Banal dehumanisation 63 It has been suggested that the American English ethnic slur ‘WOP’, used against Italian Americans, comes from the letters that were put onto the documents accompanying Italian deportees, standing for ‘With Out Papers’.8 Sometimes, ‘illegal’ is used in English as a noun, implying that a person’s very existence is illegal. Catherine Dauvergne describes it as ‘one of the most derogatory terms’ applied to those engaged in irregular border crossings.9 This view is shared, for example, by the ‘No One Is Illegal’ campaign, a global movement calling for an end to borders and immigration controls. In its very name, this movement draws attention to a nonsensical linguistic construction. It applies the adjective ‘illegal’ to a person, rather than to her/is actions.10 A comment attributed to Nobel-prize-winning author Elie Wiesel perhaps best shows the incoherence: You who are so-called illegal aliens must know that no human being is illegal. That is a contradiction in terms. Human beings can be beautiful or more beautiful, they can be fat or skinny, they can be right or wrong, but illegal? How can a human being be illegal?11 Moreover, using language in this way enables the development of an underlying sense that such persons have no relationship with the State(s) under discussion, making often extreme privations seem acceptable. The emphasis of lack in the hyphenated terminology of ‘non-citizenship’ is similar. Allowing an assumption of exclusion, ‘non-citizenship’ hides the substantive relationship of (unhyphenated) noncitizenship that an individual may have with a liberal State. Banal dehumanisation also takes place in the construction of an atmosphere that assumes some persons to be appropriately omitted from consideration. This occurs with respect to noncitizens far away from, at the borders of, and within, the States in question. The media plays an important role in this. In one international study, for example, researchers conducted a series of experiments using negative news stories with research subjects, concluding: These studies suggest that the uncertainty surrounding immigration, paired with the media’s proclivity to focus on negative rather than positive news 8 For example, see Alan Dundes (1971) ‘A Study of Ethnic Slurs: The Jew and the Polack in the United States’, The Journal of American Folklore 84(332). Thank you to Danny van Gelder for drawing my attention to this example. 9 Catherine Dauvergne (2008) Making People Illegal: What Globalisation Means for Migration and Law, Cambridge University Press, p. 4. 10 Dauvergne 2008 ibid., p. 10. Indeed, the illegalising of people themselves is associated with some of the most problematic regimes in history. See, for example, Trevor Noah (2016) Born a Crime, Random House, about his experience of being born to a Black mother and a White father in apartheid South Africa. 11 I have not been able to find the first source of this widely cited quotation, but it is likely to have been said by Elie Wiesel in the late 1980s or early 1990s and to have been directed at irregular immigrants in the US.