Chi Trib uses both “illegal” and “undocumented” for immigrants without portfolio who live in suburban Carpentersville — six to four in favor of the latter, depending on point of view.
When referring to the three newly elected or re-elected aldermen who favor the ordinance called the Illegal Alien Immigration Relief Act and its supporters, “illegal” wins. When people apparently of Mexican origin are discussed, it’s “undocumented.”
I’d like to see a brief explanation why one and not the other. As it is, we have Trib as split personality.
We also have wooden rhetoric such as one frequently does not find in blogs, for instance, which usually employ a more direct expression.
Flippancy is there too, of course (as in newspapers), but that’s hardly the goal. Rather a simple directness. A copy editor could supply it if a reporter, pulling many things together for a story and in this case two of them, does not.
As for the reporting, I would have liked a response by Carpentersville authorities to a question, not asked, about long-time residents, presumably with clearance from our government, feeling unwelcome.
The response would have fit nicely after this, high up in the story:
“This was pretty bad,” Hilario Savedra, 62, said of Tuesday’s vote, pausing amid a flow of pedestrian traffic at a popular grocery store in the Meadowdale Shopping Center.
“I’ve been in this community for more than 20 years, and I hate to think someone will tell me I’m no longer wanted here. This is my community, too.”
At almost the end of the story, we have this:
Some longtime residents such as Mike Connolly search for middle ground. Carpentersville has plenty of legal Hispanics, and it would be unfair to lump them with the undocumented, he said.
This implies that somebody in Carpentersville is ignoring legality. But legality is at the heart of the problem. I think the story could have made that point more clearly, again in no more than a sentence, if that. And again we look to the copy desk.
Blithe Spirit 