Actions Can Be "Illegal". Human Beings Cannot.
Before a single home is burned or a single family is torn apart, a word has already done the work. The second essay in a series on the global anti-foreigner wave examines the vocabulary that makes it.
I want you to imagine a driver who breaks the speed limit on the way to work. We do not call him or her an illegal driver. Also consider a person who jaywalks across a busy street, a family that underreports their income tax, a teenager who downloads a film he did not pay for. We have no phrase for illegal pedestrians, illegal taxpayers, or illegal teenagers. In every other corner of life, English keeps a careful distinction between an unlawful act and the person who commits it. There is exactly one context in which we collapse that distinction and let the violation swallow the human being whole. Only the migrant becomes the crime.
The lack of equivalence is the tell. If “illegal alien” were merely a description, it would behave like every other legal description we use. It does not, because it is not doing descriptive work. It is rather doing declarative work. The phrase does not say this person has violated an immigration statute. It says this person’s existence is unlawful. And the moment a society accepts that a category of human beings can exist illegally, it has granted itself permission for everything that follows.
What does a dehumanizing phrase mean?
Each word in the phrase carries its own payload. “Illegal,” attached to a person rather than an act, performs a subtle transfer from behavior to essence. Psychologists who study moral perception have shown for decades that labels are not necessarily neutral containers; they organize how we see, and essentializing labels are the most powerful of all. Once a person is illegal rather than has done something illegal, the moral machinery that normally restrains us toward other people begins to disengage. There is no proportionality for an essence. A speeding ticket has a fine. An illegal existence has no remedy except removal or execution.
“Alien” completes the operation. Whatever the word meant in older legal English, in the language of the 20th century and the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary it names “the creature from another world”, the thing that is fundamentally not us. Pair the two words and you have manufactured a being who is criminal by nature and foreign to the species. Research on dehumanizing language converges on a sobering finding, reminding us that people extend less empathy, less moral concern, and less protection to those described in terms that push them outside the human circle.
History confirms what research suggests. Campaigns of mass violence against minorities have reliably been preceded by a linguistic phase in which the targeted group was renamed: as vermin, as cockroaches, as disease, as infestation, as parasites, as scums, as flood. Nobody has to be persuaded to fight an infestation. The persuasion happened when the word was chosen. The anti-foreigner wave now moving across South Africa, Britain, and the United States, which the first essay in this series traced to a global crisis of belonging, runs on exactly this fuel. Mobs do not chant statute numbers. They chant categories.
Dehumanizing language is not the aftermath of cruelty. It is the advance team.
What if it’s the legal term?
The strongest defense of the phrase deserves an honest hearing. I’ve heard some folks argue that “alien” appears in immigration statutes, and unlawful entry is a real offense. Both points are true, and neither rescues the term. First, precision cuts the other way. Under U.S. law, unlawful presence in the country is in most cases a civil violation, not a crime, closer in legal character to overstaying a parking meter than to felony conduct. A phrase that brands millions of people as walking crimes is not legally precise. I dare say it is legally sloppy in the direction of maximum contempt.
Second, and more important for people of faith: the question was never whether the phrase is lawful to say but whether it is godly or humane to say. Statutes set the floor of what a state permits. Discipleship answers to a different grammar altogether, and on this subject that grammar is unusually explicit.
God’s vocabulary for the stranger
The bible, remarkably, has its own word in this space, and older English translations even rendered it “alien.” The Hebrew ger, the sojourner or resident foreigner, appears dozens of times across the Law and the Prophets. Some scholars have gone as far to argue that distinction between ger tzedek (‘righteous alien’) and a ger toshav (‘resident alien’) (see Gen 9:8–17). What matters is the grammar that surrounds it. The ger in the bible is never a category of criminality. The ger is a protected class, listed alongside the widow and the orphan as those whose vulnerability makes them God’s special concern. “He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner (ger) residing among you, giving them food and clothing” (Deuteronomy 10:18). The command that follows is important to note: “And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.”
Juxtapose the two vocabularies side by side. Modern political speech takes the foreigner and attaches the word “illegal.” The God of the bible takes the same figure and attaches the word “beloved.” One vocabulary licenses contempt; the other commands protection. A Christian cannot speak both languages at once, and choosing the first while worshiping the God of the second is what the older theologians would have simply called sin.
In Genesis, naming is a sacred act. God names the light, the darkness, the day. Adam’s first vocation is to name the creatures. When God transforms a life, he marks it with a new name. For example, Abram becomes Abraham, Jacob becomes Israel, Simon becomes Peter, Saul becomes Paul. To name is to exercise power over identity, which is precisely why the misuse of naming is treated in the bible as violence. James writes that the tongue is a fire, and lands on the exact contradiction at issue here, saying “With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness” (James 3:9). A worshiper who blesses God on Sunday and calls God’s image-bearer an illegal alien on Monday has not committed two unrelated acts. He has contradicted himself at the deepest level his faith allows.
And there is one more fact the church is not free to forget. The Lord it confesses spent his earliest years as a foreigner in Egypt, carried across a border by parents fleeing state violence (Matthew 2:13-15). By the logic of the modern phrase, the vocabulary would have had a name for the holy family. That alone should end the discussion at any Christian table.
Core Claim
Actions can be illegal. Human beings cannot. A person made in the image of God can violate a statute, but no statute can make an image of God unlawful. Language that claims otherwise is not tough talk about policy. It is false witness against a neighbor.
Why “evil” is the accurate word
Evil in the bible rarely announces itself with horns. It typically enters through speech, through a renaming of reality that makes the forbidden thing thinkable. The serpent’s whole arsenal in Eden was vocabulary. Measured against that pattern, a phrase that reclassifies image-bearers as criminal non-persons, that measurably reduces the empathy extended to them, and that historically precedes violence against them is not an unfortunate figure of speech. It meets the definition. Calling it evil is not rhetorical heat.
None of this settles a single policy question. Nations may regulate borders, and Christians of good faith will disagree about how. But policy debate conducted in dehumanizing language has already conceded the most important point before the first argument is made. The church’s task is to refuse the concession, and that refusal may as well begin with practice.
Like I noted in the last series, there are three things we can do moving forward. First, rename. Second, correct. And lastly, bless the ger amongst you.
Rename
Retire the phrase from your own speech entirely. Say undocumented neighbor, migrant, sojourner, or better, learn an actual name. Learning how to accurately pronounce one’s name is a discipline of love.
Correct
Challenge the term when it surfaces in your pew, your feed, your community, or your family table, with grace and without apology. Silence teaches the congregation that the vocabulary is compatible with the gospel.
Bless
Recover God’s grammar out loud, honoring the stranger as protected, beloved, and made in the divine image. Communities repeat the words their leaders use. Give them better words to repeat instead.
The first essay in this series argued that the anti-foreigner wave is at bottom a crisis of belonging. This one adds the corollary: every crisis of belonging is fought first at the level of words, because words are where a society decides who counts as one of us. What might change if every congregation on every continent simply refused the phrase?