The "Nation of Immigrants" is a Settler Nation: The Public Pedagogy of Immigration and Indigeneity in the United States

• In Event: Transnational Public Pedagogies of Immigration: Race, Gender, Coloniality, and Media

Abstract

How polices and cultural productions work dialectically to legitimate each other is strikingly apparent in matters of immigration in the United States, the self-proclaimed “nation of immigrants.” Yet the U.S. has consistently been inhospitable to many immigrants along the lines of race and gender, and as indigenous scholars remind us, the U.S. is a settler nation; immigrants came later and in fact also became settlers. Furthermore, while Trump’s election disrupted the inclusive façade of “nation of immigrants” liberalism, the ongoing erasure of Native Americans that the “nation of immigrants” mythos relies on is predictably absent in mainstream representations, and only considered in academia. This paper connects immigration studies to what J. Kēhaulani Kauanui calls “enduring indigeneity”—the notion that indigenous people endure despite the eliminative logic of settler colonialism and that settler colonialism continues to hold out against indigeneity—around 1980s “nation of immigrants” discourse.

Grace Hong asserted in Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference that “affect is foundationally imbricated in the social relations created by neoliberal power” in order to resolve its contradictions (75). 1980s immigration discourses, developed in response to the civil rights and “second-wave” feminist movements, are a crucial ingredient in the cohesion of the neoliberal idea of democracy. For instance, in policy debates and popular culture, a conglomerate “Asian” population became “model minorities;” certain “Asians” joined white ethnic immigrants as quintessential Americans in the Reagan-era reframing of the U.S. as an increasingly inclusive haven for immigrants and refugees who worked hard for the sake of their heteropatriarchal families. This romanticized neoliberal re-branding of white supremacist heteropatriarchy circulated widely in policy and popular culture, and cohered as increased Latin American and especially Mexican undocumented immigration was framed as a crisis in relation to Reagan’s “War on Drugs,” welfare, and Mexican immigrant women’s alleged fecundity; the term “illegal alien,” affixed to Mexicans in the 1970s, connotes future crime. New immigration policy restricted welfare, increased border militarization and punishment, and excluded women from amnesty. The media featured alarmist stories about “illegal aliens” and violent Latina/o criminals. The 1980s model for immigration discourse is extant from DREAM rhetoric to president-elect Donald Trump’s flagrantly racist xenophobia. Both discourses are predicated upon and erase the (ongoing) U.S. colonizing project and indigeneity, as does much immigration scholarship and activism.

Policy and culture generate affect around race, gender, immigration, and capital in order to rationalize the de/valuation of certain immigrant lives and the persistent erasure of indigenous lives. I will analyze 1980s immigration discourse in light of indigenous scholars’ work on settler colonialism and indigeneity. What are the pedagogical implications of bring these fields together? Could attention to indigeneity move us out of the powerful “nation of immigrants” storyline that, immigration scholars have shown, hinges on multiple exclusions? What might it mean for activists if we consider the current production of illegality/deportability in relation to the criminalization of #NODAPL indigenous water protectors? How might “enduring indigeneity” help us rethink the nativism underscoring immigration policy, and concepts of borders, transnationality, and rights?

Author

• Leah Marie Perry, SUNY Empire State College