Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it.
Kingsolver, Barbara. The Bean Trees. Harper & Row, 1988, p. 138.
At the time, many people referred to immigrants who had entered the United States without the proper documentation or by contravening our laws were referred to as “illegals” or “illegal immigrants”. Bank robbers and rapists were never referred to as “illegals”—only immigrants. Carroll and others pointed out that there was no such thing as an “illegal person”—only illegal acts.
The words “illegal alien” are crude and needlessly harsh. There are people who are in American illegally, but the people are not illegal. There is no such term in United States law as “illegal alien”. See {640788}.
Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist and poet. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood. Kingsolver earned degrees in biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a non-fiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally.
