From Anchor Babies to Obama

Taylor makes many claims in this brief concluding chapter that are worth noting, but I would like to comment on his discussion about the underlying motivation for anti-immigrant sentiments, commonly directed towards Latin(a/o) immigrants:

“anti-immigrant activism is an American tradition, defined, like any other tradition, by proprietary rituals and conventions and rhetoric. And this tradition is constituted in part by ritual genuflections to the whiteness of America and to the dangers of immigrants.”

Considering anti-immigrant activism to be a constitutive element of American tradition might, at first, may elicit resistance to accept such a claim for a few reasons I want to examine. First is the mythology of the “American melting pot”: the belief that immigrant populations have historically arrived on the shores of the United States and shortly thereafter, staked their claim to the American Dream. Yet to consolidate the experiences of various racialized ethnic groups by boiling down their identity to “eventually American” tragically overlooks the resistance faced in their journey to gain naturalization rights—from indigenous Americans to Latin(a/o) immigrants.

Second, let’s consider the oft-cited response that anti-immigrant activism is not uniquely American, but a human inclination: survival of the fittest, if you will, in which we reject populations that do not contribute to the success of the country. This is problematic on many levels! As Taylor cites, it is not even entirely clear that rejecting immigrants make the country stronger. We should be cautious of attempts to sweep targeted emphasis of certain populations, which is in part based on race, under the “human” carpet; we cannot discuss these issues simply on an abstracted human level because not all groups are beginning from the same starting point. Further, rejecting racialized immigrant populations sounds eerily similar to a system of racial control that strives for a problematic sense of purity.

This brings us to a third, broader philosophical argument for rejecting anti-immigrant activism as part of American tradition: such a negative practice cannot legitimately constitute American tradition because culture is necessarily composed of the positive aspects of a people. I first encountered this in a Philosophy course at the University of Ghana. The argument made was that nepotism is not part of Ghanaian culture, but a distortion of it. However, we must consider that the paradoxes—racial and otherwise—which have produced our present context are indeed part of a history we must confront if we ever hope of working towards a more equitable society. Herein lies the significance of Taylor’s comment: we must be explicit and honest that racism and white supremacy have and continue to shape the way that meaning is attributed to bodies and bloodlines, and social goods are distributed.