Your papers, please — but mind your vocabulary

I used to carry an Alien Registration card.

That isn’t a metaphor, or a bit of nostalgic whimsy. It was a real laminated rectangle issued by the United States government, tucked into my wallet for years, identifying me as a resident alien. It even had my fingerprint on it, as if to reassure immigration officers that I wasn’t a little green man recently arrived from the moons of Jupiter.

It was, of course, a green card — the official term was “Alien Registration Receipt Card,” a phrase so evocative it could have been used in a sci-fi novel by Isaac Asimov. America, in its bureaucratic wisdom, had managed to reduce the human experience of migration to something that sounded like the customs manifest from a galactic freight shipment.

And yet, I never took offense. I wasn’t supposed to. That’s just what they were called. “Alien” was the legal term. There were resident aliens, nonresident aliens, illegal aliens—and while the classifications were stern, the tone was oddly impersonal. Not hateful. Just… weird. Like calling someone a temporary lifeform.

So imagine my surprise when, years later, I posted a short note on Reddit — of all places — about the complexities of U.S. visa law. I pointed out, reasonably I thought, that there’s a big difference between someone who overstays a visa and someone who jumps the border fence without documents.

The person who overstays a visa has already provided the U.S. government with police reports, vaccination records, birth certificates, and other assorted documents just to get in. Their fingerprints are on file. Their name is in a database. They didn’t sneak past anyone—they just didn’t leave when they were supposed to. That doesn’t make it right, but it’s a different situation entirely from someone who never went through any legal checkpoint at all.

I used the phrase “illegal alien,” not with malice, not even with emphasis—just as a term of legal distinction.

Deleted. No warning, no comment. Just scrubbed away by robot presumably designed to root out hate speech. The irony? The post was in a subreddit called PoliticalOpinions.

Apparently, political opinions are welcome, as long as they conform to the prevailing dialect of the bots.

I don’t mind that the phrase has fallen out of favor. Language evolves. So do our sensitivities. But there’s something Orwellian about erasing not only insults but historical terminology itself — especially when that terminology was once printed on government documents and handed to people like me, and is still, I believe, used by the IRS.

It’s a strange thing to be caught between systems — first labeled as an alien by law, then punished for repeating the label. The rules change mid-sentence, and you’re expected to have intuited the update before the algorithm does.

And here’s the final absurdity: when you go to your naturalization ceremony — the official moment when you stop being an alien and start being a citizen — you are required to toss your green card into a basket by the door. Just like that. No ceremony, no archive, no keepsake. Tossed like a boarding pass you will never need again.

If I had posted, “I was once classified as a temporary terrestrial entity by the Republic of North America,” maybe the bots would have left me alone. Maybe they’d have applauded the nuance. Or maybe they’d still have deleted it for sarcasm.

I don’t blame Reddit, exactly. I blame the illusion that public forums are neutral arenas for thought. They’re not. They are theme parks of conformity, with moderators and algorithms playing the role of bouncers who don’t care how politely you phrase your point if the keywords are wrong.

In the end, it’s not a tragedy. Just a reminder: if you want to speak your mind freely, you’d better have your own soapbox. Or at least your own essay column.

And no, I don’t still have that alien registration card. I gave it back at the door, as instructed. But I remember it perfectly: proof that for a few years of my life that I was once an alien.