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He’s using it not as a legal term but as a meta description. Arnold Kling outlined in The Three Languages of Politics that most political language is not for convincing opponents but rather for rallying those on the edge of the tribe, reminding them of why they’re in the tribe:
In this case, Vance is describing the meta-category of people who find a way to systematically skirt the usual requirements for citizenship or residency, naming it for the central case while describing an edge case. Anything which looks like a back-channel or backdoor into the US for a steady flow of non-Americans is in this big-tent category. It smells like sabotage, a subversion of the Congressionally-passed immigration and naturalization processes by which people from other nations become legal citizens with full privileges.
For some in this category, it looks like claiming asylum, getting their deportation hearing deferred a year, getting some money from the US taxpayer, and then never showing up.
For others, it’s seeking refuge because their home country is crappy, if not specifically in a state of emergency. For the conspiratorial mindset, this is the time to check intelligence operations in that country and see if the deep state did something like assassinate a head of country to get refugees to flow to America.
That's fine, but if he wants a meta-descriptor he should be probably not use one containing a word which is strictly false in relation to the group he is trying to describe.
I’ll agree to that as soon as advocates for these people return the unadorned word “immigrant” to its rightful place as a synonym of “naturalized citizen”.
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