Lately we have been hearing a lot about immigration reform and we wanted to make a comic strip that reflected our feelings about the issue.
Although, the word alien literally means, a resident born in or belonging to another country who has not acquired citizenship by naturalization, which is what illegal immigrants are, I think over time it has garnered a different definition. Nowadays, when people think about aliens they think about a creature from outer space. Therefore, not human.
I am highly uncomfortable with a word such as Alien being used on a group of people. Right now it is mostly aimed at Hispanics and I feel it is dehumanizing them.
Darrin and Kristopher did a magnificent job bringing this concept to life and bringing a comical spin to it. I hope you guys like it and feel free to comment.
But what other term would you use? "Legal resident non-citizen"? That's way too long and too technical. "Green-carder"? That's even more offensive.
ReplyDeleteI would say the issue is not that someone might mistakenly mistake the word as referring to a creature from outer space, but that people implicitly add "illegal" in front of it, even though most resident aliens are here completely legally. Even many who are not here legally per se are documented and often in a state of legal limbo as they wait for their status to be clarified or paperwork to be processed. I posted a really interesting article about this on facebook a while ago.... I'll try to find it again.
I don't think we, the creators of this blog, thought people would actually get confused when newscasters used the term alien. However, we were just trying to point out the fact that the word alien is being used to describe human beings. We took this approach (the approach being that of someone being confused by the term) to show how moronic it is to name a group of people, alien.
ReplyDeleteI see your point about how finding a different term to describe this group of people would be difficult, but we are an intelligent society that can think of something.
To put this in our perspective for our audience, when someone is named Theodore and you call them Teddy to which they reply I prefer it if you call me Theodore, would you continue calling them Teddy? If someone does not want to be called something because they feel a sort of offense to that, who are we to continue calling them that?