In his State of the Union address earlier this month, Joe Biden had the following exchange with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene about Laken Riley, the nursing student who was brutally killed on February 22 by, allegedly, a Venezuelan man who had entered the United States illegally in September 2022 (43:09 here):
BIDEN: Lincoln [sic]—Lincoln Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed.
GREENE: By an illegal!
BIDEN: By an illegal. That’s right. But how many of [sic] thousands of people being [sic] killed by legals?
Progressives lost their minds: not because Ms. Riley had been killed but because the president had had the temerity to use the word “illegal”—as “he must have [done] repeatedly over the past thirty years without anyone rebuking him” (to quote Rich Lowry). In an msnbc interview with Jonathan Capehart two days later, Biden apologized—though, bizarrely, the White House subsequently denied that he had done so. When Capehart spoke to him about that word, he said this (0:28 here):
. . . uh, undocumented—an undocumented person. And I shouldn’t have used “illegal.” I should’ve—it’s “undocumented.”
I share the outrage of those who believe that Biden should instead be apologizing to Ms. Riley’s family and to the American people for the chaos at the Mexican border. But what has been missing from the story on both the right and the left is attention to the word Greene and the president each used before “illegal”: “an.” The employment of the indefinite article here is in fact surprisingly interesting.
In recent years, it has become increasingly common in elite circles to reject the phrases “illegal alien” (the main term Americans of my generation—Gen X—grew up with) and its successor, “illegal immigrant,” on the grounds that they are dehumanizing: “No human being is illegal,” as Elie Wiesel first said in 1985. Instead, as these phrases fall in use, “undocumented immigrant” is on the rise, in both newspapers and case law, though The Associated Press Stylebook has since 2013 objected to “undocumented,” too: “Do not use the terms alien, unauthorized immigrant, irregular migrant, an illegal, illegals or undocumented.” While still allowing “illegal immigration,” because it “refer[s] to an action, not a person,” the AP, when it comes to people, plumps for the cumbersome “immigrants lacking permanent legal status.”
You will notice the unacknowledged shifting here from noun phrases like “unauthorized immigrant” to the lone adjective, “undocumented,” which is becoming ever more common in ordinary speech. Yes, “alien” can also be an adjective, as it was in the first place in Latin, from which English borrowed the word: aliēnus. But the AP treats it here exclusively as a noun, noting that, in 2021, “the Biden administration . . . replaced the word alien in government documents with noncitizen,” the latter yet another word that the AP does not care for: “Limit use of the term.”
“Undocumented” can be used as a noun, but this is extremely rare (and “documented” even more so)—except when it is preceded by the other English article, “the,” in which case the so-called substantivized adjective is a plural (“The undocumented are a political football”). (As it happens, the AP last year issued a statement against using the definite article in this way because “‘the’ terms for any people”—not just undocumented ones—“can sound dehumanizing.” It’s remarkable just how much of human language many humans apparently consider dehumanizing.) While there is no grammatical problem with substituting “an illegal immigrant” for “an illegal” in the exchange between Greene and Biden (or, for that matter, “killed by legal immigrants” for “killed by legals”), I doubt that either of them would have spoken of “an undocumented” (or said “killed by documenteds”).
It is time for me to make a confession: my sense of English bristles at the use as nouns of the adjectives “illegal” and “legal,” both of which arose from the Latin adjective lēgālis. When I see or hear “an illegal”/“a legal” or plural “(il)legals,” I shudder—not in the first place because of the meaning (though the Oxford English Dictionary notes that the noun “illegal” is “now frequently regarded as offensive, esp. in U.S. use”) but because of the form, whose first attestation, over 250 years after the adjective’s debut in English, is in scare quotes (1884: “It is only from the ‘illegals’, as the suspected are termed . . .”). As for “legal” as a noun with the meaning in question (there are some others, like the obsolete sense “a Mosaic regulation”), which the oed says is “chiefly North American” and “usually in plural,” it first shows up in the written record only in 1952—well over half a millennium after the adjective.
I may shudder, but it is easy to understand how such forms came about: people began dropping the noun from phrases like “an illegal alien” and “a legal immigrant,” and the results were “an illegal” and “a legal.” There is no procedural difference between this and the development from “a paralegal specialist” to what is now a perfectly common locution: “a paralegal” (the first attestation of the noun, from 1969, has scare quotes: “The ‘paralegal’ is one who is not a lawyer . . .”). Further examples abound: “a carry-on bag” becomes simply “a carry-on,” “an old-fashioned cocktail” becomes “an old-fashioned,” “a remote control” becomes “a remote,” etc.
The thing about language is that it is always changing, and when it comes to subjects that people dance around, whatever is au courant now may well seem off in a decade or two. Still, normal people are unlikely to speak of “immigrants lacking permanent legal status,” and I expect there will continue to be rhetorical warfare between those who prefer “illegal immigrant” and those who prefer “undocumented immigrant”—or, as the Department of Homeland Security now puts it, “unauthorized immigrant.”
That said, if you want to be concise, maybe “illegal” as a noun isn’t so bad. I don’t expect it will ever trip off my tongue. But to those who cry out—correctly, in my view—that people can’t be illegal, I respond that when an adjective becomes a noun, it often comes to have a rather different semantic value: you can thus check your carry-on, an old-fashioned isn’t old-fashioned (mine with rye, please), and while “the remote is remote” does sound a bit odd, it is not a tautology (in the move, we forgot to pack the remote, so no television for you, kids).
When Hillary Clinton spoke in 2016 of “the basket of deplorables,” she pretty clearly considered deplorables deplorable. Similarly, I expect Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks of illegals as illegal. What Joe Biden actually believes is anyone’s guess. But the fact remains that there is no necessary contradiction in the statement “No illegal is illegal.”