Is The Miami Herald guilt-ridden with white man's burden, soft on crime or just muddle headed? These are among the questions raised by some readers about what they see as The Herald's squeamishness in writing about . . well, that's the issue. Are they illegal aliens? Undocumented workers? Or as some say in South Texas, just plain wetbacks.

The choice is critical. In the escalating battle over immigration, all sides agree on at least this: words are power. The labels that stick become the prism through which the nation views the issue. This helps determine which side wins. So it is no mistake that a bill offering a path to citizenship for thousands of illegal-immigrant students is titled the "Dream Act" by pro-immigrant forces. Who would deny hopes and the American Dream to youths?

The opponents know verbal tricks of their own. They have managed to turn "amnesty" into a dirty word, given the failure to halt illegal immigration after the last two amnesties. "Illegal alien shamnesty, " says conservative columnist Michelle Malkin. The student bill is "amnesty light."

The effect can be more than political. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called the fight over illegal immigration "a war here at home" as important as Iraq. Some take such words literally. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that 144 "nativist extremist" organizations have sprung up from nearly none five years ago, including nine classified as hate groups, among them the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan supremacists.

Hispanics, legal and illegal, worry. A national poll by Sergio Bendixen found that 83 percent of Mexican immigrants and 79 percent from Central America believe that discrimination against them is growing. Racial violence may not be far behind. Caught in the middle are the media. My e-mail box has been deluged this past week with readers expressing opinions on the issue.

At one end of the media spectrum, CNN's Lou Dobbs and much of Fox News use the phrase "illegal alien." Hardly surprising. That is the anti-immigrant term. Dobbs and Fox pander to the populist backlash against immigration. But there is a catch. "Illegal alien" is also the term that the government has used for years, and is, if you pull out your dictionary, technically correct.

Most of U.S. journalism, earnest to a fault, often tying itself into knots to be both correct and politically correct, but not wanting to be irresponsible like Gingrich, rejects the word "alien." Iván Román, executive director of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, likened it to being from "outer space, " dehumanized and therefore fair game for discrimination. Instead, most newspapers and television news programs appear to use "illegal immigrant, " the usage set by the Associated Press Stylebook.

Then there is The Herald. "In South Florida, you can't assume to know the legal status of someone, so we need a term that covers all the bases, " Anders Gyllenhaal, the executive editor, told me, noting the dense mix of asylum cases, Cuban privileges, visas and violations. "We understand that as 'undocumented worker' or 'undocumented immigrant, ' " he said. Those also are usages advocated by Hispanic groups, as is "indocumentado, " the word used by El Nuevo Herald and most Spanish media. So it is that in the celebrated case of the Gomez brothers, The Herald and El Nuevo refer to them as "undocumented students" and "estudiantes indocumentados."

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