Immigration Commentary PDF

This commentary argues that prescriptive immigration scholarship has something to learn from the rise of Donald Trump. The Republican party’s relatively close ideological engagement with the aspirations of its immigration dissenters (white nationalists) has paid political dividends in the long run b...

This commentary argues that prescriptive immigration scholarship has something to learn from the rise of Donald Trump. The Republican party’s relatively close ideological engagement with the aspirations of its immigration dissenters (white nationalists) has paid political dividends in the long run by allowing the party to capture a passion for immigration issues and marry that atavistic energy to legal know-how. But mainstream Democrats, along with scholars whose immigration reform prescriptions align with that group, reject as fantasy the open-borders demands of its dissenters. Yet fantasy can be made real, or at least spark real political enthusiasm, as Trump illustrates. A deeper engagement with the dreams of open-borders advocates, like the group #Not1More Deportation, could in time prove similarly fruitful and galvanizing for the mainstream immigration left. The rich liberal democracies of the West are in crisis and immigrants are the scapegoats. Donald Trump’s ascension to the White House on a baldly xenophobic platform has brought a resurgent blood and soil nationalism to the zenith of world power. More troubling still, this racialized nationalism has taken hold in a country that appeared relatively at ease navigating the shoals of multiracial democracy. The radical, racist, islamophobic fringe is now the center; the cosmopolitan center – 65 percent of Americans approve of granting citizenship to undocumented immigrants1 – is shut out of national power. The majority is in dissent; the minority of longtime, right-wing immigration dissenters now call the shots. Trump’s revanchist cabinet appointments2 and racist executive orders3 underscore the point. Donald Trump performed dissent and won. And nowhere was this performance more thoroughgoing and galvanizing than in immigration. From his opening salvo on Twitter, declaring that “Druggies, drug dealers, rapists and killers are coming across the southern border. When will the U.S. get smart and stop this travesty?,”4 to his oft-repeated promise to “build a big, beautiful wall” along the United States’ border with Mexico, Trump played the tribune of America’s immigration id to perfection; playing that part swept him into the White House.5 What can we learn from the role that immigration dissenters played in the rise of Trump? What does the character and depth of dissent in immigration politics tell scholars about how to approach normative or prescriptive questions in immigration law? In this commentary I reflect broadly on these questions; mapping the landscape of immigration dissent on both sides of the status quo, delineating the power asymmetry between dissenters on the right and left of immigration issues, and concluding with a call for immigration scholars and reformers to expand the horizon of possible reform to include the cosmopolitan vision increasingly pushed by immigrant activist groups. Engaging the idealistic aspirations of these activists, I argue, will pay dividends by helping to match the know-how of scholars and reformers to the passion of radical pro-immigrant dissenters. To date, dissenting, pro-immigrant visions of immigration law and policy have not played a prominent role in normative discussions of immigration law and policy. The fringe was thought to be just that,6 and so not much worth worrying about; the center was thought to be durable. As a result, scholars have hewed closely to Joseph Carens’s entreaty to offer only pragmatic prescriptions about migration: “[w]hatever we say ought to be done about international migration should not be too far from what we think actually might happen.”7Now is the time to assess whether this limit on immigration law’s normative imaginary is too cramped, arid and technocratic for our tumultuous, revanchist age. I. The Landscape of Dissent in Immigration 1 The normative baseline in the United States The substance of dissent, i.e., what counts as a “dissenting” political viewpoint, can only be understood in particular contexts and by reference to a median viewpoint, a status quo, or some other baseline. Dissenting positions are nearer the tail-ends of the distribution of political beliefs on any given topic. The status quo in American immigration law and policy over the last few decades involves a few core principles that enjoyed robust bipartisan approval in the pre-Trump era. First, that immigration levels should remain at or near historic highs and that immigrants should be drawn from around the globe. Second, that deportation levels should also remain at historic highs and that immigration enforcement ought to focus on the southern border with Mexico, as well as on deporting immigrants who come into contact with local law enforcement. Third, that immigration law and policy should be set at the national level and administered technocratically, that is, largely by expert bureaucrats with only periodic policy and legislative input from Congress and only indirect democratic input from states and localities. Immigration levels are at historic highs when measured by raw numbers of immigrants8 and near all-time highs when measured by the percentage of the U.S. population that is foreign born. The racial, ethnic, and religious diversity of the immigrant population, however, is unprecedented. Even as recently as 1960 fully 75 percent of the immigrant population hailed from Europe.9 Today European immigrants constitute 11 percent of immigrants. Over half of immigrants were born in the Americas, and 30 percent in Asia.10 The Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 precipitated this transformation of U.S. racial composition by abolishing the racist quotas from the 1920s that favored northern-European immigration. This expression of civil-rights era colorblindness in immigration law ushered in the numerical decline of the white majority, a decline which has only recently emerged as an object of self-conscious national reflection, and a unified theory of mass-right politics. Given the high level of the immigrant population and the radical diversity of entering immigrants, it is surprising that an explicitly xenophobic politics has taken this long to go mainstream. Immigration enforcement levels are also at historic highs. Deportation levels have multiplied by a factor of nine in the last two decades.11 Immigration and border enforcement expenditures are allocated more federal dollars than all other law enforcement combined.12 Even as these levels remain high, the population of deportable immigrants, often referred to as undocumented or “illegal” immigrants, has remained stable at approximately eleven million people since 2009.13 Which of these millions of undocumented immigrants is placed in deportation proceedings at any given time is largely a function of which undocumented persons happen to come into contact with local law enforcement through arrest or prosecution for crimes that run the gamut from petty misdemeanors to murder. Racial profiling plays a prominent role in this process. The bulk of those who are deported have been convicted of minor crimes, since the population of truly villainous immigrants is vanishingly small.14 All of this makes immigration enforcement systematically arbitrary. In the last few years of the Obama administration it appeared that there had been some decline in the number of deportations of immigrants in the domestic interior – as opposed to the border.15 But even pre-Trump there appeared to be no political traction for the idea of a major de-escalation in immigration enforcement in Congress or the Executive. Instead the pre-Trump consensus appeared to point toward continued escalation of immigration enforcement, alongside relatively high immigration levels. Another important consensus feature of the status quo is the relative dominance of centralized law and policymaking authority. While the arc of immigrants’ lives play out in thousands of diverse neighborhoods throughout the United States, the value of those lives to “the Nation” is determined in Washington, D.C. As natural as it seems today to regard immigration as a national issue, for much of American history it was largely a local one.16 States and localities played quite significant roles in regulating immigration until the late nineteenth century.17 The consolidation of immigration regulation in national hands coincided with a demand by citizens to reinvigorate the United States as a nation of and for the peoples of Northern Europe. The national immigration agency and border patrol were forged in this mold; they were established, respectively, to administer the Quota Acts, which aggressively privileged immigration from Northern Europe in an effort to return America’s ethnic composition to its original stock, and keep out Mexicans who were thought to be of inferior genetic quality.18 The structural racism19 of the national immigration agencies continues to manifest today in ways large and small. Legal scholars Adam Cox and Thomas Miles, for instance, have amassed data suggesting that Immigration and Customs Enforcement prioritized localities for the adoption of a new immigration enforcement technology based on the percentage of the population in a particular locality that was Hispanic, irrespective of the percentage of that Hispanic population that was actually foreign-born, and thus subject to the agency’s jurisdiction.20 There were other places of broad long-term consensus among political actors on immigration law and policy, but this abbreviated list will adequately serve for our purposes. 2 Anti-immigrant dissent At the far right tail of immigration dissenters are white nationalists. For example, the National Policy Institute, led by University of Chicago-educated Richard Spencer, styles itself a think tank committed to the “heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States.”21 But the group’s recruiting video “Who are We?”22 betrays Spencer’s real ambition: a broad-based rejection of the enlightenment-based, multi-ethnic, nation-state in favor of a white-racial Reconquista.23 Realizing this imagined community24 of and for whites only, requires a radical immigration policy of brown expulsion without regard to citizenship status. In this racist imaginary, legal citizenship (the Fourteenth Amendment and the birthright citizenship it confers) makes no difference. Citizenship and alienage are a function of an individual’s phenotype and provenance. The mainstream Republican party has long sought to publicly distance itself from these kinds of ideas, but as I show in Part III, they form the warp and weft of the mainstream Republican subconscious. The seeming permanence of post-1960’s race-blind American nationalism has been largely taken for granted. But the revanchist, white nationalist ideas circulating in, and being implemented by, the Trump administration beg closer examination of white nationalism’s emotional pull. To draw the reader into this world or nomos,25 I transcribe and analyze below the aural, textual and visual content of “Who are We?,” a video on the front-page of the website for the National Policy Institute. As will become clear, the video is a “consciousness-raising” recruitment tool that attempts to bridge the radical demands of white nationalism into the mainstream. The video opens with clean-cut Spencer asking “Who are you? I’m not talking about your name or your occupation, I’m talking about something bigger, deeper.” The video then cuts to a montage of photographic images of rural Teutonic landscapes (the likes of which would surely have captivated German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich), busts of western philosophers, and major European landmarks, like the Pantheon and the Brandenburg Gate. Spencer continues in voiceover: “I’m talking about your connection to a culture, a history, a destiny, an identity that stretches back and flows forward for centuries, an identity you can glimpse in the face of a grandparent or a child.” At “child,” the visuals cut to a close-up, cropped picture of a young white boy’s bright blue eyes. “Our ancestors had a very strong sense of their identity, they could say, I’m a Roman, I’m a Saxon, I’m a Dane, some could say, I’m a European; to be exiled from their communities and identities would have been a fate worse than death.” Here visuals and text together establish whiteness – the boy’s blue eyes – as the essence of European identity. “Today we seem to have no idea who we are. We are rootless, we’ve become wanderers, perhaps we’ll also become seekers... [W]e are often told that being an American... or any other European nationality... is about being dedicated to a collection of abstractions and buzzwords: Democracy.” Here the video cuts to the signature of John Hancock on the Declaration of Independence, overlaid with a waving E.U. flag, then cuts to the calligraphic “We the People” in the U.S. Constitution, and next to Delacroix’s famous French revolutionary painting, “Liberty Leading the People,” overlaid with the hammer and sickle emblem of the former Soviet Union. In the context of Spencer’s pejorative gloss on enlightenment values, these images unsubtly imply that all universalist, emancipatory European ideologies – whether penned by Hamilton, Rousseau, or Marx – are equivalent and equally hollow. As Spencer sets out another “buzzword” – “freedom” – the video cuts to Martin Luther King giving his “I have a dream” speech. Word and image taken together imply the fraudulence of a freedom that would grant black people the same rights as whites. Spencer goes on listing core contemporary western cultural values, “tolerance, multiculturalism. But a nation based on freedom is just another place to go shopping, it’s a country for everyone and thus a country for no one. It’s a country in which we ourselves have become strangers. Man doesn’t live and man doesn’t die for abstractions like freedom; man lives and dies for a homeland.” The imagery then cuts to an overlay of a white cowboy with a lasso and a white woman walking through a cut field of grass. “[F]or a people and its future,” the video cuts to a blond, pale white woman with her blond, pale daughter; “for beauty,” cut to a close-up of the face and bust of an attractive white woman with bright pink lipstick lying in a field of long grass, looking up at the sky. Here the visual emphasis on rugged, romantic white masculinity and passive, maternal white femininity, coming after the rejection of multiculturalism, casts white men as guardians and saviors of white women. White men impliedly defend white women from the black and brown men with whom they might produce children cut off from their racial/cultural/national heritage – children who lack those piercing blue eyes. “[F]or the power of being part of something bigger than oneself. Who are we? We aren’t just white, white is a checkbox on a census form. We are part of the peoples, history, spirit and civilization of Europe.” While this last sentence plays, the video is overlaid with images of famous white male inventors and statesmen, a photo of the Wright Brothers’ plane taking off at Kitty Hawk, a rocket ship, a man on the moon, a statue of a roman warrior, the Brandenburg Gate, the Acropolis of Athens, the Hungarian parliament, the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and other landmarks. The montage closes on a photo of a longsword lodged upright in a stone. “This legacy stands before us as a gift and as a challenge, for what our ancestors took for granted we must discover, we must renew. Some might say that this task is impossible.” The video cuts to a montage of photos of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of the Vitruvian man and armature for human wings, to a schematic drawing of a printing press, to patent drawings for the light bulb, telephone, and an automobile, to the space shuttle launching, and a man on the moon. In this series of images the contributions of nonwhites to western civilization are systematically erased in favor of a visual history that grants whites exclusive claim to the fruits of past achievements. “But nothing necessary is ever impossible. So long as we avoid and deny our identities at a time when every other people is asserting its own.” While this phrase plays the video displays a montage of video from a protest march led by a banner that says “Muslims will destroy the crusade;” an anti-Trump protest with a sign that says “Trump=hate; we are not rapists; don’t vote for white supremacy;” a Black Lives Matter sign; and then to a celebratory Israeli political march where Israeli flags abound and in the background left a marcher holds a sign that says “Hamas uses humans and children as shields.” This last image is emphasized visually with an overlay of a waving Israeli flag. Spencer closes: “we will have no chance to resist our dispossession, no chance to make our future, no chance to find another horizon, so who are we? I guess the real question is, are we ready to become who we are?” Here a crescendoing drumbeat plays while the video shows the text “BECOME WHO YOU ARE;” “RISE.” Nowhere in Spencer’s message to whites is immigration expressly mentioned, yet it is an omnipresent subtext. It is there subliminally in a split-second visual (the clip of the sign that says “we are not rapists,” alludes to Donald Trump’s opening campaign salvo on Twitter). But the immigration radicalism of the message is obvious by reference to the immigration status quo. The Hart-Cellar Act was a break from the herrenvolk nationalism Spencer espouses; a means to reify a nationalism of the enlightenment, to make real a multi-hued nation indifferent to creed or color where legal citizenship is the sine qua non of membership in the polity. For Spencer, the enlightenment’s core values are just “buzzwords;” what matters uber alles is the tribal-solidarity built by looking your blue-eyed baby in the eye and seeing the through line to your ancient Teutonic origins. Spencer’s message attacks the twin pillars of mainstream immigration policy: relatively high immigration levels coupled with high deportation levels. To build the white nation, deportation levels must be radically increased and trained exclusively on deporting non-whites of any legal status – including legal citizens – and immigration of non-whites must cease entirely. The contrast between this vision of immigration law as a singular tool of expulsion and the status quo’s calibrated balance between immigration and deportation highlights the membership work of high deportation levels. Reprehensible and overinclusive as high deportation levels have been, deportation – especially crime-based deportation – has the marginal benefit of constructing the immigrants who remain as deserving, as members in good standing by contrast. But a membership grounded in conformance to law, whether defined by the absence of law-breaking, possession of a visa, or even an American passport or birth certificate, is as illegitimate and hollow for Spencer as the enlightenment “buzzwords” he condemned in his video. Spencer rejects claims to belonging grounded in non-white citizens or immigrants’ “papers” or their deeds. No amount of performative26 Americanness or legal imprimatur can make a non-white person American. More darkly, the reason performance-based membership is impossible for Spencer is grounded in the success of European colonialism and the sovereign hereditary ownership of the American territory that it conferred. As Spencer puts it: “Our bones are in the ground. We own it. At the end of the day America can’t exist without us. We defined it. This country does belong to White people, culturally, politically, socially, everything.”27 White nationalism further attacks immigration law’s technocratic orientation by turning immigration law and policy into a singular question of tribal maintenance. To the extent white nationalism requires technocratic expertise, it is only in the administration of the category of whiteness28 and in the expulsion, disenfranchisement, or subordination of those who are excluded from the category. The precise calibration of competing values – humanitarianism, labor needs, family reunification – that currently animates the work of immigration agencies, and the mainstream debate about immigration reform, is alien to Spencer’s simple, tribalist demand: a nation-state by and for white men. 3 Pro-immigrant dissent The radical left position on immigration is the mirror image of the radical right position. Where white nationalists assert that European colonial achievements confer on European descendants a boundless right to exclude “non-European” races from U.S. territory, the far left position is that the U.S. has no right to exclude peaceable persons of any stripe from its borders: that no one is illegal. Put another way, presence in a territory, invited or not, confers at least the right to remain in that territory, and nullifies the right of the state to deport. Unlike the baldly racist assertions of white nationalists, the open borders position is usually coded. Even left immigration activists have tended to favor less combative framings of undocumented migration that are more capable of eliciting citizens’ sympathy; the citizenry’s political monopoly over immigration law and policy demands this caution. That circumspection is changing, however.29 Some U.S.-based activist groups have begun following the lead of Montreal-based “No One is Illegal,” denying entirely the government’s right to enforce its exclusionary prerogatives. The American immigrants’ rights organization #Not1More Deportation, for instance, states that its mission is to: Accompan[y] and galvanize[] the determination of millions of immigrants who have endured suffering and now are exercising the right to remain in the place they call home. In recent years, the terms of the immigration debate have been poisoned and a crisis created as deportations, incarceration, and criminalization of immigrant communities has escalated at unprecedented rates. But at the same time record numbers of people are refusing to be victims and instead are drawing an entirely different picture by taking a stand for themselves, for their families, for our communities, and for all of us. #Not1More weaves together all of our voices in a central location so that local efforts to stop deportations and build community are strengthened and accompanied by cultural creations that illustrate the ugliness of criminalization and the beauty of our communities. Together we say: not one more family destroyed, not one more person left behind, not one more indifferent reaction to suffering, not one more deportation.30 The foundation for this emerging loud-and-proud immigration dissent, I have argued elsewhere, is the basic act of migrating without permission, multiplied over millions of “illegal” migrants and their efforts to remain in the United States. The act of “illegal” migration is itself a form of protest speech against the exclusionary global order that condemns individuals to live in their countries of birth: “[I]llegal” migration is speech of necessity – there is no other way for [the excluded] to be heard [on the question of immigration exclusion]. Protest speech occurs every time a migrant crosses a border without permission and every time a noncitizen chooses to overstay a visa: these defiant actions declare the illegitimacy of immigration law. In turn, the individual speech acts of millions of “illegal” migrants help to foment an immigrants’ rights consciousness and enable groups of migrants to engage in core, protected forms of dissent, like marching in the streets shouting “NOT ONE MORE DEPORTATION” and tweeting #Not1More.31 Without this defiance of the United States’ right to exclude, the possibility of a politics of emancipation from immigration exclusion could not exist. When people migrate without permission and seek to remain in sufficient numbers, the undocumented form a community where consciousness raising can occur; their individual defiant acts give birth to the possibility of migrant political action. Atomized across the world, pining for a life elsewhere, the community of those who would contest the state’s right to exclude cannot effectively form that consciousness. Only when the inarticulate urge to move – to go elsewhere – is acted out, against the law of the state which the migrant enters, can conditions for the articulation of grievances against [immigration exclusion] occur.32 This theory of “illegal” migration as the foundational act of left-immigration dissent finds additional support in the defiant reactions of some undocumented immigrants to Donald Trump’s election: “He can build a wall, but we’ll just build a tunnel,” said Magdaleno Santos, a Salvadorian man who arrived in the United States illegally more than two decades ago.... [another undocumented worker said] “We always knew Americans didn’t want us here... They use us, but that’s okay because we use them too, for the money.” Another man, who has crossed the border illegally several times, laughs at the idea that a border wall will solve anything. “Trump can build the tallest wall that he can, and we will find a way to fly over it, just like birds.” 33 This performance of dissent by undocumented laborers mirrors Trump’s aggressive posturing, but conflicts with the usual undocumented immigrant narrative, where migrants are painted as largely passive actors, pushed and pulled to the United States by forces beyond their control.34 Like white nationalism, the open-borders vision rejects the immigration status quo. Indeed, it has even less use for the technocratic orientation of immigration law than white nationalists do. Where Spencer needs a bureaucracy to sort whites from non-whites, and to eject non-whites from the territory, open borders requires virtually no administrative apparatus at all, except perhaps to identify and exclude the truly dangerous.35 And even in that task, criminal law and punishment might sufficiently carry out this security work. The open borders vision also rejects the twin pillars of immigration visa policy: the maintenance of immigration and deportation levels at historic highs. #Not1More Deportation, of course, couldn’t be clearer about the latter policy, but it impliedly rejects the former as well. The demand not to deport is commonly made on behalf of individuals – the undocumented – who migrate despite being unable to obtain a visa. The presence and successful integration of nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants into the social fabric shows that immigration levels, high as they may be, are not high enough. After all, the undocumented were excluded, yet on arrival they found demand for their labor, space for their families, food for their sustenance, and, in most cases, money to spare that they could use to support communities in their countries of origin. By migrating without permission, the undocumented show that their exclusion was unwarranted, that visa levels are too low. Demanding that no one be deported also rejects the status quo’s reliance on high deportation levels to construct the worthiness of those immigrants who remain in U.S. territory. #Not1More Deportation celebrates all immigrants as worthy of inclusion, resisting the temptation to build the inclusion of some immigrants on the exclusion of others. The group’s “action” page36 shows forty-five pictures of immigrants currently in deportation proceedings. The snapshots often depict immigrants holding loved ones, or posed with their families. Clicking on an image takes the user to text that tells the deportable immigrant’s story. The stories vary, of course, but they are notable for emphasizing themes beyond family, work ethic, and length of residence. Many of the stories celebrate the organizing work of the immigrants in deportation proceedings, often in the context of advocating for labor rights. Victor Diaz, for example, is portrayed as “a human rights leader... Victor Diaz is a dairy worker and leader of the Vermont based human rights organization Migrant Justice. Victor became a community leader after his wages were stolen on a Vermont dairy farm where he lived in a run down camper with a leaky roof and no running water. He organized his co-workers to stand up to their abusive employer – demanding and winning their stolen wages.”37 In this way #Not1More Deportation attempts to motivate group action against deportation by emphasizing the agency of migrants in deportation proceedings – not just their status as victims. In this group’s dissenting imaginary, grounded in the legitimacy of “illegal” migration, the undocumented do not just take what they can get; they migrate in defiance of their exclusion, they arrive, they work, and they fight for more. II. Power and Immigration Dissent The distance between dissenting white nationalists and the political mainstream is far shorter than the distance between #Not1More Deportation and the mainstream. For all the shock and awe of Donald Trump’s campaign, his brand of law and order white nationalism was never very far below the surface. The political appetite for today’s express xenophobia38 was nurtured over time by popular right-wing figures like Pat Buchanan. Buchanan has long maintained positions nearly identical to Richard Spencer and his ilk, and yet has never been cast out as beyond the pale. Buchanan won the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary in 1996, after barely losing it in 1992. He has written New York Times bestsellers and served as a commentator on the cable-news channel MSNBC for nearly a decade, beginning in 2000.39 Buchanan swims in the mainstream. Yet, as long ago as 2002, Buchanan was writing books with titles like, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.40 His 2011 book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?,41 prescribed Donald Trump’s electoral playbook, imploring Republicans to adopt a political platform that increases the white turnout by resisting multiculturalism and antiracism and by embracing their role as the party of and for whites. Republicans should, per Buchanan, deploy “a strategy to increase the GOP share of the white Christian vote and increase the turnout of that vote by specific appeals to social, cultural, and moral issues, and for equal justice for the emerging white minority... [W]hy should Republicans be ashamed to represent the progeny of the men who founded, built, and defended America since her birth as a nation?”42 This last argument is just a shade removed from Richard Spencer’s claim that the United States belongs to white men because “their bones are in the ground.” This racialized, hierarchical view of American membership is far more pervasive than is typically acknowledged. It was behind the incredible traction of the Trump-led anti-Obama birther movement. Indeed, it is so ingrained in the Republican mainstream that Mark Kirk, a former Senator of the deep-blue, multiracial, Land of Lincoln, publicly demonstrated white supremacy’s hold on the white Republican subconscious in a revealing slip of the tongue.43 In a debate between Kirk and now-Senator Tammy Duckworth, a multiracial (White and Thai), double-amputee veteran and recipient of the Purple Heart, Duckworth argued that her own military service, and her family’s long tradition of military service, made her particularly well suited to the task of deciding when to lend the Senate’s support to war: [M]y family has served this nation in uniform going back to the Revolution. I’m a Daughter of the American Revolution... I’ve bled for this nation. But I still want to be there in the Senate when the drums of war sound, because people are quick to sound the drums of war, and I want to be there to say, “This is what it costs. This is what you’re asking us to do. And if that’s the case, I’ll go.” Families like mine are the ones that bleed first. To this moving articulation of Duckworth’s visceral, emotional knowledge of the gravity of war; knowledge grounded in her own personal sacrifice and that of her forefathers, Kirk responded: “I forgot that your parents came all the way from Thailand to serve George Washington.”44 In this slip, Kirk reveals the way that belonging, membership and citizenship in the United States are tied inextricably to phenotype – to visible whiteness – rather than to any performative act of Americanness. It would be impossible for Duckworth to more fully perform her belonging: she has actually given up body parts – her own flesh and bones – on the nation’s behalf. And yet, Kirk confessed that he thinks Duckworth can never be as American as he. Duckworth’s performance of service and sacrifice on behalf of nation, along with her allusion to her WASP forefather’s history of military service, are just parlor tricks intended to mask Duckworth’s ineluctable foreignness. Kirk’s slip also illustrates the degree to which whites feel threatened by non-white’s claims to the national inheritance.45 Duckworth, the Asian “other,” is also a high-WASP “Daughter of the American Revolution,” with the same white-ancestry-based claim to American ownership as Richard Spencer or Kirk. But for Kirk and for some swath of America, this is impossible; it does not compute. The complexity of claims to American ownership, belonging, and control, which Duckworth’s mixed ancestry highlights, must be radically simplified into binary, race-based membership categories: white/citizen, non-white/alien. Kirk’s gaffe shows the profound degree to which America is still at its core a herrenvolk nation. Trump’s election and his actions since he assumed office makes this fact undeniable. The way that white nationalism pervades the American subconscious amplifies the power of anti-immigrant dissenters. The feelings, anxieties and pride that Spencer vocalizes in his video, are widely held among American whites and are waiting to be tapped. The grip of white supremacy on the white American subconscious puts the mainstream immigration left on the defensive; this is especially true at the national level, where whites are over-represented in Congress and the electoral college. To show the depth of the power asymmetry between immigration dissenters on the right and on the left I discuss below the fragility of the political gains made by a group of immigration activists known as the DREAMers, undocumented migrants brought to the U.S. as children. The DREAMers’ political power is grounded in their successful performance of Americanness, and in the innocence of their trespass of American sovereignty (they were children when they broke the law).46 A documentary filmed in 200347 and released in 2010 chronicles the DREAMers’ efforts to lobby Congress and then-President Bush to regularize their status. In advocating for their interests, the DREAMers, like Duckworth, perform their worthiness and belonging. They showcase in public their accentless English, they talk about the way that America is the only country they have ever known; they emphasize academic excellence. Their particular focus on gaining access to higher education highlights how DREAMers strived to embody the American dream of intergenerational socio-economic rise. One student, shown speaking to Univision reporters, had been admitted to Stanford. From humble, undocumented origins to Stanford – what could be more American than that? Poignantly, students emphasized the sense of dispossession that undocumented status gives them. They were raised in the United States, attended public schools, but once they turned eighteen they were on their own to navigate the United States in the shadows,48 like any other undocumented person. The bill to grant the DREAMers legal status and access to educational opportunities died in 2003, ushering in the dispossession of that generation of DREAMers. Republicans, like Senator Jeff Sessions, now the Attorney General, used law and order rhetoric – granting legal status rewards law-breaking – and a fixation on scarcity of opportunity and of money to bring the bill to its demise. Anti-DREAM act Senators and aides emphasized the unfairness of an undocumented person getting preferential in-state admission and tuition to UNC-Chapel Hill as North Carolina residents, when out-of-state American citizens are denied access on those terms for lack of North Carolina residency.49 Pell Grants too are framed as scarce, zero-sum resources. Giving a Pell Grant to an “illegal” immigrant means not giving one to “normal, taxpaying, citizens.”50 As with Duckworth, no amount of performing belonging can make the DREAMers Americans in the eyes of Sessions and the other members of congress that blocked the bill. Though here the raw racism evident in Kirk’s slip of the tongue is masked by the assertion that the DREAMers’ legal violation is an indelible and appropriate barrier to inclusion. (It just so happens that virtually all the DREAMers are non-white.) Eventually, in 2012 the DREAMers successfully lobbied President Obama to use his executive power to grant them temporary, renewable, reprieves from deportation, work authorization, and access to higher education.51 Inverting the Republican senators’ zero-sum, hierarchical, alienated view of the DREAMers, President Obama affirmed their performance, calling them “Americans in their heart, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper,”52 and then giving them the papers – the legal standing – that they lacked. But the fragility of this arrangement has now become clear. Despite the DREAMers’ brilliant performance of belonging, and persuasion of the mainstream left, they find their papers headed to President Trump’s shredder. The indelibility of the DREAMers’ initial sovereign trespass, as well as their race, have reasserted themselves as the right’s imagined community re-takes power and reasserts its preferred hierarchy. III. Re-Centering the Left-Immigration Imaginary Where the mainstream immigration right has long been closely allied with its dissenters’ aspirational, nostalgic imagined community of an America of, by, and for whites, the mainstream immigration left is less connected to its dissenting imaginary. The mainstream left’s aspirations for immigration reform are fundamentally technocratic. The left mainstream recognizes the value in granting legal status to the 11 million undocumented living within our borders, but there is little engagement with the idea of open borders, or with making any progress in that direction. The mainstream immigration left is fundamentally conservative, trying to resist the ravanchism of the right in order to preserve the high immigration levels of the status quo. This stance is grounded in a reputedly pragmatic assessment of political possibility, but Trump’s ascent may illustrate the folly of this approach. Immigration scholars, lawyers and many advocates implicitly or explicitly embrace technocracy. For legal scholars, their disciplinary orientation and, perhaps, their unconscious need to preserve the power that comes with their own expertise, have given technocracy the feel of the natural. As a result, immigration reform is centered in technocracy, on bureaucratic tinkering (expansion of guest worker visas, more efficient and humane enforcement techniques) and the preservation of the colorblind status quo. But, as we now know, we cannot tune technocracy’s dials precisely enough to hold the status quo together; it is time to consider re-centering our aspirations on the vision of the dissenting left – on immigration law’s abolition; on an affirmation of the magic and mystery in the way mere presence within the American territory can turn a person condemned to poverty or illiteracy beyond our borders into a Stanford graduate; on an embrace of the “wretched refuse”53 of the shores that teem around the globe; on a devolution of control over American membership to individual human beings who wish to migrate – a truly liberal immigration policy.54 Centering the mainstream left’s aspirations on the dissenting vision of #Not1More Deportation, and pressing our energies into making real their idealistic aspirations, rather than into technocratic tinkering, may prove as fruitful for the left as it has for the right in the decades to come. Dissenters have passion, and any thriving, galvanizing politics requires passionate commitment. “All political principles... need emotional support to ensure their stability over time,”55 Martha Nussbaum teaches. Passionate emotional support, in turn, is cultivated by engagement with ideals like #Not1More Deportation. Connecting with an idealistic imaginary is essential for reformers and scholars because [i]deals are real: They direct our striving, our plans, our legal processes... Real people aspire. They imagine possibilities better than the world they know and they try to actualize them. People who strive for this worldly justice typically aspire to distant goals – prominently including theoretical goals – and are moved by them. That’s a large part of human reality.56 Political and legal reform projects require “technical calculation” but they also require a daily emotional sustenance, “the sympathy, tears, and laughter that we require of ourselves as parents, lovers, and friends, or the wonder with which we contemplate beauty.”57 The overly technocratic stance of the immigration law literature and of mainstream left immigration politics has robbed this politics of the passion it needs to thrive. Left immigration dissenters have that passion in spades; engaging with their ideals – imagining along with #Not1More Deportation that a world without the American deportation machine is possible – will help to motivate a mainstream left immigration politics that can stand up to white nationalism. It may also generate new prescriptive immigration scholarship that focuses the political system’s limited capacity for reform on changes that systematically help to cultivate a love58 of immigrants, rather than seeking to make deportation slightly less frequent and a bit more humane. The power of this kind of ideal-inflected love of immigrants to motivate mass enthusiasm was on vivid display in the reaction to Trump’s ban on Muslim immigration. Thousands of ordinary citizens spontaneously ran to airports across the country to defend the ideal of America as a refuge for people of all races and creeds;59 to stand up and vociferously reject unfounded, racist fears of “foreign” others; to protect the enlightenment. Imagine if reform-minded scholars or politicians could inspire and channel this kind of energy in service of immigration reform or the expansion of immigrants’ rights. Note too that this engagement with and cultivation of an idealistic and emotional connection to immigrants is even more essential for left immigration politics than for any other kind of left politics.60 The thousands affected by Trump’s Muslim travel ban had no direct political means of challenging it – since they are neither citizens nor constituents. Left immigration politics is a politics by proxy to an extraordinary degree, a politics on behalf of the material interests of others. To make up for the disenfranchisement of those most affected by immigration laws, citizen advocacy on behalf of noncitizens must be powered by a supercharged version of the emotional sustenance required of any push for social justice. Re-centering the ideal of immigration law does not mean abandoning our technocratic expertise; it means changing our stance and orientation towards immigration reform, and rethinking the limits of the legal tools at our disposal.61 It means doing precisely what Kris Kobach – the leading anti-immigrant technocrat – did when he hatched Arizona’s anti-immigrant law,62 but doing it on behalf of the enlightenment. A more imaginative deployment of technocratic expertise could mean, for instance, rejecting Michael Walzer’s thesis that immigration law should be determined nationally to avoid the creation of “a thousand petty fortresses.”63 Perhaps today, when divides between rural and urban are starker than ever, local control could create a thousand possibilities for immigration liberalization, or regulation. Re-imagining immigration law as a local issue to be settled by smaller polities grants anti-immigrant communities a feeling of control over their destinies (in an era where all aspects of social life appear up for grabs), while freeing pro-immigrant communities, like sanctuary cities, to live up to the liberal ideal that sanctuary implies, and welcome far more immigrants than national control permits.64 This example puts federalism, a legal tool, to use in creating conditions where some localities might move in the direction that #Not1More Deportation would like, even as exclusionary localities sate their need to exclude – but without imperiling the entire nation with their xenophobia. The pro-immigrant technocrat’s principle role, then, may be to use law to create and design spaces where a love for migrants can be further cultivated; legally-empowered spaces that can eventually yield more progressive immigration law and policy. This suggestion is just a small example of what might be possible if we imagine that something else is possible besides the maintenance of the technocratic status quo; a sample of the kind of work reform-minded scholars can do when our technocratic expertise is matched with more imagination than Carens’ pragmatic dictum allows.