The Grammar of the Adjective Is Not What’s Wrong With ‘Illegal Alien’

The Justice Department recently sent an email instructing U.S. attorneys never to refer to foreign citizens in the U.S. without the appropriate visa as “undocumented.”

“The word ‘undocumented’ is not based in U.S. code and should not be used to describe someone’s illegal presence in the country,” the attorneys were told. The department wants them to use illegal alien.

This spiteful-looking injunction shows contempt for the many people who have objected that illegality cannot be a property of a human being. And it smells of Newspeak: government control of language.

However, I must reluctantly note that the reasoning behind the slogan “a person can’t be illegal” (the phrase gets tens of thousands of Google hits) is unsound, for reasons having to do with the grammar of adjectives.

Adjectives like intelligent and isosceles can be used either as attributive modifiers (an isosceles triangle) or as predicative complements (This triangle is isosceles). One names a familiar property of people, the other a property of triangles. In ordinary cases like this you really can say that a person can’t be isosceles, and a triangle can’t be intelligent.

However, there is a construction called associative attributive adjective modification (see The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Page 556).

In the associative construction, CGEL notes, “the property expressed by the adjective does not apply literally to the denotation of the head nominal, but rather to some entity associated with it.”

Take historical novelist as an example. Only a period or a monument can literally be historical. But that doesn’t mean the phrase historical novelist is incoherent. It’s just fine as a description of Hilary Mantel or Robert Graves. The periods they write novels about are historical; but the adjective can modify the nouns novel and novelist associatively.

Likewise, someone might say that only an act can be criminal; a branch of jurisprudence can’t. Yet it’s entirely normal to use the phrase criminal law. Some acts are criminal; the adjective criminal is extended associatively to the branch of law dealing with the prosecution of such acts.

Again, you might say that only a concept or a problem can literally be mathematical, not a person. But again, there’s nothing wrong with mathematical genius. What’s mathematical is the domain of expertise; the adjective is used associatively.

That’s how it is with illegal alien. What’s illegal is the immigration status of the alien; the adjective is used associatively.

So Adam Ozimek in a Forbes magazine article is entirely correct when he says says there is nothing wrong with the term illegal alien. And notice, he says that despite being “both pro immigrant and pro illegal immigrant.” He defends the people who work in the U.S. without having legally obtained the right to do so: “We do not have a sensible guest-worker program,” he says, “and for many who come illegally there is no practical legal door outside of waiting in line for more than a decade.”

I agree. Foreign-born Americans do not all start by going to an American Embassy to fill out forms stating their intention to settle in the U.S. I suspect young Friedrich Drumpf didn’t, back in 1885. (He later anglicized his surname to Trump and eventually had a grandson who is now well known.)

Among today’s residents, the list of those who didn’t strictly follow legal procedures includes Melanija Knavs, who entered from Slovenia in 1996 and did 10 paid modeling jobs in New York before acquiring the legal right to work in the U.S. (she mysteriously obtained permanent residency under the EB-1 “Einstein visa” program for distinguished applicants of “sustained national and international acclaim”), and marrying Drumpf’s grandson.

And the list includes me. I was in the United States as a temporary academic visitor in 1980–81 when I was offered a tenured faculty position at the University of California at Santa Cruz. UC pulled some sleight of hand involving a putatively temporary appointment, permitting me to work while applying for permanent residency. (I got it, and attained citizenship in 1987.) There was no real alternative: Going back to Britain and starting the immigration application process from scratch could have taken years. The job at UCSC couldn’t have been held for me, so I would have been applying to immigrate with no prospective employer and no way to support my wife and son if I got in.

Objecting on semantic grounds to the phrase illegal alien is not the right reason for condemning the Justice Department’s vindictive-looking terminological authoritarianism. The right point to make is that it’s morally wrong to stoke up hostility against the 11 million people in the U.S. who are currently living and working here without appropriate documentation, the way I was in 1981, and the present first lady of our country was in 1996.