Now the Biden government is explicitly reversing this position. On February 12, officials at the Citizenship and Immigration Bureau, which is responsible for citizenship, said staff should not use the word “foreigner” in “public relations, internal documents and in general communications with stakeholders, partners and the public.” The move, said the agency’s acting director, “aligns our language practices with the administration’s guidelines on the federal government’s use of immigration terminology.”
A few days later the White House moved on. In his legislative proposal for a major overhaul of immigration, Mr. Biden would remove the word “foreigner” from the Immigration and Citizenship Act of 1965 and replace it with “non-citizens”, a proposal that infuriated anti-immigration groups.
“It’s kind of Orwellian – it really is,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates the limits of immigration. “The war on the word ‘alien’ is a continuation of that effort to destigmatize illegal immigration that began in the mid-1970s. In a sense, this is the culmination of this process. “
Some changes are still pending.
The Department of Homeland Security Citizenship Bureau’s website, USCIS.gov, still maintains the mission statement that Trump administration officials changed in 2018 to remove “America’s Promises as a Nation of Immigrants” and replace it with “fair immigration claims.” to replace. “That could change course soon.
At the Environmental Protection Agency, Mr. Trump’s staff had removed the portion of the climate change website. The site had not been restored until mid-February. Given Mr. Biden’s hug with the subject, officials said they expected this to happen soon.
But the finance department is already pushing plans to put Harriet Tubman on the $ 20 bill, a decision that was delayed during the Trump administration.
And at the Home Office, employees were told they could use phrases like “science-based evidence” again. When she called the agency’s PR representatives on January 21, Ms. Schwartz had a message for her colleagues.
