That naughty word "illegal"

The new Australian conservative government has started to call  illegal immigrants illegal.  Shock!  Horror!  And in a splendid example of projection (seeing your own faults in others) the Leftist rant below calls the new accurate terminolgy "a brutish manipulation of language".  All the Leftist euphemisms ("Asylum seeker", "undocumented person") are not "a brutish manipulation of language", of course.

As it happens, there would be very few real asylum seekers among the illegals concerned.  They are mostly just economic immigrants  -- in search of higher pay and more generous welfare.  So it IS the Left who are guilty of "a brutish manipulation of language".  The illegals concerned are mostly Muslims and mostly come via Pakistan and Indonesia, two Muslim countries.  So they already have asylum in those countries before they set out for Australia.  Paying a lot of money to get from those countries to Australia is an economic decision, not the product of being unsafe.  They are escaping poverty, not persecution

Let us call a spade a spade shall we, Scott Morrison? Your edict, Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, that detention staff and members of your department now refer to asylum seekers as "illegal maritime arrivals" is shameless and shameful.

It is a brutish manipulation of language to suit your, and your government's, political purposes.

This week The Sun-day Age published an email written by a department official to detention centre staff that states: "The department has received correspondence from the minister clarifying his expectations about the department's use of terminology." People who arrived by boat were to be referred to as illegal maritime arrivals. Those held in detention centres were to be known as "detainees", rather than "clients".

The minister subsequently said he wouldn't apologise for "not using politically correct language to describe something that I am trying to stop".

"I'm not going to engage in some sort of clever language to try and mask anything here," he said. "I'm going to call a spade a spade. People who have entered Australia illegally by boat have illegally entered by boat. "I've never said that it is illegal to claim asylum. That's not what the term refers to. It refers to their mode of entry."

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