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Can a person be "illegal"?

Just like young-earth creationists, social justice warriors love to play with words, and deliberately make equivocation fallacies.

There's this mantra that "there's no such a thing as an illegal person". It's essentially nitpicking on the term "illegal immigrant", and interpreting that expression as meaning that the person himself is, somehow, considered "illegal". The intent is to argue that there are no illegal immigrants, because people can't be "illegal".

This is one of the stupidest arguments ever.

The term "illegal immigrant" is just a shorthand to describe the status of an immigrant who has no legal right to stay in a country. It's not saying that the person himself is, somehow, "illegal". It's saying that what they are doing is illegal. (In this case, what they are doing is entering or staying in the country without legal permission to do so.) It's no different from saying that a person who steals something has done something illegal. The action is illegal in both cases.

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