Survey Says!

By: Amy Ketner

With the help of my project partners, I sent out a survey* asking participants one simple question: What are the first three words or phrases that come to mind when you think of the word “illegal”?  The results were fascinating.

Though 110 responded, only 100 results were able to be analyzed due to website limitations; however the first 100 respondents had plenty to tell us.  I organized the results into several categories.  The most common words (136 total) were those of the category involving authority (“police” ,“jail”), criminals (“crime”, “getting caught”) and adjectives (“bad”, “unfair”, “wrong”).  Next common were those words relating to substances (“alcohol”, “marijuana”) with 65 responses falling in this category.  Just behind substances in the survey was immigration, with 45 related responses (“immigrant”, “alien”).  After immigration, there was a significant drop in the most commonly stated words, with theft and stealing next most frequent (10), followed by guns (7) and murder (4).  

Responses
Words related to legality, authority, punishment, etc	68
Adjectives (criminal, bad, dangerous, wrong, unfair, etc)	68
Substances (drinking, pot, etc)	65
Words related to immigration	45
Theft/Stealing	10
Guns	7
Murder	4
Miscellaneous	13

      

These results show a lot of implications about how society thinks about immigration.  First it shows that we talk about immigration so much in the context of legality that it comes to people’s minds over eleven times more frequently than the act of killing another person.  These results are stunning to me.  What we don’t know from the survey is how the participants feel about the issues surrounding immigration legality and reform, but we do know that in some manner they were led to think about it when prompted with simply the word “illegal”.  It has become part of our common sense that if we are talking about the act of entering our country, we are talking about something ‘wrong’, ‘criminal’ and ‘bad’, as our respondents overwhelmingly  named in their responses to “illegal”.  In this way, society has found a way to dehumanize an entire group of people, for immigrants suddenly become ranked among pot, alcohol, guns, thievery and crime.  When society is socialized to think of immigrants in terms of whether they are legally allowed to exist here or not, we learn to value them less.  We find certain qualities about them upon which to decide whether they deserve the same rights as we natives of the USA have.

Furthermore, it is necessary to look at the specifics of what was said within this immigration category.  Thirty of these 45 responses were either ‘immigrant’ or ‘immigration’.  Ten used the harsher term of ‘alien’ (see “Injustice Illustrated” post for more thoughts on the use of the word ‘alien’).  One person said ‘green card’, another said ‘emigrant’.  Where it gets difficult is in the explicit final two responses: ‘Mexican’ and ‘Hispanic’. 

Breakdown of Responses Related to Immigration
Immigrant/Immigration	30
Alien	11
Green Card	1
Emigrant	1
Hispanic	1
Mexican	1

Again, we cannot make presumptions about the viewpoint of the participants who stated these answers, for we do not know any further information about them (however we do know that they did not self-identify as Hispanic/Latino or Mexican on the survey, but rather as other races).  This means that just like we have been made to think about immigrants in terms of legality, we also sometimes think of people of a specific race or from a particular country in terms of their legality.  I find this to be incredibly troubling and problematic, for it reminds me so much of the pre-Civil Rights times, when our country used skin color and country origin to decide who ‘counted’ and who did not.  Here we are again, decades later, with a different skin color, different color of origin, different excuses, but the same question: is this person allowed to exist here as a citizen?  We have found another systemic way to discriminate against a people of an entire race, ethnicity and region, and have told them over and over that they don’t belong here and they don’t count.  In this process, we've debated about it in the media, government and other public spheres and eventually it becomes ingrained in our brains that immigrants are illegal…that Hispanics are illegal, that Mexicans are illegal.

No one is illegal.  Not an entire population, not an entire race or ethnicity, not an individual.  We must always challenge this rhetoric which allows us to dehumanize others.

*The survey was conducted on Survey Monkey and was sent out to our four friend circles via emails and facebook.  A copy can be found here.