be silly. Morality just isn't that cut and dry. Neither are people. Whenever you try to quantify reality into nice neat numbers and terms, you lose something. Hue. Perspective. The bigger picture. When you do this to people, the results are often tragic, because it makes it very easy to ignore that what you're dealing with is a person and not a number.
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I hated 'alignment' in D&D because I am chaotic chaotic, not true evil or neutral good, just chaotic and a pain in the ass. There is no dice roll for that
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When a politician refers to the illegal immigrants as wetbacks, yeah.
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Hate to say it, but I really couldn't care less. An illegal is an illegal no matter how you cut it. Trying to make it racial is really distracting from the issue at hand and is the real factor that "confuses the debate." You and 8manderz8 have the entire thing completely, 100% backwards.
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Hahahaha!
No.
You're just ducking and dodging.
When a politician refers to illegal immigrants as wetbacks they confuse the debate.
When people like you look the other way, you ruin the debate with your lack of civility and intelligence.
I'm all for restructuring immigration and handling illegals (especially violent/criminal ones) but I'm not a Republican politician referring to tan people as wetbacks.
Try agin
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So because someone said the word "wetback" suddenly we should feel sorry for illegals? It should be 100% irrelevant what this politician said- it doesn't change any facts about illegals and the harm they do to the country. Get over it and move on.
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No where did I say at all in any way shape or form that 'feeling sorry' is even in the topic. Stop injecting your emotional issues into the subject.
The politician's comments are 100% relevant because that person represents voters and government.
You know what does more harm to the country? Obesity. Cancer. Unemployment.
They all cost more then illegals individually.
When dealing with the topic of illegals, you need to deal with the topic of illegals without using slurs, stereotypes, unsupported assertions, and ideological nonsense. Just like any other topic. Remember, we're supposed to be adults. Finding solutions shouldn't be watered down to sides of a coin.
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"When dealing with the topic of illegals, you need to deal with the topic of illegals without using slurs, stereotypes, unsupported assertions, and ideological nonsense"
You mean like claiming that being against illegal immigration (or using the word illegal) is racist? Hm... where have I see this before? Give me a minute, I'll think of it.
Bottom line, illegals are the only people that can enter a country and be criminals 100% of the time. That's why they're illegal. That's what the word implies- breaking a law. Illegals breed crime, intolerance, they ruin employment for Americans, inflate the voting demographics, hurt legal immigrants (fun fact- the left hates legal immigrants since they don't vote their way), amongst other problems, all in one fell swoop. And in return, we give them free healthcare and education. I would give them all a free train ride... back to where they came from. THERE's my solution. You want to disagree with THAT, go ahead. However, don't try to pull the race card here. Consider me immune.
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Couldn't have said it better myself. : D
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I'm glad. All these pro-illegal activists have are appeals to emotion. I can do that, too. How about the millions of legal immigrants who are just trying to get to this country the right way, but they are denied access because immigration has to compensate for what can only be described as the cheaters of the system? What about the families that have been torn apart by the sex and drug trades that have only been made worse because of our "open borders" policy? The only families and people that these pseudo-activists want to talk about are the anchor-babies of illegal mothers. Speaking of them, the only reason we have the dilemma of children being separated from parents is because the immigration policies are not completely enforced, anyways.
There's no justification for this.
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"DEY DAKE JAWBS!"
You do realize that (being that I live in SoCal where this issue is EXTREMELY big) most of this so called "jobs being stolen" are actually the jobs that most mid-upper class white-twats DON'T want? Like carpentry, auto-repair, landscaping, farm work, or any other kind "grunt" work that usually yields less-than minimum wage pay and is extremely physically demanding. These people get exploited for cheap labor, not be working some high-stakes jobs like being a lawyer or nurse, let alone aren't allowed to be creative and work in the arts.
And I'm going to school to be an ANIMATOR. Which means my job has already been "stolen" to outsourcing because for some odd reason, an American artist isn't good like a Japanese artist. Aesthetics are why I'm getting the shaft... But do you see me bawling my eyes out about it? After all, most of those right-wingers don't really give two-shits about art and music anyway... Considering they believe all forms of media are the evils... :V
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Oh definitely, I was considering making a stamp along the lines of that very point sometime - my cousin's job is being outsourced to India or something, and while he's upset about that, others people are telling him he should be worried about dem illegal ale-yee-yuns that are dakin all der jerbs.
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Just you wait, in the next 5 years, accounting is going to be outsourced in larger numbers too.
It's going to be a mess.
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Yup... I really can't explain anymore because there's too much to agree with.
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Absolutely. I agree completely. It is completely dehumanizing. What's even worse is when people call undocumented immigrants "illegal aliens." Aliens? Really??? Again, that's even more dehumanizing. I don't get why people can't call them "undocumented immigrants" like civilized human beings.
"Use of the i-word affects attitudes toward immigrants and non-immigrants alike, most often toward people of African, Asian, and Latin American descent"
Asian descent? In this country, Asians are like honorary white people in all but the media. Except in the media, where the token Asian is either a tourist, a prostitute, or a straight-A student with a tiger mom breathing down her neck.
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I do agree it's a bit odd that they included 'Asian' in the info. I could see that being true for Asian immigrants here in Australia - recently, in Sydney I believe, a group of little shits beat up a Chinese man simply because he's Chinese. However in the US, it's a bit different, I agree.
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Shit! Are you serious? I thought Australia was less prejudiced than America. Especially Sydney! Guess I was wrong.
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I thought so at first as well. My husband grew up a bit further into NSW (Dubbo, lots of farming, etc), and had to deal with a lot of discrimination because his mother's Filipino, and while he took more after his father's Caucasian looks, he still had to deal with it. There's plenty of bogans (hicks, rednecks, white trash) here who are extremely prejudiced and racist. Even the government tried to "breed out" the physical characteristics of the aboriginals (The Stolen Generations) from 1869 to the 1970s. It just goes to show that people have the capability to hate others based on their race/religion/anything, not just people from certain countries. :/
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Wow! I'm biracial Asian-white like your husband! That's so awesome!
I heard about the attempt to "breed out" the physical characteristics in my HS World History class.
"It just goes to show that people have the capability to hate others based on their race/religion/anything, not just people from certain countries. :/"
I knew that, but different areas of the world are more tolerant than others. For example, Sweden is more tolerant of those who are different than, say, Afghanistan.
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Hehe awesome! 
That's true that some areas are a bit more tolerant. I'd say that America's a bit less tolerant than Australia, at least from my own personal experience. Of course ya have your jerks on either side, but yeah, Australia's a bit better in that regard than the US.
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My HS World History teacher was really into different cultures, so he lectured us about stuff like that all the time, along with the DO NOT NEGOTIATE WITH TERRORIST stuff.
Yeah, there are definitely jerks in either hemisphere.
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"Liberals are lyers" -- for some reason, that just made my entire evening...
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I like how some right wing think that the Native Americans 'didn't legally' own the land they lived on for centuries.
I use so people can play ad libs with my sentences.
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