At a Friday press conference, a reporter from Jacksonville asked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) if there was a plan in place to help industries that rely on “undocumented immigrants” for labor after President Donald Trump’s mass deportations are carried out.
The governor visibly bristled at the term “undocumented immigrants” and proceeded to straighten the reporter out in his inimitable way.
Interrupting the reporter in mid-question, DeSantis said, “Well, you know … so the federal government has made clear that the statutory term—it’s not undoc—they’re illegal aliens. That’s the statutory term. That’s what it is. And I think it’s to try to water down.
He continued, “I mean, like, undocumented, it’s like if I get in my car and I forget my wallet. Okay, I don’t have my document on me like my driver’s license. But, I mean, I still have a right to drive. I just made a mistake. This is intentional to come in illegally. It’s not just a question of missing a document. It’s a question of, you know, you violated the law that was very clear and knowingly and with the help of the cartels in many cases.”
The reporter replied, “I’ll rephrase that. So, Florida is home to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who are—illegal aliens, if you want to call it, who are working in areas of agriculture, farming, construction, hospitality. I’m just wondering, once we start to see, you know, the significant roundups of these people, is there a plan in place to help those industries, to prevent those industries from experiencing true hardship, financial hardship?”
“So, here’s what I’d say,” the governor replied. “They made the same arguments in [20]23 when we did our immigration [inaudible] We did e-verify. … Any of those industries, when they hire new people, they’ve got to verify their immigration status. Otherwise, they can’t work.
DeSantis was right to take the reporter to task over his words. And there was even a time that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) would have agreed with him.
In a July 2009 speech about immigration at Georgetown University, Schumer told his audience, “When we use phrases like ‘undocumented workers,’ we convey a message to the American people that their government is not serious about combatting illegal immigration, which the American people overwhelmingly oppose. … I think it is illegal and wrong.”
Fifteen years later, the American people still overwhelmingly oppose illegal immigration. But Schumer and the rest of his party have completely reversed their position on the issue. They now refer to illegal aliens as undocumented immigrants.
Language—the words we choose, what we call things—matters more than it may appear. That’s because control of language is often the first step toward indoctrination.
One of the earliest instances of the U.S. government attempting to control our language (at least that I can recall) came during the Obama administration. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano suggested replacing the term “Islamic terrorism” with “man-caused disasters,” arguing the former was discriminatory. While “man-caused disasters” never really caught on, the effort had been a success: the modifier, “Islamic,” quietly disappeared, and terrorist acts were simply referred to as “terrorism.”
Around the same time, “global warming” was replaced with “climate change,” because the best and the brightest recognized that the planet wasn’t heating up quite as dramatically as Al Gore had predicted it would. They quickly realized that by calling it “climate change” instead, they could stir public concern and, in turn, use the issue to consolidate political power.
Over the years, Democrats introduced novel terms like “inclusivity” and “equity,” subtly reshaping cultural narratives. Slowly, a new “woke” ideology took root in America, reshaping the perspectives of half the nation.
The Biden administration took things even further by advancing the second frontier of indoctrination: censorship.
The bottom line is simple: words matter. It’s time to reclaim control of the national vocabulary.
Another four years of Democratic rule, and America would have resembled Oceania from Orwell’s 1984.
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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