Who is illegal

Read more: Explainer: the difference between asylum seekers, refugees and economic migrants. And yet no US citizens were held in Australian immigration detention. That these two concepts are not interchangeable can be seen most dramatically in the case of the at least 15m people in the world who have citizenship of no country at all, including the country where they live. Many of these people will have never crossed an international border. She returned in and was awarded compensation.

Theoretically yes, but "illegal alien" is not a technical term. It's popularly used jargon, nowhere found in the U. Because of its insulting connotations, however, we at Nolo prefer to use more neutral terms like "undocumented immigrant" or "unauthorized immigrant.

In fact, the immigration reform bill proposed by President Joe Biden would remove the term "alien" from U. Estimates place the number of undocumented immigrants in the U. Of course, it's an impossible number to know precisely, since this is a population that attempts to stay under the radar. Some, but not all. Although accurate numbers are hard to come by, it's clear that a significant number of undocumented immigrants originally came to the U. Then they failed to leave after the expiration date of their permitted stay arrived.

Overstaying a visa carries its own consequences under U. Partly because U. If you haven't yet been in the United States illegally for six months or more, you might want to leave right away in order to make use of the consular processing possibility. If you have already spent more than six months in the United States illegally, talk to an immigration lawyer. You might qualify for a "waiver," legal forgiveness, ideally on Form IA if no other grounds of inadmissibility are a hurdle in your case.

A waiver would allow you to reenter the United States right away after your consular processing interview, but this waiver is hard to get. You would need to prove that your being denied the immigrant visa green card would cause extreme hardship to one or more of your U. Getting married to a lawful permanent U. That means you'd have to go through " consular processing " as described above, with all the risks that entails.

If you serve honorably and on active duty with the U. Armed Forces during one of the wars or conflicts named below, the law allows you to apply for U. You don't have to go through the usual step of applying for a green card first. You must, however, enlist sign up while on U. If you are arrested by U. Don't attempt to apply for cancellation of removal on your own. It is available only if you are already in immigration court removal proceedings and facing deportation.

You'll definitely need a lawyer's help in this situation. Instead, the very words we use to understand our social and political world can not only influence political debates and opinions but may already carry with them implicit ethical judgments about how to structure and change our world. How we should describe different classes of immigrants will depend partly and more broadly on what we envision justice in immigration to be.

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