Some Americans look to the border and see huddled masses of desperate mothers and fathers fleeing with their children from violence and destitution. They see asylum seekers who should be offered not just protection, but also opportunity, by their more prosperous northern neighbor.

Others view the new arrivals as opportunistic and reckless because they have chosen to put vulnerable children at risk, bringing them on a dangerous, sometimes deadly journey in order to exploit the American legal system to get an unearned leg up in life.

Almost no one calls the newcomers “foreigners,” though it would be an accurate and relatively dispassionate term to use.

For its part, the federal government takes a clinical approach to the discussion. Some people argue that doing so dehumanizes migrants, which can also tilt the debate. For example, in government parlance, the foreign-born are referred to as “aliens.” Youth who migrate alone are called “unaccompanied alien children” or “unaccompanied minors.” Anyone intercepted by the Border Patrol while crossing the Rio Grande into Texas is considered “wet,” which, to many ears, sounds too much like a racist term for Mexican people. Even asylum seekers who look for Border Patrol agents and turn themselves in and ask for protection are counted in official data as “apprehended,” suggesting, inaccurately, that they were caught trying to sneak into the United States.

Readers pay close attention to the words we use as journalists to describe these issues, and for good reason. A few choice terms can shift the entire tone of a story. Years ago, the complaint I heard most often was about whether to call immigrants living in the United States without legal status “illegal” or “undocumented” (I see problems with both and try to avoid them). But now the questions are evolving. Should the situation with large numbers of people overwhelming Border Patrol stations be called a “crisis,” even if some of the chaos is self-imposed by the administration? Should rules intended to protect the welfare of children be called “loopholes” because they also make it easier for children to enter and remain in the United States?

Recently, a reader pointed out that this newsletter used the word “deployment” to describe a temporary assignment that sent two of my colleagues to live on the southern border for several months. While inside newsrooms, editors and reporters often use that word to describe story assignments of all kinds (“Caitlin, you’re being deployed to help with coverage of the royal wedding,”) the phrase itself doesn’t typically appear in print, except in stories about a military response in a violent conflict. In this case, “deployment” may have conjured images of chaos and danger along the border that don’t match up with reality, so we scrapped it. Likewise, President Trump’s favorite way of describing the process of detaining and then freeing migrants captured at the border — “catch and release,” he calls it. Sounds like fishing, many people pointed out, and desperate migrants, whatever you call them, are not quarry. Our preference now is to avoid the phrase, unless referring to the way the administration describes it.

The challenge here is not that a few of the words that are used in the immigration debate are politically charged, but that the majority of them are. In light of that, one useful exercise might be to pause for a moment, wherever you stand in the debate, and switch out the terms you typically use for those of people who see things differently — not as a way to make your views more like theirs, but to more fully understand the space between them.

Read earlier installments of Crossing the Border here.