Glossary

Successful collaboration begins with a shared language, hence the need for a glossary. This joint effort of contributors from several teams ensures, on the one hand, terminological and conceptual coherence across not only our theoretical approaches, but also the qualitative case studies and quantitative research conducted in OPPORTUNITIES. On the other hand, our glossary facilitates communication between the academic side of the project and the fieldwork conducted by NGOs, uniting our teams working from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ghana, Italy, Mauritania, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania and Senegal.

For more information about the Structure and Objectives of the Glossary, click here...)

Alien

In national and international law, as well as in official documents of the EU, the term alien refers to “a foreign-born resident who is not a citizen by virtue of parentage or naturalization and who is still a citizen or subject of another country” (qtd. from the entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica). More often than not, the official use of the term also enters the mass media, where it is deployed to depict ‘those who are not from here.’ Thanks to such ‘common’ language usage which extends beyond legal meanings, the term has the power to shape public discourse on migration, thus forming public opinion and attitudes toward migration. For example, alien could then be taken literally as “belonging to another […] place,” being “born in, or owing allegiance to, a foreign country,” or being “of a foreign nature or character” (definition qtd. from the OED).

In a comprehensive review of language and metaphors of immigration used by the courts and judiciary in the U.S., Keith Cunningham-Parmeter (2011) argues that immigration metaphors not only influence judicial matters but also the social discourse and the broader debate on migration: “The theoretical study of language has very practical consequences for the people defined by immigration metaphors.” (1545) Yet such metaphorical language usage is not restricted to English-speaking contexts. In the Netherlands, for instance, the Dutch term allochtoon, which literally means “emerg­ing from another soil” (and thus constitutes the opposite of the word autochtoon, which trans­lates as “emerging from this soil”) has widely been used to refer to immigrants and their descendants (Bpedia 2023, n. p.). The term was introduced by Dutch sociologist Hilda Verwey-Jonker in the early 1970s as a replacement of the terms guest worker or immigrant to reflect the permanent nature of their stay in the Netherlands. Its implied notion of ‘otherness’ (i.e., the notion of belonging to ‘an­other soil’) as well as its metaphoric implications of ‘not being of the same root,’ however, eventually led to the official abandonment of the term (Dutch News 2016).

⇢ see also Attitudes, beliefs, and values, Citizenship

References and further reading: 

Cunningham-Parmeter, Keith. 2011. “Alien Language: Immigration Metaphors and the Jurisprudence of Alien Language: Immigration Metaphors and the Jurisprudence of Otherness.” Fordham Law Review 79.4: 1545–1598.

DBpdedia. 2023. “About: Allochtoon.” DBpdedia. URL: https://dbpedia.org/page/Allochtoon.

Dutch News. 2016. “Government Agencies to Stop Using to Stop Using ‘Allochtoon’ to Describe Immigrants.” Dutch News. November 1, 2016. URL: https://www.dutchnews.nl/2016/11/government-agencies-to-ditch-allochtoon-to-describe-immigrants/.

European Commission. 2020. “Alien.” European Migration Network (EMN) Glossary. URL: https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/networks/european-migration-network-emn/emn-asylum-and-migration-glossary/glossary/alien_en.

Scholten, Peter. 2013. “The Multilevel Governance of Migrant Integration: A Multilevel Governance Perspective on Dutch Migrant Integration Policies.” In The Discourses and Politics of Migration in Europe, edited by Umut Korkut,, Jonas Hinnfors, and Helen Drake, 151–170. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Category: D

Work Package: 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8

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