In the U.S., when people talk about the border or use phrases like “undocumented immigrant” or “illegal alien,” they’re almost always thinking about Latinos. This is despite the broad diversity of people coming to the United States. The narratives portrayed both in the media and broader society paint migrants coming to the U.S. via Mexico as strictly from Latin America thus creating a discriminatory bias against Latinos in all aspects of our daily lives.
This thinking gained prominence under former president Bill Clinton after both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush had a much more humane stance about Latino immigrants. After Clinton, George W. Bush took an even more hardline approach to immigrants from various countries while turning a blind eye to the hundreds of thousands of people from white countries in Europe who overstay their visas.
In 2023, a Congressional Research Service report highlighted how nonimmigrant admissions into the U.S. represent about 650,000 to 850,000 visa overstays annually for the fiscal years between 2016 and 2020. Of the 11 million unauthorized people in the United States in 2022, approximately 40% were visa overstays yet, no one ever talks about it.
It’s always, border, border, border.
There’s so much more to immigration than the southern border. Another major issue is the green card backlog. A brief look at pending employment-based green cards shows a backlog of more than 1.8 million people. Indian immigrants bear the brunt of that as more than 1.1 million of them are on that list. A 2023 report from the Cato Institute underscores how new applicants from India face a lifetime wait and more than 400,000 will die before they receive a green card.
For children of those in the green card backlog, they face aging out of the system which means they may be deported and their families separated. In other cases, if someone loses their job, they must quickly find one with an employer willing to sponsor them or they too face deportation and being separated from their families in the United States. Meanwhile, most people just think about Latin Americans and Caribbean Islanders when the subject of immigration comes up.
Since society, in general, thinks like this, it’s even easier to see and understand conservative dog whistles when they talk about the border or so-called ”illegal aliens”. So, it’s alarming to see that 51% of U.S. voters (40% of Democrats) support mass deportations. For Latinos, it’s an alarming thing to see since we know we’ll be the targets of such an idea regardless of whether we were born in the U.S. or not. Police will target us at unbelievable rates.
This shift to the right on immigration is dangerous for many reasons. For conservative politics, it means every Latino will be subject to being stopped and questioned under what is often referred to as “show me your papers” laws. Having a Latino surname will be enough as we have seen in various states that implemented such laws. The difference this time is it may subject us to being detained or thrown in a camp because police won’t know what they’re looking for. It’s happening in Texas where similar laws are already in place.
But this didn’t happen overnight and is far from being one-sided.
Bush made the border a national security issue thanks in large part to the hype from the widely debunked far-right idea that the 9/11 hijackers entered the U.S. via the southern border. They did not. Upon the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and putting everything from FEMA to the border patrol under its umbrella, the border became the next militarized frontier as more and more enforcement-only policies were put in place rather than fix the myriad problems in the U.S. immigration system.
“The 19 hijackers applied for 23 visas and obtained 22. Five other conspirators were denied U.S. visas. Two more obtained visas but did not participate in the attack for various reasons” – 9/11 Commission report on terrorist travel
When you hear lawmakers talk about terrorists coming to the U.S. through the southern border, it’s because they can use that to target Latinos and prevent them from entering the country. The goal isn’t to stop immigrants from coming to the United States It’s to stop the global south from coming to the U.S. One could argue that this is the same motivation behind not making any effort to fix the green card backlog and every other issue with the immigration system.
Because once they do, they have no reason to remove the brown people.
Conservatives, however, have embraced former Trump advisor Steven Miller’s racist idea promoted by Trump to denaturalize immigrants. For Latinos supporting Trump – who to him are poisoning the blood of the nation – that means a child of immigrants naturalized by simply being born in the U.S. would allow the government to take that from them. Such would be the case for every immigrant with U.S.-born children.
Latinos and any other nonwhite groups supporting Trump are putting themselves and the rest of the country in danger. The fact that they all ignore Trump saying he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act from 1798 – an idea that shows just how far backward “Make America Great Again” is meant to go – only highlights how little they care about nonwhite people. It does, however, expose how they want to exploit their proximity to whiteness despite not being considered white.
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