> In the past year, many major tech companies such as Amazon, Palantir, Salesforce, and Microsoft have come under scrutiny for selling software to US federal immigration agencies. That’s because those agencies have been responsible for enforcing some of the controversial immigration policies that separate families at the border, detain children, and deport people seeking refuge back to dangerous places.
The uses are different. Words have overt and implied meanings. In the case of "illegals", the overt meaning is referring to illegal immigrants. The implied meaning is the stress on the illegal nature of the immigration.
Referring to jail as a "cage" may overtly be technically correct (it's a structure with bars for the purpose of restraint), but our minds correlate cages with animals and so the implied meaning becomes that people are being treated like animals, which rightly provokes an emotional reaction that this is wrong. Also, saying they're putting children in cages is even worse, because we have an emotional inclination to protect children more than we do adults.
So what parent was saying was that the use of "cage" was an emotionally manipulative use of the word in this case.
The laws currently on the books (sans commentary on whether such laws are themselves just or not) do threaten jail time for illegal immigration. By all means, let's reform the laws, but I would hope we can do so with straightforward language.
I use the word Illegals as short for Illegal Aliens.
There are multiple types of Illegals, they are not all here to immigrate, therefore Illegals or Illegal Aliens is the most appropriate and inclusive nomenclature.
