WORDS MATTER: ILLEGAL MEANS “NOT LEGAL”. INVASION ..MEANS “TO ENTER”

The word monitors are at it again.  If they can not win elections by the ballot box they will try some other means of controlling the minds and actions of the electorate.  Let’s not fall for it.  Our Founders were well aware of attempts  to abridge speech and control the thoughts and actions of citizens—because they suffered under such acts by British overlords.  The Founders being aware of these abuses gave us our First Amendment and our right of free speech.  Let’s not forget that!  The word-police are “abridging freedom of speech” by making attempts  to control which words we use.  That is expressly prohibited in our Constitution.  You want to use accurate terms such as“invasion” and “illegal”?   Use them!

When a person climbs over a fence clearly designed to keep them out and cross an international boundary without permission of the government of that nation, these individuals have broken the law.   Their behavior was an illegal and the act is  accurately described as “illegal”.  If they  remain in the nation they entered illegally, they are  are accurately described as “illegal immigrants”.  Those who favor open borders would like us all to cease using this term.  They prefer to hide the facts and use the term “undocumented” immigrants.

That term  does not accurately describe the status of someone who has crossed into the territory of the USA without going through the legal process which was established by the nation’s lawgivers.  (There may be individuals who might be accurately described as “undocumented immigrant”. Perhaps someone who has entered the country legally but has lost or misplaced the documents which are required, may be so described.). So let us not be cowed by the word police, illegal immigrant is an accurate descriptive term. 

The President has been recently pilloried unfairly for using the term “invaded” or “invasion” when describing the flood of immigrants along our southern border.   That word is derived from a Latin term meaning to “to enter”, “to take possession of”, or “to attack”.  It also has a military more recent meaning: “to invade militarily”, but that is not is root meaning at all.  The term “invasion” is also a perfectly accurate term to describe the movement of substances, things or people from one place into another place and particularly in the case where the substances, things or people are not normally found there, are not wanted, or where they do no belong.   

In biology plant or animal species may move into or  “invade” environments in which they did not inhabit before.  The movement of these new species is accurately termed “an invasion”.  Bacteria may enter a wound and “invade” surrounding tissues.  The bacterium involved could accurately be described as an invader and the event itself as a “bacterial invasion”.   Shall I go on?   Invasions do not mean “military invasion”—which the word-police seems to want to stick on the President’s usage and then claim he misspoke.  

Invader is a perfectly good word used to describe people who congregate in large numbers on one side of a boundary and then surge across the border en mass. That act is properly and legitimately described as an “invasion”.  It has nothing to do with a military invasion.  

So beware of the politicizing word police.  These actions  of attempting to control speech are precursors to attempts to control ideas first—-and then people and governments.  They are the actions and behaviors we expect and observe coming from the Communist Chinese in Beijing as they scheme  to control the pro-democracy uprising in Hong Kong a manifestation of the universal urge for freedom of expression.     We have it.  Don’t let them take it away.