Now, the Biden government is explicitly reversing that position. On February 12, officials at Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that handles citizenship, said employees should not use the word “foreign” in “outreach efforts, internal documents and in general communication with stakeholders, partners and the general public. ” The move, said the agency’s interim director, “aligns our language practices with government guidelines 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 far-reaching immigration review, Biden would remove the word “foreigner” from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and replace it with “non-citizen”, a suggestion that infuriates anti-immigration groups.
“It’s kind of Orwellian – it’s what it really is,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates immigration limits. “The war against the word ‘foreigner’ is a continuation of that effort to destigmatize illegal immigration that started in the mid-1970s. In a sense, this is the culmination of that process. “
Some changes are still pending.
The website of the Department of Homeland Security’s citizenship office, USCIS.gov, still features the mission statement that Trump administration officials modified in 2018 to remove “America’s promise as a nation of immigrants” and replace it with ” reasonably judge applications for immigration benefits. ”That could change course soon.
At the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump’s advisers took down the part of the site dedicated to climate change. In mid-February, the site had not yet been restored. But given Biden’s approach to the issue, officials said they expected it to happen soon.
But the Treasury Department is already moving forward with plans to put Harriet Tubman on the $ 20 bill, a decision that was postponed during the Trump administration.
And at the Department of the Interior, employees have been told that they can use phrases like “science-based evidence” again. In a call with the agency’s public relations staff on January 21, Ms. Schwartz had a message for her colleagues.