Reply #246: Is the objection to the choice of adjective, or to the absence of noun? [View All]

[Donald Ian Rankin]

Refering to the illegality of illegal immigrants is, I think, perfectly reasonable -if anything, it's people who refer to illegal immigrants as "undocumented" who are trying to obfuscate the issue - the general objection is to people who break the law to enter a country, not just to people who do so without documentation.

Leaving a noun out wouldn't be offensive or stupidly ungrammatical outside of context, but since it's become something of a trademark of the extreme wing of the anti-illegal immigration/anti-immigration movement it does appear now to cause offence ("who, if anyone, does this cause offence to?" is a much more useful question than "is this, viewed objectively, offencive?").

"Illegal immigrants" is the formulation I always use. If it didn't cause offence, I might well use "illegals" as a shorthand, but since it does I don't. I wouldn't generally talk about "undocument migrants" unless I was talking to people who had arrived without documentation but without breaking the law (which I can't imagine happens much).