Calling an illegal immigrant an "undocumented immigrant" is like calling someone who is breaking and entering into your home an "undocumented tenant".

This is coming from a person who believes illegal immigrants are not worth our time or money to prevent and, if we werent a welfare state, I'd be pushing for open borders.

@freemo should we call people "illegals" when they drive 30 in a 20? No, we call them a speeder. We describe the crime they committed. That's the same thing with "undocumented immigrant"; it describes what they did.

Relatedly, why is "illegal" never used to refer to someone from Britain or Canada who overstayed their visa, it seems to only be used to refer to brown skinned people (citizen, documented, or undocumented)

@trianglman "illegal immigration" and "illegal immigrant" refers to the the action of immigration being illegal.

So yes we DO. When someone drives 30 in a 20 zone we say they are "illegally driving", or "illegal driving" or if we want to be specific "illegal speeding".

So yes we do it all the time, when someone does something illegally we call that act illegal, nothing new there.

@freemo Immigration is not illegal. This sort of blurring is why this semantic argument matters. The usage of "illegal immigrant" (or worse, just "illegals") is a dog whistle to say brown people aren't welcome here.

Pretty much outside of this analogy, "illegal driver" is not used. Especially not in comparison with "speeder" https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=illegal+driver%2Cspeeder&year_start=1950&year_end=2018&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cillegal%20driver%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cspeeder%3B%2Cc0 (if they were interchangeable, even if one was not as popular, you'd expect a closer split; this split is as close to no correlation as you can get)

Bend over backward and lie to yourself to justify this bigotry all you want, but don't try to pretend to the rest of the world that it's the logical or just action.

@trianglman Also the difference between "speeder" and "driver" really depends on contect. If for example a police officer was giving an announcement about how they were going to crack down on all sorts of illegal driving from DUI to speeding they might say "We want to get illegal drivers off the road". No one would bat an eye at this.

The only reason it sounds unusual is we dont usually have a context come up where it applies, namely a group of people doing illegal things under a particular category en mass. When we do this sort of language is perfectly natural.