Positive and negative sentences

In the hierarchy of death, anyone labelled “migrant” must take their place somewhere near the bottom

For others, they are an unwanted and uninvited swarm that Fortress Europe must keep out: full of undeserving would-be leeches who have no place in the west.

It is a dehumanised word: for all too many people, it is somewhere down with “petty criminal”, and who mourns petty criminals?

They’re not people: nobody would tolerate hearing about the drowning of human beings over and over again.

People from the UK moving abroad to pursue their career or financial interests, meanwhile, are “expats”, never emigrants or migrants.

“They are people – men, women and children, fathers and mothers, teachers and engineers, just like us – except they come from Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Why not just call them ‘people’, then list any other information we know that is relevant?”

Yes, they are all migrants – or, if you prefer, immigrants. Having moved to the UK to further their careers, some of them might perhaps be described as “economic migrants”.

Newspapers such as the Guardian have been using “migrant” in recent years in part because something similar happened to the word “immigrant”, when it became increasingly used by racists to mean something like “a black person in Britain who should go back home”.