For the last several centuries, and increasingly so in recent years, millions of people have moved from one country to another. In the language of the Left, many of those people are referred to by the term “migrants,” while others get the label “settlers,” or even worse, “settler colonialists.”

Do you know the difference? Clearly, people who are “migrants” are associated with only positive connotations. They are decent human beings, just struggling to better their lives. Existing populations in the recipient countries are morally obligated not only to welcome them, but to accord them all rights of pre-existing residents, including rights to hold jobs, to attend public schools, to own or rent property, and even to receive generous welfare benefits.

“Settlers,” on the other hand, are bad, while “settler colonialists” are even worse, maybe the ultimate evil. Pre-existing populations don’t have to accept them at all, and indeed, are perfectly entitled to kill them.

But how can you tell the which are which?

Perhaps we can find the answer by looking at some examples. For instance, the people coming from Latin America into the U.S. across the southern border are clearly “migrants.” With a little searching, you can find hundreds of news articles referring to these arrivals as “migrants.” For a tiny sample, here is Reuters on October 4 (“Thousands of migrants have crossed into the U.S. from Mexico in recent weeks . . . .”); or PBS on September 21 (“What’s behind the influx of migrants crossing the U.S. southern border?”); or CBS News from September 2021 (“The number of migrant arrivals reported along the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year 2022 surpassed 2 million in August”).

Remarkably, I can’t find a single piece referring to these millions of arriving people as “settlers,” let alone “settler colonialists.” If those terms are inapplicable, then why? Clearly most to all of these arrivals intend to stay for the long term, that is, to settle. By the standard definition of the word, they are “settlers.” Moreover, many of them very understandably tend on arrival to congregate in communities of people who have come from the same place, and who often speak the same language. Aren’t these communities fairly described as “colonies”? Here in New York, we have dozens of such communities, for example “Little Haiti” in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn, or “Little Russia” in the Brighton Beach section, not to mention multiple Chinatowns in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. The City of Hamtramck in Michigan famously has so many Middle Eastern Muslims that it has elected an all-Muslim City Coucil.

The hundreds of thousands of people arriving in Europe from North Africa and the Middle East similarly universally get the label “migrants.” Again, it is easy to find hundreds of examples. Here are a few: From Le Monde, October 14 (“More than ever, the southern French town of Menton is facing an influx of migrants arriving from neighboring Italy.”); PBS, September 15 (“What’s behind the surge in migrants arriving to Italy?”); France 24, September 14 (“Around 7,000 migrants arrive on Italy's Lampedusa island”).

Similarly, try to find a single piece referring to these hundreds of thousands of arrivals as “settlers” or “settler colonialists.” I can’t.

The terms “settlers” and “settler colonialists” are instead reserved for a few specific groups of people: the various European colonies in Africa (nearly all of which, however, have been abandoned); the remaining Europeans in South Africa; the Europeans (and their descendants) who came to North and South America, Australia and New Zealand; and the Jews in Israel.

If you want it all explained to you, you might consider this 2019 article from the Fordham Urban Law Journal by Monika Batra Kashyap, title “Unsettling Immigration Laws: Settler Colonialism and the U.S. Immigration Legal System.” The article begins by acknowledging that it has adopted calling the U.S. a “settler colonial society” as its “premise.” In other words, that’s the assumption, rather than a conclusion reached after examining some sort of evidence:

This Article flows from the premise that the United States is a present-day settler colonial society whose laws and policies function to support an ongoing structure of invasion called “settler colonialism.”

Once the author has adopted that “premise,” it flows obviously that everything the U.S. does in the immigration arena is by definition “settler colonialism,” whereas the efforts of outsiders to come in to settle and form colonies can’t possibly fit that term:

[T]his article seeks to broaden the understanding of the U.S. immigration system using a settler colonialism lens. The Article analyzes contemporary U.S. immigration laws and policies such as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) and Trump’s immigration policies within a settler colonialism framework in order to locate the U.S. immigration system at the heart of settler colonialism’s ongoing project of elimination and subordination.

Try as you might in analyzing this or other such articles, you will be hard-pressed to find any basis for the migrant/settler distinction other than this: Europeans, Americans, and Jews are “settlers” or “settler colonialists”; everybody else is a “migrant.” In other words, it’s just pure, naked, raw racism.