The Associated Press last week officially omitted "illegal immigrant" from its stylebook. Many media outlets already use the term "undocumented immigrant" to describe people who are living in the United States illegally.

The Star is one such newspaper. On Saturday, Start Editor John Moore wrote:

For the past two years, The Star's style ...has used the term "undocumented immigrant" instead of "illegal immigrant" in news stories when discussing a person who is living in this country illegally.

He's right.  Why? The reasoning is simple. People aren't illegal, as the lefty saying goes.

Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of the AP, said in an interview with Poynter.org that the use of labels in writing is "kind of a lazy device that those of us who type for a living can become overly reliant on as a shortcut. It ends up pigeonholing people or creating long descriptive titles where you use some main event in someone's life to become the modifier before their name."

Uh, "undocumented immigrant" is no different as a lazy, pigeonholing device than "illegal immigrant," using her logic. It's still a label, isn't it? It's just a softer one, which conveniently downplays the illegal part.  You could go with "one who is in the country illegally", but that sort of conflicts with Carroll's reluctance to use "long descriptive titles." Heck, calling someone an immigrant period, even one who is here legally, is a label. Should we drop that too?

It doesn't help her reasoning that "undocumented immigrant is less accurate than "illegal immigrant." Some illegal immigrants ARE documented--with stolen information. However, all of them are illegal. Why not use the most accurate term?

The truth of the matter is that the AP dropped "illegal immigrant" because of political correctness--they caved to political pressure from special interest groups or they themselves fall on the left-hand side of the illegal immigration issue. They are just fine with labels, especially when it comes to labeling conservatives. There are lots of people who want to influence the debate by changing the terms and the AP is facilitating that. Fine for an advocacy group, not fine for objective journalists.

Here's a fun challenge--write an entire article about illegal immigration without mentioning "illegal immigration!" If you need help, use this article as a guide.

There, you'll find examples such as:

•         "immigration overhaul that would make legal residents of 11 million immigrants"
•         "If it wasn't for immigrants in this country..."
•         "Without the skills and the professional workmanship of immigrant farmworkers today--that unfortunately don't have papers"
•         "About 14,000 undocumented farmworkers..."
•         "The national debate about immigration and a pathway to citizenship for immigrants..."
•         "The immigrants who are here are really a backbone of our economy."
•         "..the majority of field laborers he knows have no documents."
•         "...he said his parents are undocumented workers...."

You will earn bonus points for describing illegal immigration protesters as "flag-bearing" when the picture in the article shows they are waving red flags, if you label a fringe ideological organization as merely "nonpartisan", if you use three or more heartstring-tugging personal stories, or if you fail to include any opposing voices on a major political topic whatsoever!

The Star ran a story Sunday about Don Rosenberg, a Westlake Village man who embarked on a crusade against unlicensed drivers after his 25-year-old son was killed in a traffic accident in 2010. Here's some more information about his ordeal that will enhance the original article.

In February, Rosenberg dressed down the Los Angeles Police Commission for proposing to refuse to impound vehicles of unlicensed drivers.

"There's over a million unlicensed drivers in California, and they're killing people every day," he said.

"Almost all of them are illegal aliens," Rosenberg told immigration expert Michael Cutler in a May interview.

It doesn't take a leap of logic, then, to see that illegal aliens--some of whom who are learning how to drive "on the job" in California--are killing people every day.

After his son died, Rosenberg did some research and was "shocked" at what he found.

"All the killings, all the tragic accidents, and fifty or sixty thousand fender benders [were] caused by illegal drivers and nobody seemed to care," he said.

That understanding places Rosenberg--who describes himself as a "pretty far-to-the-left liberal"--at odds with the government and the media. He's testified against a bill from a Democratic legislator, called Jerry Brown's administration an "absolute disaster", and said the Los Angeles Times exhibited "a dereliction of their responsibility beyond belief."

"Even the newspapers never talk to the true victims" who lost loved ones or were badly injured, he said.

"They make the victims appear to be the illegal aliens."

Rosenberg's son was run over by man whose immigration status was in question. The Spanish language Hoy Los Angeles reported Roberto Galo was a "suspected illegal immigrant." However, according to the grieving father's story on unlicensedtokill.org, a police inspector originally told the family that the driver was an illegal immigrant, only to call back three days later and say he was in the country legally.

"I do not care if he's here legally or illegally, but he killed my son," Rosenberg has said.

Galo's immigration status notwithstanding, the passion surrounding the issue of unlicensed drivers is undoubtedly caused by frustration over the government's reluctance to enforce immigration laws.

When the Los Angeles Police Commission and Police Chief Charlie Beck appeared at a town hall event in Northridge, hundreds of people packed the room and one after another criticized LAPD's plan to not impound cars of unlicensed drivers. Rosenberg was one of them.

KTLA reported, "For many, this is clearly tied to illegal immigration."

When Rosenberg spoke about how his son died and against the policy for more than his allotted two minutes, the panel cut him off, leading to a dramatic confrontation.

"If you think this is fair you come down the road and you meet my son at the cemetery and you tell him that this is fair," he lectured. His voice shaking, he noted the irony the commission displayed.

"You're talking about violating the law but you won't allow your rules to be bent?"

Later that day, he told libertarian talk-radio hosts John and Ken that the commission's two-minute rule is "so sacrosanct, you can't break that" but they can ignore a law on the books that puts people's lives in danger without a second thought.

"I feel like I'm on another planet," he said.

When asked by a reporter what his son would think about the applause Rosenberg received from the crowd after his speech, he replied his son be satisfied because "he was in law school--he believed in the law."

In addition to hospitals going out of business, prison populations swelling, drug importation rising, crippling congestion, and just general social upheaval, we can add automobile accidents to the list of problems caused by rampant illegal immigration.

The Star reported Monday that the driver in a Camarillo crash that killed four people and seriously injured two doesn't have a whole lot of experience driving in the good ol' U.S. of A.

When investigators spoke to him, the suspect didn't remember anything and thought he was still in Mexico, Popp said. Officials said he had injuries to his head and other parts of his body.

An undocumented immigrant, Ramirez-Lopez did not have a license, and relatives told investigators he'd been driving for perhaps a year at most, Popp said.

It's not something that's usually reported, but when you import poor workers from poor countries, they tend not to have lots of driving experience. Next time you're driving your kids around, think about the hundreds of thousands of inexperienced illegal immigrant drivers on the road with you.

Witnesses said there was moderate traffic and Ramirez-Lopez was tailgating a vehicle in front of him for about three miles from Fifth Street, Popp said. Witnesses also told authorities that, before the crash, the suspect was periodically swerving halfway into the westbound lane as if to see if it was clear enough to pass, said the traffic investigator.

We--and by "we" I mean everybody but law-and-order conservatives--allow illegal immigrants to come to a country where you almost can't work without a car, then wonder why one-in-seven drivers don't have automobile insurance, at a cost of $10 billion a year.

Lest we get too comfortable patting ourselves on the back for being fully insured, documented citizens, let me point out that it was already obvious the driver was an illegal immigrant before the Star published this follow-up story. The crash occurred at 6 a.m. in an agricultural area. I don't know many citizens that get themselves up that early to go bust their hump in a field all day long.

This is not a defense of illegal immigration, but I notice that my family-oriented, traditional, religious, Midwestern-style agricultural-based ethos has much in common with some Central American cultures. Both value hard work, Christianity, helping one another, and loving your family.

Progressives, on the other hand, consistently punish hard work and undermine Christianity and the family unit. They're the real culprits that cause our fractious 21st Century America. Blame the people that swung the door to the borders wide open for the ensuing social ills, not the people who crossed over.

I don't use the word "lie" lightly, but I think it applies here.

First, some background. Ventura County Congressman Elton Gallegly supports E-Verify, which runs social security numbers through a federal database to determine if a worker is authorized to work in this country.

Pro-illegal-immigrant groups are running radios ads on Spanish-language stations criticizing Gallegly and others for advocating this common-sense program. According to the Star:

SEIU and America's Voice Education Fund, which supports comprehensive immigration reform, are the two organizations behind the ad campaign. A similar ad will appear in La Opinion, the nation's largest Spanish-language newspaper.

Immigration supporters and others argue that requiring employers to use E-Verify to check the backgrounds of potential workers would have a huge impact on Latinos in California and across the country.

Before we delve into the lie that America's Voice Education Fund is perpetuating, I can't let this slip by without comment--"immigration supporters" oppose Gallegly? Does that make him anti-immigration? Or is he only anti-illegal-immigration?  Let's not forget there's a difference between those two, people.

I digress. America's Voice Education Fund--what a pleasant name, by the way--"supports comprehensive immigration reform," which is a euphemism for amnesty.  Here's the group's problem with Gallegly:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, has filed legislation mandating the use of E-Verify, even though a government report last year found errors and other problems with the program. Gallegly is a co-sponsor of the bill, which cleared the Judiciary Committee last week and is now headed to the House floor for a vote.

Gallegly is a co-sponsor of an E-Verify bill, and a government report "found errors and other problems with the program."

What kind of errors, you might ask? America's Voice's website blares, "E-Verify has 50% Failure Rate, Throws Hundreds of Thousands of Legal Workers Out of a Job."

A 50% fail rate, huh? According to the government, it has a 96% success rate. Who's right?

This is where the lie comes in, but it's important to see how tricky America's Voice is.

93.1% of E-Verify's results correctly identified authorized workers as "authorized." Only 0.7% were authorized workers that E-Verify said were not authorized. America's Voice wants you to think that 0.7% is 50%. Pretty brazen, right?

Here's how they got to 50%. E-Verify found that 6.2% of the workers it checked came back as unauthorized. Of that 6.2%, half were illegal immigrants that E-Verify failed to identify. In other words, the 50% error rate only includes illegal immigrants who got away with it, not workers that were authorized to work but came back as unauthorized, as America's Voice would have you believe.