In the end, whether we use the word illegal or unauthorized, alien or migrant, or whether we call it a banana, the only thing that matters is whether, and when, we enact meaningful, and comprehensive, immigration reform.
Most of the people with whom he came in contact did not see him as a trafficking victim in need of help, but rather as an illegal alien, a migrant worker, or an arrestee.
You can't dismiss shipwrecked aliens as economic migrants, suggest that their homeland needs their services or demand that they should be repatriated.
And below them, not much mentioned, is the bottom drawer, filled with dark-skinned migrants with alien beliefs (Syrians, Turks).
As a spate of strikes for higher pay in southern China shows, employers are also jacking up wages in their coastal factories to lure migrant workers increasingly reluctant to toil far from home in alien and alienating factory towns.
Whether native or foreign-born, migrants are fundamentally alien to the community in which they work.
Furthermore, the question-answer style of semi-structured interviews, or indeed the open-endedness of unstructured interviews, tends to be culturally alien to many first generation South Asian migrants.
Four years ago the state legislature passed HB56, at the time considered the most punitive anti-immigration law in the country, intended to "attack every aspect of an illegal alien's life" and encourage the state's migrants to leave.
It cuts a few welcome hours off a very long flight, and many local inhabitants are British migrants, which makes the city feel less alien.
