One of the things we, in our consensus-fabrication team, feel most proud of is our skill in manipulating semantics and the vocabulary in order to confound, mislead, condition and ultimately shape people's minds, thoughts, opinions and attitudes. The strategy is to use the huge potential of language for modifying the audience's ideas, introducing new ones, as well as profiling people's perception of reality. We do this in several ways, like by coining new terms, adscribing other meanings to existing words, replacing or displacing concepts, semantic substitution, etc. Though these are very old techniques, nowdays most of this manipuative language comes from our think-tanks, even if not seldom some or other of the many thousands of local and small-scale activist workshops worldwide come up with a new gem of their own discovery that we promptly feed to the policy propagandists so they arrange its widespreading via mainstream/social media and the policy enforcers' public addresses. Needless to say, this is closely connected with political correctness: first we present the public with whichever new product from our laboratories by flooding the media with it, then we convince people that the old term or any opposing idea (usually better but too crudely representing reality) is offensive, derogatory, insolidary, etc, and therefore socially incorrect to express, shameful to think or feel.
At times we play this game via some innovative vocabulary (as we did, for instance, with the word ' conspiranoid ') aimed to force the listener to a conscious reflection on the proposed term, and hopefully welcome it. This approach has, however, the disadvantage that, being apparent, a part (usually quite small, thanks Jehovah) of the audience, those more critical or more brainwash-aware may straightforwardly reject, defy or even unmask it. Thus, what most often we try to do is, taking advantage of the subconscious level at which language works within our brain, to come up with as subtle as possible words or meanings (alike subliminal advertising messages) in order to not trigger any mental alert or self-defense mechanism: the public, unawares, buys into the switch and, before they can realize, the new idea has been planted in their minds, where it grows and blossoms without them even knowing it.
One of our best and most overwhelmingly successful masterpieces in the last two decades has been the promotion of the word at the expense of the -admittedly- more precise and proper , with the ultimate goal of whitewashing the -again admittedly- illegal and massive entry of foreigners into a nation's territory. We issued the directives to push this word unto basically the whole planet and to shove it down the citizens' throats around the mid-late 2010's; and not only the policy enforcers and propagandists dutifully followed our instructions, but even many academic authorities gladly complied to cooperate. Please bear with me while I explain how and why we did it.
According to previous editions of the Collins English dictionary, an is "a person who immigrates", meaning "to come to a place or country of which one is not a native in order to settle there". Also, immigration is "the movement of non-native people into a country in order to settle there." Clearly, these definitions match exactly and precisely what the flocks of dark skinned peoples do when moving from their countries to the Whitelands.
On the other hand, as per the same dictionary, a is "a person or animal that moves from one region, place, or country to another". Although, yes, the aforementioned swarthy herds also fall within this definition (they're persons moving from one country to another), the notion is clearly more general, since it too applies to animals moving between regions. In turn, the verb has two definitions, the 1st being "to go from one place to settle in another, esp in a foreign country", which is almost synonymous with immigrate except for this missing hue: "of which one is not a native in order to settle there"; and that is a crucial hue, since it strongly conditions how immigrants are perceived by the host country's citizens, who may see them as 'those people who do not belong here and aim to settle here', and therefore feel more inclined to reject illegal aliens. Such perception had to be corrected.
This was paramount, and it is exactly what with our word substitution we aimed to eradicate from the minds of the Whitefolks. Here is where the 2nd definition of migrate came to our help. It goes like this: "(of birds, fish, etc) to journey between different habitats at specific times of the year." Up until around ten years ago, the concept of migration had mostly belonged to the realm of zoology (or, in the case of men, to anthropology before the appearance of nation states), and so we thought: which normal person would think of opposing Nature's creatures journeying between different habitats? Who would want to be seen by others as a freak objecting to the natural process of migration? Thus, being both terms so semantically and morphologically akin, we saw migrant as the perfect, the ideal replacement candidate for immigrant. And that's what we did all over the world and simultaneously with a promptness and effectiveness only comparable to how, years later, we did with the Covid panic campaign. By the time, I remember having being astonished by our own success: in the blink of an eye, in the lapse of a couple weeks I saw the word immigrant completely vanishing from the social sphere. No media, no politician used it ever again any more.
As I said, academicians also cooperated in this swap: Collins dictionary modified the definition of immigrant and removed the telltale, the shameful part: "of which one is not a native", so that now it means simply "a person who comes to a country in order to settle there". But that was just in English. In Spanish -the second most natively-spoken language in the world after Mandarin- we did a more daring job, noting that the DRAE (the official dictionary in virtually all Spanish speaking countries) up to its 22nd edition (i.e. up to the mid 2010's) did not even include the word migrante (migrant) at all! How dared they? The noun/adjective simply did not exist for half a billion people worldwide. This cried out for an immediate remedy, and so we instructed the Real Academia de la Lengua to add migrante to their dictionary, which they kindly did for us after its 23rd edition, around the very same time when we managed to unoficcially but completely ban inmigrante (immigrant) throughout the Spanish-speaking social and political life.
Now, what I find most fascinating is the scope and degree to which these semantic technics infiltrate people's minds: almost nobody is spared, from the less suspecting, the most compliant and politically correct individuals (naturally enthusiastic adopters of our Newspeak), all the way across the social spectrum, to the opposite end where the staunchest anti-globalists, the supercritical, high-IQ and most mistrustful citizens reside (whose attitude we expected to be of fiercest resistance). So powerful both our artificial dissemination of this vocabulary and the psychological mechanism by which it gets implanted within the brain are. And this is why I can't help being amused -and feeling a bit desdainful- when I see the most diehard anti-immigration characters, politicians, bloggers, analysts and influencers unvaryingly using the word migrant instead of immigrant, thus working for us to further our agenda and promote the very same ideas they're allegedly against. Since they probably don't experience any cognitive dissonance from this, I can only conclude they're about as naïve as the rest and perhaps not as clever -let alone rebellious- as they like to think of themselves.
