As a writer, I can attest that words matter. The choice of this word versus that word carries with it different meanings and connotations.

As a reader, you surely feel the same.

For today, let’s focus on the complex issue of immigration and how vocabulary is key to the debate. The words we use in this context reveal our opening prejudices and preconceptions. Moreover, those words contribute to the divisiveness of the issue and the harder-than-need-be difficulty of finding compromise or resolution.

To start, there is the important distinction between “immigrant” and “refugee”. It has been widely reported that President Biden backed away from his opening pledge on increased refugee admissions due to political fear of the public conflation of refugees with would-be immigrants massed on our southern border. This was prior to his reversal of his reversal under pressure from advocates to his left.

For dictionary purposes, an immigrant is someone who has moved or resettled to another country. A refugee is someone who seeks shelter in another country in the process of fleeing violence, oppression or persecution.

Refugees are clearly immigrants; but not all immigrants are refugees.

More than any other country, America is truly a nation of immigrants. Save for Native Americans, each and every one of us traces our ancestry back to some other place. For some, those foreign origins go back multiple centuries. For others, their arrival was far more recent.

My own marriage is a living, breathing example of these paths. My wife traces her American heritage back to not that many ships after the Mayflower. While I am the first-born child of two German-Jewish Holocaust refugees who made their way to our shores along with their parents (my grandparents), while leaving other, more distant relatives behind and to their fate.

I would not be human to be unbiased by my own story. But any fair reading of history confirms much of that outlook. Contrary to a good deal of currently popular sentiment, our national welfare and prosperity have benefited vastly from immigration. Further, we have far more often been too skimpy and ungenerous in our admission of refugees than we have been too open and overly taxed our carrying capacity.

The era of my parents’ arrival at the end of the 1930s is but one period of such misguided stinginess. History will record as another stain these most recent years during which refugee admissions were barely above zero.

But loose and confused vocabulary is not just the province of those who would build walls and stem the flow of newcomers.

Among immigration proponents, signs and bumper stickers have become popular, asserting that, “No one is illegal.”

Legality never fully defines a person. But the intent of this slogan is to remove the distinction between legal and illegal immigration. Good luck with that bit of denial. Many here in violation of our laws and process do hard, back-breaking work and enhance our national welfare. Young immigrants, often called “Dreamers”, who came here at an early age through no choice of their own, deserve special consideration.

But that does not alter the fact that those here illegally broke the law and jumped the line ahead of others who chose to play by the rules. As comedian Dennis Miller quipped years ago, “Is it too much to ask that you sign the guest book on your way in?”

The notion of “open borders” is an oxymoronic misnomer as well. No country can remain truly sovereign without borders that it protects and others respect.

Immigration policies at those borders can be looser or tighter. That is up for debate. I will most often come down on the former side within reason. But the wish of some, spoken or unspoken, for truly open borders, aka no borders at all, is folly every bit as extreme as any Trumpite’s wish to seal off our country.

All of which brings us to the final linguistical disconnect, one that has developed over the last few decades.

In years gone by, it used to be that Americans of almost all stripes could rally around the concept of “assimilation” and the cherished idea of our nation as a vast “melting pot.” However, in some circles of self-proclaimed enlightenment, those very notions are now banished. 

The “melting pot” has yielded to the “salad bowl” (or perhaps the fajita plate or bouillabaisse or menu item du jour) and the entire value of “assimilation” is castigated by too many as somehow contrary to hallowed “diversity” and emblematic of excessive regard for American culture.

For prior generation after generation of immigrants, the deeply-held goal was to become an American. In the case of my mother, age 11 when she arrived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in early 1939, nothing was more important than learning English and quickly adopting American customs.

For millions of Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Somali-Americans and others from virtually everywhere on the globe, native identities remain treasured – but not to the exclusion of becoming an interwoven part of their new homeland.

If there is a tradeoff to be made, how about a more open, welcoming immigration policy in exchange for a renewed acceptance of the goal of assimilation? It is the other side of the coin for those desperately wanting to call America home.

Immigration is the very heart and soul of our national story. Looking to the coming years, it will be also an economic imperative given demographic trends and the baby bust across much of the country.

Clarity of language will go a long way to rendering clearer thinking and policy prescriptions. If we expect those new to our shores to learn our language, and we do, then it is equally incumbent on us who arrived often long before to be more careful in how our words are deployed.

Eric Sondermann is a Colorado-based independent political commentator. He writes regularly for ColoradoPolitics and the Denver Gazette. Reach him at EWS@EricSondermann.com; follow him at @EricSondermann