The news has been full of stories about “bombs,” assignations, mid-term elections, and the usual violence on various city streets, but the President seems intent in focusing our attention on immigration.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard so many terms related to immigration used, that I find it confusing. I’ve heard terms like immigrant, illegal immigrant, legal and illegal alien, foreigner, non-citizen, resident alien or enemy alien and some more terms that I can’t think of right now — seemingly all used interchangeably. So naturally, all this confusion calls for some extensive research on my part.
Seems like in the past, I’d always used the term immigrant when referring to someone that relocated to the US from another country. I thought the term alien applied when talking about someone (something?) from another planet. Of course, that’s wrong. My extensive research proved to be a little confusing itself, but here’s what I think I discovered.
It appears that a lot of people, including newspapers and politicians pretty much interchange the terms immigrant and alien when referring to individuals that are not “natives.” Despite similarities, there are differences between an alien and an immigrant.
In general, an alien is any person or creature that is in the wrong place or does not belong to the place where he/she/it is presently located.
An immigrant is an individual that comes to another country with the intention of settling permanently in that country. So immigrant is a term that is used to refer to all people of foreign origin that have relocated here permanently.
So, I think (maybe) that the following statements are true…
Immigrants are people who decide to move to a foreign country to permanently settle there.
An alien is an individual that is not in a foreign country for permanent settlement because he intends to return to his own country — or at least leave the country in which he presently resides.
A foreigner is anyone from outside the US who currently resides here.
Still confused? Join the club. I guess it really doesn’t matter — the least of the problems with politicians and the government is whether they use the correct terminology.
Someone once said, “Immigrants built our great nation; racists and bigots will destroy it.” Maybe truer than we’d like to think….
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