Top 10 Media Euphemisms for Violent Bipartisan Anti-Immigrant Policies

Now that far-right “border” policy is bipartisan consensus, conveying the human stakes of “tougher” enforcement is unacceptable. So euphemism reigns.

As I noted yesterday in The Real News, the human stakes of the explicitly rightwing “border deal” Democrats have offered up Republicans is entirely missing from mainstream US media coverage of the discussion. While the deal is now broadly seen as stalled, it’s alive and well as a rhetorical bludgeon against Republicans and could, thus, be reborn at any minute. The 370-page border bill Democrats are pushing reads like a GOP wish list because this, by their admission, is largely what it is. Among its provisions: $8 billion in emergency funding for ICE (more than doubling its budget); $7 billion in “emergency funding” for Customs and Border Protection—including $3 billion to increase detentions; a mechanism for the President to “shut down the border”; and a continuation of Trump’s border wall.

Thus far, what the public has been fed is mostly coverage conveying how clever the Democrats are for exposing Republican hypocrisy on the issue, or reporting simply taking for granted that it’s an electoral winner in 2024. A February 11 poll showed the tactic backfiring or having little impact on public opinion. Yet, despite this evidence, press outlets are universally holding up a special election victory Tuesday by Tom Suozzi, in New York’s 3rd Congressional District, as an example of how this new clever tactic on the part of Democrats, playing the Racist Reverse Uno Card on the GOP, could pay dividends in November. (Suozzi did echo the new nativist talking points.)

Per usual, virtually no outlets covering the special election or the broader, weeks-long discourse surrounding the “border security” bill included any comment from migrants or migrants’ rights groups, despite the fact that they are, ostensibly, the subject of the bill being discussed. Instead, migrants and their families are presented simply as faceless pawns to be moved around and sacrificed on a chessboard for short-term political gain. Since there is now bipartisan consensus that migrants’ increased suffering is the most appropriate means to “solve” the so-called “border crisis,” their humanization is of little importance to American press outlets who take their cues from partisan messaging organs. 

The stakes are very real, if entirely obscured by US media. According to the UN’s International Organization for Migration, the US-Mexico border is the world’s deadliest land route. The IOM documented 686 deaths and disappearances of migrants on the US-Mexico border in 2022—almost certainly an undercount. Doubling, and in some cases, tripling the “enforcement” budget and capacity of ICE and Border Patrol will invariably lead to even more deaths. Since the implementation of Operation Gatekeeper in 1994, the animating logic of the US’s border policy is that by making border crossings increasingly dangerous, violent, and brutal, this will “deter” crossings. As such, this widespread acceptance of even harsher border policy by Democrats will have very real human costs.  

And, as I note in my Real News piece, the worst place to be on Earth is on the business end of a bipartisan Washington consensus. So when the actual policy being discussed is mentioned, gone are the days of “kids in cages,” “separating families,” or any mention of the actual human stakes Democratic partisans once referenced when countering the  anti-immigrant rhetoric of Trump. Democrats are now, by their own telling, to the right of Republicans, so, in coverage of the issue, not only are the migrant voices of those impacted by the right-wing pivot silenced, but the actual details of this so-called “border deal” remain as anodyne and vague as possible. After all, this is a clever triangulation wedge issue, not a real-world policy that will negatively impact real humans, and actually describing the human stakes would muddy up this fun horse race framing.

Here are the media’s top 10 preferred euphemisms for policies that will increase, by design, human suffering:

1. “Immigration restrictions”

2. “Toughen border laws” 

3. “Stricter”

4. “Crackdown”   

5. “Leaning into migration woes” 

6. “Improvements to U.S. border security”

7. “Fix the border”

8. “Go on offense on the border and immigration” 

9. “Stronger border enforcement”

10. “Deter illegal migration”

Note that in all of these linked articles, there is not a single comment from any migrants or migrant rights groups that have come out in opposition to the bill. Not a single mention of the hundreds who have already died, or the hundreds more who will likely die as a result of these “restrictions,” “improvements,” and “toughening laws.” The human costs simply do not exist. They are irrelevant to the “migrant woes” being discussed. There are no actual humans on the other end of these policies. 

If media outlets wish to discuss the moral trade offs and determine that hundreds more dead migrants left in the desert are worth some perceived political gain, then they can make that case, or at least present it as a debate. But they’re not doing this. They’re not debating the issue and discussing the true human costs of these euphemisms. They are, instead, reporting the issue as if this “border bill” will “fix” the “crisis” in some neat and sterile way. As if there’s just a button Congress can push to stop migrants from trekking north. But there is no button (and if there were one, it’s not clear why we would want to press it; newcomers are our neighbors, community members, our children’s classmates, and they, too, deserve safety and refuge). There is, instead, a deliberate policy of increased violence, caging, deportation, and deliberate dehydration in some vague hope this will deter the most desperate and impoverished people on earth from seeking a better life. Our media should make these human stakes clear, rather than hiding behind Orwellian vagaries nestled politely inside partisan gotcha stories.