There was a time when words had meanings

Millions of rootless or stateless peoples around the world today never wanted to be migrants. “Emigrants,” yes, in the sense that they left, or fled, the countries they once lived in. They emigrated — more than 304 million people, according to the United Nations’ recent estimate.

But only a tiny percentage of these wanderers — equivalent to nearly the entire population of the United States — are migrants or immigrants.

An immigrant is someone who left her country to settle in another land, to which she is an immigrant: as were our Founding Fathers. Immigrants, in short, are accepted in their new homeland, adapt to it, and plan to live there, with their children and grandchildren, ad infinitum.

If, indeed, most of today’s 304 million emigrants — many of them hungry, destitute and desperate — if these people are “migrants,” it’s because we made them so: by rejecting them, by refusing to accept them as immigrants.

With nowhere to go, and nowhere to return, we turn emigrants, refugees, into “migrants.” Bedouins of the desert.

Thus by a simple word trick, we refuse to admit our own part in turning emigrants and refugees into the bland and deceptive word “migrants.” As if that’s their “lifestyle.”

It’s one of the most deceptive words in the world today, and we in the United States are the most aggressive promoters of this bullshit.

More than half of the emigrants to our country, whom we have turned into migrants, come from Latin America. Here is a brief summary of why that’s happened, and our role in it, which we should not be able to disguise by calling refugees “migrants.”

**El Salvador:  More than 2 million people from El Salvador live in the United States today, after we, chiefly under Ronald Reagan’s administrations, funded Salvadoran death squads that killed more than 250,000 overwhelmingly poor people of Mayan ancestry in the 1980s: The statistics come from the notoriously “woke” Encyclopedia Britannica.

**Guatemala: ** Roughly 2 million people of Guatemalan (Mayan) origin live in the United States today, after we sponsored a CIA coup against legitimately elected President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 — because he wanted to nationalize United Fruit’s banana plantations. We funded the Guatemalan governments’ and private corporations’ death squads that tortured and killed more than 250,000 people, overwhelmingly Mayans — most of them, again, under President Reagan. (United Fruit changed its name to Chiquita in 1990. Chiquita means little and cute.)

**Honduras: ** More than 1 million people of Honduran origin live in the United States today, most of them driven out after the 2009 military coup — backed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama — that unleashed thousands of murders of unionists and Indigenous workers.

Vietnam:  More than 2.4 million people of Vietnamese origin live in the United States today; before 1960, about 290 Vietnamese people lived here, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

**Chile: ** About 200,000 people from Chile live here today; the Census Bureau did not count our emigrant Chilean population before 1970, because so few Chileans lived here. During and after Nixon’s and Kissinger’s CIA-backed coup in 1973, more than 30,000 Chileans were tortured, imprisoned, and/or “disappeared.” I know some of the survivors. Do you want to hear their stories? No, you do not. You would cover your ears.

Brazil:  During and after a CIA-backed military coup in 1964, thousands were tortured and executed under a 21-year neofascist dictatorship, backed by our presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan.

**Argentina: ** Backed by the CIA, Argentina’s Dirty War tortured and/or executed more than 30,000 people, with help from more than $50 million in U.S. military aid — according to the CIA.

Venezuela:  More than 1 million Venezuelans live in the United States. Couldn’t have anything to do with our economic embargo and other policies against that country, could it?

I could go on, but haven’t you had enough? Millions dead, tens of thousands tortured. Not even counting U.S. interventions in Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua.

But what is the use of counting corpses, unless we can do something about it?

And let’s face it, under today’s presidential coup and a spineless Congress, there is not much we can do about it.

This is not the first time I have objected to this abuse of the English language, nor, I suspect, will it be the last.

The sad thing is not that so few U.S. citizens understand that we — our governments: the people we elect — created the conditions that caused our so-called “immigration crisis.” No, the sad thing is the suffering we imposed upon millions of poor people who only sought a better life for themselves and their children.

In conclusion: Donald Drumpf (Germany), JD Vance (Ireland), Stephen Miller (Belarus), Marco Rubio (Cuba), Kash Patel (India): Why don’t y’all go back where you came from?

Here is a short primer of some of the causes of our immigration “crisis.”

The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War, by Mark Danner, Vintage Books, 1994.

The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup, by Dana Frank, Haymarket Books, 2018.

Women & Guerrilla Movements: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas, Cuba, by Karen Kampwirth, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.

Beyond Displacement: Campesinos, Refugees, and Collective Action in the Salvadoran Civil War, by Molly Todd. University of Wisconsin Press, 2010.

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner, Doubleday, 2006; and The Mission: the CIA in the 21st Century, Mariner Books, 2025.