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I'm sympathetic to the view of Asion and Pinnix that the illegal label has a pejorative ring that dehumanizes humans. In the story last Saturday on college admissions, the paper used the words illegal or illegally 16 times to refer to kids who want to go to college. Whether you agree with the no-immigrant-student policy or not, every repetition of illegal is a hammer-blow that reinforces stereotypes about a population. We're talking about high school teenagers here, not hard-core offenders repeatedly being deported and sneaking back across the border.

But we have to use some language. Steve Merelman, The N&O's front-page editor who oversees word usage, defends the current illegal immigrant standard. The phrase describes reality under current law, he said, and if people have a problem, they need to change the law.

"I don't see much point in perfuming what some people think stinks," he said. "We can call them 'undocumented' or we can call them 'unauthorized,' but it still doesn't stop them from being deported. It seems cold, but that's our job -- to take a cold-eyed look at things."

Pinnix, the immigration attorney, noted that illegal is not technically accurate. Illegal, when applied to immigrants, refers to how they got into the country, but they're not committing a crime by being here. Deportations are civil, not criminal, proceedings.

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MY TAKE: I'd loosen the style manual to allow undocumented and unauthorized. Illegal may be used to describe how people got here -- "immigrants who are in the country illegally" -- but not to describe the people themselves -- "illegal immigrants."

And rule out aliens, legally correct though it may be. Ditto for illegals. I don't like adjectives as nouns, especially as a label for people who violated the law to improve their families' lives.

(Fastest-growing unauthorized population: people from India, up 133 percent from 2000 to 2005, to 270,000. Mexicans are the largest population, about 6 million, up 40 percent, according to the Department of Homeland Security.)

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