Progressive Conservatism: NEVER SAY UNDOCUMENTED

21 Dec Progressive Conservatism: NEVER SAY UNDOCUMENTED

Posted from Seattle December 20, 2025

This Progressive Conservative wants us to clean up our language

Using the word “undocumented” to describe immigrants is an unforced error for anyone who is opposed to the current deportation cruelty. Nor should the word undocumented be used by those who support the cruelty, for what that’s worth.

In referring to these people, the word “undocumented” is a lie, although not necessarily an intentional one, insofar as it completely fails to address the reason they are here in the first place.  Many or all of the most dedicated fighters against mass deportation use it, perhaps comforting themselves that it is superior to “illegal alien,” but the difference between the two phrases isn’t substantive.

Why do I say this? Let’s start from the top.  America has the most dynamic and productive free market in the world. As Adam Smith and many in his wake have argued, this has not happened just because we work hard or have natural advantages so much as it has been built on a foundation of individual rights. Please no one mistake what I just wrote as a claim that America has been perfect or anywhere near perfect in this regard or that America has laurels to rest on. I am  simply arguing that there has been a general embrace of these rights in the abstract and the concrete that has flowed through the body politic and the economy.

The rights that we have talked about, argued about and codified into law at various points –Rights such as free speech, protection from search and seizure, freedom of assembly, freedom from confiscation of property, freedom of religion and so on—are all basically one right. Progressive Conservatism believes this is Natural Law right and that they were “discovered,” rather than invented, but that’s mostly semantics and not important here.   The word Due Process could be inserted as a stand in for naming them.

The aforementioned free market, AKA America’s private sector, has issued gold-plated invitations to people from around the world who live in economies where rights are not protected to please get here as soon as they can.  Show up at these coordinates and in 5 minutes you will have a job in a meatpacking plant that pays in an hour what you just made in a month. In some cases there are signs like this, but there don’t have to be: word gets around.

Laws and political actions arising in the public sector have attempted to thwart these invitations. I am NOT SAYING THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE, but had our country really ever wanted to mostly stop the flow of workers into this country it could have done so at any point.

It would have been possible to cross check social security numbers of job applicants with a database, and then rigorously enforced a law that would jail employers for hiring those without a “valid” social security number. Again, I am not saying this should have been done. We would then have had to be willing to put high-placed, wealthy and (white) business owners in jail for violating this law. At every point advocates were near achieving laws that could do this, heavyweight players, often or always (?) including Republican politicians and powerful employer-groups intervened and scotched the plan.

This argument has been made by many Liberals, I recently heard it from Tom Hartman (who is 10% s progressive conservative himself). But here’s a slight tweak: Where does that leave us?  The private sector has issued very clear, unambiguous invitations, while the public sector has said to these people something different. What the public sector said was:  “Technically, you are not supposed to come. It’s complicated though… Be careful. Wink Wink.”

What Progressive Conservatism doesn’t say every want expressed by the private sector is right or should be obeyed. What it does say, is that the Private Sector needs and wishes cannot be defined away or pretended away. That the private sector calls the shots in our economy over a myriad of issues is not generally contested. No political phrasemaking can or should disappear its role in anything, in this case its role in bringing workers to this country.  It can’t be ignored, yet the word “Undocumented” does ignore it, only making reference to what the public sector has been weakly saying misses the very big truth here.

So I’m saying never use the lying word “undocumented”   Don’t even think about using the word “illegal.” Use these words, or fail to protest when others do, and we could lose this fight. We are losing now thanks in part to bad word choice.

But if I tell someone they can’t call something a cat, I have to offer up a new word to call that thing that meows.

I use this acronym: NGI.  NGO has been accepted into the lexicon and it rolls off the tongue for non-governmental organizations.  NGI stands for Non-governmentally Invited. It speaks for itself.

Now use the two phrases in a sentence:  Forty undocumented workers today were ziptied, made to wait outside in the hot sun or cold wind  take your pick and then sent to a foreign country where they don’t know the language.

Forty Nongovernmentally-Invited workers were ziptied, made to wait outside in the hot sun or cold wind  take your pick and then sent to a foreign country where they don’t know the language.

In the first sentence we have a punishment that is too harsh for people who did something wrong.  In the second sentence we are closer to the truth that an atrocity has been committed against the innocent.

This thought has been brought to you by Progressive Conservatism. Progressive Conservatism can help with the fight. Give it a chance. Thanks, this is Ed Newbold, a Wildlife Artist from Seattle who is working in installments on the Progressive Conservative Manifesto. Contact Ed at ednewbold1@yahoo.com