The Biden government explicitly reverses the position. On February 12, officials from Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that handles citizenship, said employees should not use the word “foreigner” in “outreach efforts, internal documents and in overall communication with stakeholders, partners and the general public.” The agency’s acting director says the move “is in line with the government’s guidance on the use of immigration terminology by the federal government.”
A few days later, the White House went further. In his legislative proposal for a radical immigration overhaul, Mr. Biden the word “foreigner” stripped of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and replaced with “non-citizen”, a proposal that makes anti-immigration groups furious.
“It’s a kind of Orwellian – that’s what it is, really,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, who favors the limits of immigration. The war on the word ‘alien’ is a continuation of this attempt to desigmatize illegal immigration that began in the mid-1970s. It is, in a sense, the culmination of that process. ”
Some changes are still pending.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Citizens’ Office website, USCIS.gov, still contains the mission statement that Trump administration officials amended in 2018 to “remove America’s promise as a nation of immigrants” and replace it with ” reasonable appraisal requests for immigration benefits. “It could change course soon.
At the Environmental Protection Agency, Mr. Trump’s assistants took down the section of the site dedicated to climate change. As of mid-February, the site has not been repaired. But given mr. Biden’s embrace of the subject, officials said they expect will happen soon.
But the Treasury Department is already continuing with plans to put Harriet Tubman on the $ 20 bill, a decision that was delayed during the Trump administration.
And at the Department of Home Affairs, employees were told they could use phrases like ‘scientific evidence’ again. In a call with the agency’s liaison officers on January 21, Ms. Schwartz had a message for her colleagues.