From "swarm" to "illegal": dissecting how we talk about migrants

Language can go a long way into building understand and sympathy or promoting hate and fear. So how does the way we talk about migrants affect how we treat them?

The language used to describe the ebb and flow of people around the world has been contested for about as long as people have been ebbing and flowing around the world.

Today we're decoding the differences between immigrant, migrant, expat, and refugee... and asking how the language we use when we talk about migration shapes our attitudes and our policies.

To help us break it down, we were joined by three guests:

• Alexander Betts, Director of the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford
• Ruben Navarrette, syndicated columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group
• Ato Quayson, professor of English and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto

This segment was produced by The Current's Pacinthe Mattar, Shannon Higgins, Amil Niazi, and Leif Zapf-Gilje.