Overlabeling

pickles & olives, then pickles, then olives
Photo by Sandy Kemsley.  Licensed by Creative Commons.

In a story about immigration bureaucracy reform, doesn't the following sentence make a redundant reference to the legal status of the students?

...education legislation, in the form of the Dream Act, will allow better access to universities for promising illegal students who are working toward legalization.

Why the word "illegal?"  If the students are working toward legalization, isn't it understood that they have an immigration status problem?

This is a perfect example of the point I made in my previous post, and a demonstration of the erroneous but common tendency of journalists to define people with immigration problems with labels that refer to their immigration status more frequently than they define people with other legal problems with labels that refer to their alleged violations.

The sentence in the story above could have been reworded as I've indicated below and been just as accurate, without the person-defining word "illegal" (or "undocumented" or any similar variation):

...education legislation, in the form of the Dream Act, will allow better access to universities for promising students who are working toward legalization.

If you must, end it with "toward their own legalization."  But once these people are defined as students in this sentence, that is all the labeling and the defining needed there.