The AP Stylebook Changed a Phrase in 2013 and the Coverage Changed With It

There was no hearing. There was no roll call, no committee report, no amendment from the floor, no vote in any legislature on earth. A style committee at a news cooperative made a decision about two words, and within a few years a whole country was describing one of its biggest public arguments in a different vocabulary.

I find that fascinating, and I mean it as a compliment to the power of words. Let me tell you how it happened, what was said at the time, where the words drifted afterward, and how you can learn to spot the framing in any story you read. And I want to do it without a single sneer at the people the words describe, because the people are not the issue. The vocabulary is.

What the AP decided, and what it said

The Associated Press publishes a stylebook, and for most of the country's newsrooms the stylebook is law. Reporters, copy editors and wire subscribers consult it the way a lawyer consults a code. In April 2013 the AP announced that it would stop using the term "illegal immigrant." Its executive editor at the time, Kathleen Carroll, explained the reasoning publicly: the Stylebook would now say that the word "illegal" should describe only an action, such as living in the country illegally, and never a person.

That was the stated principle, and it deserves a fair hearing. Journalists have a long-standing discomfort with labels that reduce a human being to a single fact about him. We do not call a man who was once convicted "a felon" in every sentence for the rest of his life. We do not say "a speeder" when we mean a man who was driving too fast on a Tuesday. The AP's argument was that the label "illegal" attached to a noun makes a legal status sound like an identity, and an identity sounds like a judgment about a soul. Describe the act, said the editors, and let readers decide.

Here is the part that gets left out of most retellings. The same Stylebook entry did not bless "undocumented." The revised guidance told reporters, except in direct quotations, to avoid "illegal alien," "an illegal," "illegals" and also "undocumented," and an AP editor had earlier called "undocumented" inaccurate because many people who entered unlawfully do have documents of one kind or another. So at the moment of the change, the AP's own style book rejected the word that most advocacy groups were pushing as the replacement. What it told reporters to write instead was descriptive and wordy: someone who is "living in the country illegally," or "entering the country illegally," or "without legal permission."

I'd argue that is a defensible rule, and some conservatives will disagree with me. The AP's rule was longer, but it was still honest about the legal status. "Living in the country illegally" tells the reader exactly what the law says. The trouble is not the rule in the stylebook. The trouble is what happened to the rule once it left the stylebook and went to work in the wild.

Four steps from law to sympathy

The vocabulary of a story is never frozen. It moves, and it usually moves in one direction. Watch the sequence, because it repeats in other fights too, and you will start to recognize it.

1. Step one: the legal term is retired as "loaded." The old phrase is declared unfair to the people it describes. Nobody asks whether the phrase was accurate, because accuracy is not the test being applied. The test is whether it is kind.
2. Step two: a gentler term takes its place. "Undocumented" became the standard word across much of the coverage, even though, as we just saw, the AP's own entry had flagged a problem with it. A newsroom does not need to follow its wire service line by line to feel the pull of a house vocabulary.
3. Step three: the gentler term is itself gentled. "Undocumented immigrant" becomes "undocumented person," then simply "migrant," then "newcomer" or "new arrival." The words "immigrant" and "migrant" stretch to cover people with a visa, people in the pipeline, and people who crossed between ports of entry. By the time a reader reaches a headline that says "migrants arrive in city," he cannot tell from the word alone whether the story is about a lawful refugee admission or an unlawful crossing.
4. Step four: the international term arrives. "Irregular migrant" and "irregular migration" are the vocabulary of international bureaucracies and of much European coverage. Notice the word "irregular." A thing that is irregular is a deviation from the pattern. It is not a violation of a statute. Irregular is the adjective you use for a heartbeat or a bus schedule.

I'm not saying anyone at the AP intended step four. I'm saying that once the principle is "the less legal our adjective sounds, the more humane we sound," the principle has no natural stopping point. Each new word is a little softer than the last, and each softer word makes the previous one sound harsh by comparison. That is a ratchet, and ratchets only turn one way.

Here is the joke, and it is a good one. Imagine the same newsroom applying that rule to a different story. A reporter files copy about a man "experiencing a regulatory irregularity with respect to his tax obligations." The editor reads it and says: "You mean he didn't pay." The reporter says: "We try not to label people." Somewhere, an IRS agent laughs so hard he has to sit down. Nobody writes about tax delinquents like that, because nobody in the newsroom has a theory that makes tax delinquents sympathetic. The softness is not a rule of the craft. It is a choice about which story deserves it.

What the statutes still say

The best test of any media vocabulary is to hold it against the law it claims to be describing. Congress has not changed its words. Title 8 of the United States Code, the immigration title, defines the term "alien" in Section 1101(a)(3): "any person not a citizen or national of the United States." That is the word the statute uses, because that is the word the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 used, and Congress has never amended it out. It is a legal term of art, and it is meant as one. It does not mean "creature from another planet," any more than "tort" means a pastry.

The statutes also describe the status itself in blunt terms. The law speaks of aliens who are "unlawfully present" in the United States. The word "unlawfully" is in the code. It appears in the provision, Section 1182(a)(9)(B) of Title 8, that sets multi-year bars on returning for people who have accumulated unlawful presence and then left. Congress, in other words, wrote a statute whose operative idea is that being present without authorization is a legal condition with consequences. A reporter who writes "newcomer" is not describing the statute's category. He is describing a mood.

The Supreme Court uses the statutory words, too. In Arizona v. United States in 2012, a case about a state's attempt to enforce immigration rules, the opinions are full of "aliens," and Justice Kennedy's opinion for the Court does not blush about it. If you read a federal court's opinion in an immigration case, you will find the statutory vocabulary. If you read the coverage of that same opinion the next morning, you may find a different one. The law has one vocabulary and the story about the law has another, and the gap between them is where the framing lives.

There was even a move to close that gap by changing the law's words instead of the newsroom's. A 2021 bill introduced in Congress proposed replacing "alien" in the statute books with "noncitizen." I will say plainly that this is a legitimate thing for a legislature to propose, because a legislature is the right place to change a legal vocabulary. That is how a republic does it: in the open, by vote, with the proposal's opponents entitled to make their case. What I object to is the other method, where the vocabulary of the law stays put while the vocabulary of the coverage moves, and no citizen ever gets a chance to say yes or no.

The steelman: words can wound

Before I go further, the strongest case on the other side, stated as its defenders would state it.

The best argument for the AP's change goes like this. One: words that describe people carry moral weight. Two: "illegal" as a noun is a particularly heavy word because it implies the person's very existence is unlawful, when in truth the unlawful thing is an act or a status. Three: the law distinguishes carefully between an act, a status, and a person, and journalists, who are supposed to be precise, should follow the same discipline. Four: millions of people in this country live in mixed families, with citizen children and relatives who are here unlawfully, and a vocabulary that treats the parent as an "illegal" lands on the child in the next chair. Five: a profession that prides itself on fairness should avoid terms that function as insults even when the speaker did not intend one.

That is a serious case, and I'd rather meet it than caricature it. There is real force in point two: precision matters, and a person cannot literally be illegal. There is real force in point four: decent people do not want a child to hear his mother turned into an epithet.

The answer, in four points

Here is where I part company with the AP, and why. Take it in order.

1. The precision argument cuts the other way. If the goal is precision, then "newcomer" and "irregular migrant" are worse than what they replaced, not better. They blur the line between lawful and unlawful arrival, which is the one line the entire legal system turns on. A word that cannot tell a green-card holder from a visa overstay is not precise. The AP's own preferred formula, "living in the country illegally," survives this test. The softer words that followed it do not.
2. A rule against labels has to be applied evenly, and it is not. We still write "drunk driver," "convicted felon" and "tax evader" in the same newsrooms that retired "illegal immigrant." Whatever the principle is, it is applied to one category and not to others, and the category it protects is the one with the most active advocacy attached. When a rule protects the groups with the best press operations, it is not a rule about fairness. It is a rule about who has a press operation.
3. The vocabulary shift has a policy consequence, and everybody knows it. Words are not neutral containers. If the story is about a "migrant" and a "newcomer," then enforcement sounds like cruelty toward a visitor. If the story is about someone who entered or stayed unlawfully, then enforcement sounds like what it is: the application of a rule the voters' representatives wrote. The change in the word changes the moral temperature of the whole debate, before a single fact is presented. I would respect the AP more if its defenders said so openly instead of insisting nothing was at stake.
4. A vocabulary that nobody voted on is a kind of legislation. And here I will make the constitutional point with some heat. Self-government depends on citizens being able to see the question they are being asked to decide. If the question is "should the country enforce its law about who may enter and stay," then every word that obscures the word "law" makes the question harder to see. A free press has the right to choose its words. A free people has the right to notice when the choice was made for them.

The Founding angle: why law is the point

There is a reason the old term mattered to people who cared about the structure of the republic. The Constitution gives Congress, in Article I, Section 8, the power "To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization." It is one of the enumerated powers, and notice the adjective: uniform. The Founders did not want fifty states, or fifty newsrooms for that matter, each defining who belongs on its own terms. They wanted a single rule, written by a legislature accountable to the voters, applied the same way everywhere.

Madison, writing in Federalist No. 62, warned about laws so voluminous and so changeable that "they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood." He was thinking of statutes, but the warning extends to the language in which we talk about statutes. A law that citizens cannot recognize in its own coverage is a law they cannot hold anyone accountable for. If you want the longer version of the Founders' thinking on this, our posts on One Uniform Rule, How the First Congresses Wrote America's Naturalization Laws and on What Washington, Hamilton and Jefferson Feared and Hoped About Newcomers show how seriously the first generation took the question of membership.

Here the post should be clear about what it is arguing and what it is not. It is not arguing that "illegal" must be shouted from every headline. A reporter who wants to write "a man who entered the country unlawfully" is writing accurate English, and I would applaud it. What I'm arguing is that the accuracy test, not the sympathy test, should govern, and that the test should be applied the same way to every story.

How to spot framing by word choice

You do not need a journalism degree for this. You need a short checklist, and you can run it in the time it takes to read a headline.

1. Ask what the statute would call it. Substitute the legal term for the news term in your head. If the story says "newcomers" and the law says "aliens unlawfully present," ask whether the story is about the second group while using the first group's name.
2. Count the adjectives that describe a feeling instead of a fact. "Desperate," "vulnerable" and "fleeing" may all be true of some people, and they are facts only if the story shows them. Look for whether the story offers evidence or just an adjective.
3. Look for passive voice around the legal act. "Migrants were detained" hides who did the detaining and why. "Federal agents arrested a man who had a deportation order" is a different story, and both can be accurate. Passive voice is a favorite tool for removing the law from the sentence.
4. Watch the word "immigrant" do double duty. If a story slides between "immigrants" and "illegal entrants" without saying which it means, the statistic in the next paragraph is probably about the larger group while the anecdote is about the smaller, or the other way around. Our post on Seven Words Reporters Use to Tilt a Story Without Telling a Single Lie goes through the general method.
5. Compare two outlets. Read the same event in a paper that leans left and one that leans right, and underline the nouns. The disagreement is almost always in the nouns before it is in the facts. The site's media watch page is built for exactly this kind of side-by-side reading.

Notice what this checklist does not include. It does not include contempt for the person on the other end of the story. A man who crossed a border without permission is a man with a mother, and a story about him can be told with dignity and still use the word the statute uses. Respect for people and accuracy about the law are not opposites. The best reporters, including some who disagree with me on the policy, manage both.

A note on language and law

One more thing, because I would be unfair to skip it. Language does change, and not every change is a conspiracy. Words wear out, acquire baggage and get retired for good reason. If the American public, through the ordinary slow process by which usage changes, came to prefer a different word, then a stylebook would be right to follow. The test is whether the change came from the readers or was handed down to them. When a vocabulary arrives by usage, it is a language. When it arrives by memo, and then gets treated as the only decent option, it is a campaign.

That is the real lesson of 2013. Not that a stylebook is sinister: a stylebook is a tool, and a necessary one. The lesson is that an institution with that much reach should explain itself, defend its choices in the open against argument, and keep the one commitment that gives a news organization any claim on our trust: that the words describe the facts. And then let the people vote on what the law should say, the way a republic does.

The case in brief

1. In 2013 the Associated Press retired "illegal immigrant," reasoning that "illegal" should describe an action and never a person. That principle deserves a fair hearing.
2. The AP's own rule kept the legal status in view ("living in the country illegally"), but the vocabulary around it drifted from "undocumented" to "migrant," "newcomer" and "irregular," each softer than the last, and each blurring the line between lawful and unlawful.
3. Federal statutes did not move: Title 8 still says "alien" (Section 1101(a)(3)) and "unlawfully present" (Section 1182(a)(9)(B)), and the Supreme Court writes in the statute's words.
4. A rule against labels that protects one category and not others is a choice about sympathy, not a standard of accuracy, and a vocabulary nobody voted on shapes a debate that voters are supposed to decide.
5. Readers can defend themselves with a short checklist: translate to the statute's term, count the feeling adjectives, spot the passive voice, watch "immigrant" do double duty, and compare outlets.

What you can do: pick one immigration story from a recent newspaper, read the definition of "alien" in 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(3) on Congress.gov, and rewrite the headline using the statute's words so you can see exactly what changed.