Along the east Texas border, in towns like Brownsville, children – including very young children – are coming out of the Mexico desert, alone. They've fled their towns and cities in Central America. Alone, they've run a gauntlet across Mexico, of bandits, corrupt police, and drug gangs.

Restrictionists have been on the defensive linguistically for decades. Let's turn the tables and start imposing our terms for immigration matters on the rest of society.

In some circles the technical term "illegal alien" is regarded as politically incorrect. Sometimes "undocumented immigrant" or

Fred Bauer has a thoughtful piece at National Review Online that's worth reading. He describes the dangers of today's condition of "bad-faith open borders," where "illegal immigrants are de jure rejected but de facto accepted."

One issue he didn't address was why we're

American politics, and immigration debates are certainly no exception, has become riddled with "narratives", "framing", and "optics" designed to convey an impression that doesn't really exist — at least in the way it is presented.

A narrative is the construction of a set of "facts", specifically

An airplane with 30 Hondurans — 22 children and eight mothers — arrived at San Pedro Sula, Honduras, this week. They are the first group of Central Americans repatriated in the ongoing crisis. ... The director of the Salvadoran Office of Migration, Hector Rodriguez, said that the U.S.

Mark Shurtleff, former Utah State Attorney-General, and a leading GOP amnesty advocate, was arrested Tuesday and charged with corruption for accepting gifts from rich businessmen, according to a story in the New York Times.

Shurtleff's Republican successor, John Swallow, was also arrested on

Language is the key to human insight, but also a key culprit in undermining it.

It is a primary vehicle by which we can name what we see, think further about it, and understand it better. Yet it is also, paradoxically, the vehicle of our own undoing as we misname and therefore obfuscate what we