Let’s say you were kicked out of a store for doing something they found disruptive and told you were no longer allowed to shop there. If you were to go back you could rightfully be charged with criminal trespassing.

Or if you were to take a shortcut through someone’s apple orchard on your way to work every day and the owner told you to stop doing that and you did it again, same thing.

That’s trespassing. Tres-PASSING (I think the word literally means “passing over” or “passing through.”) You have every right to keep people from coming onto your property for ANY reason and if they refuse to comply you can get the law involved.

But it seems like an entirely different thing if someone intended to come into your store and LIVE there, or to straight up pitch a tent on your apple orchard and LIVE there.

There’s the word “squatting” but that generally applies only to unused habitable property spurred by an emergency of some kind (i.e. if your family is about to freeze to death and you have nowhere else to go and you spot a half filled apartment building and you camp inside until the weather improves, etc.) so squatting isn’t really strong enough of a term either.

And since squatting is more a term used to describe an act born of desperation then “trespassing with intent to squat” doesn’t really capture the essence of this crime either.

Breaking and entering is a crime but when you think of someone breaking and entering you generally assume it’s for a temporary reason as well—usually for stealing or squatting.

So when you enter another country without that country’s permission for the intent of actually living there, the word “immigration” as part of the term really tugs at the wrong strings somehow. “Illegal immigration” just doesn’t carry enough rhetorical weight to it somehow.

We need a term that really hits at the heart of this crime that can’t easily be argued with that has some heft but doesn’t rise to the level of hyperbole in the mind of the average citizen. It needs to be accurate, pejorative in nature to reflect the criminal element of it, but without sounding unreasonably alarmist.

As I brainstorm myself I’d welcome any ideas you might have.

For example: let’s say we charged them with “invasion.” When you think of an invasion what comes to mind? An individual or family or small group? No. So just charging them with “invasion” might rise to the level of hyperbole and miss the mark for the average person (even though thats what it is). But there’s got to be something. I think maybe it should include a word that specifies the crossing of a legally recognized national border.