With support from Washington to Willacy County, it seems that the future is bright for immigration prisons. In the days after Trump’s election, private prison stock skyrocketed, suggesting that it is a good time to be in the business of locking up migrants. As a nation, our collective moral compass has swerved to the point that we no longer debate whether we should lock up children. Instead, detaining children with their mothers is offered as the humanitarian response to taking children from their parents. The nightmare of confining kids is now the official policy of the U.S. government. When that is our reality, then imaginations have already run wild.
If nightmares can become reality, why can’t dreams? Instead of an immigration-law enforcement strategy afraid that migrants will pour into our churches and schools, onto our streets and our playgrounds, I imagine a different future. I imagine a future that looks more like United States history than United States present. I imagine a future in which immigration prisons do not exist. This is a long, winding road, and I do not pretend to have all the answers that could get us from here to there.
But I do know that the story of immigration prisons isn’t a story about the righteousness of law. It’s a story about politics. Politics always matters, but when it comes to immigration prisons, politics are everywhere. Combatting immigration prisons requires tackling politics with politics. It’s past time to push back against the decades-old bipartisan politics of fear with a politics of creative, impassioned courage: courage to discard what we in the United States do for what we should do. Whether blue-state Democrats or red-state Republicans, politicians support immigration prisons. They fan fears of migrants roaming the streets under the cloak of nighttime darkness. Migrants join gangs, President Obama said. Migrants behead, President Trump added. There is a little bit of truth and a ton of sensationalism in both fear-laced remarks.
Countering the dehumanizing spirit of the bipartisan embrace of immigration prisons needs to begin with a wholesale embrace of the imperfect humanity of migrants. Migrants are superheroes, I tell my students when they ask why Superman often appears in problems I have them work on in class. The most American of aliens definitely didn’t ask the government’s permission to crash into a Kansas farm before growing into a one-man paramilitary force with a penchant for violence. But migrants also commit crimes, cheat on their spouses, get mired in poverty, and lie about it. Migrants aren’t imperfect because they aren’t citizens. Migrants are imperfect because they are people. Just people.
Any political alliance with migrants requires embracing all of this. Not out of celebration for all that migrants do for citizens. Not because migrants boost our economy, pick our crops, clean our offices, care for our young, or energize our culture. We should embrace the imperfect humanity of migrants to celebrate that we are all strange creatures: migrants and citizens alike. “The point is … not to recognize ourselves in strangers, not to gloat in the comforting falsity that ‘they are like us’, but to recognize a stranger in ourselves,” urges the philosopher Slavoj ŽiŽek. Why? Because “we are all, in our own way, strange lunatics.”1
Migrants aren’t stunted versions of people like me born into my citizenship. They’re not just people standing along the route that I traveled in utero. In this moment, in the context of one nation, I am the citizen, and others are not. But in another moment, things change. I am a U.S. citizen only because my mother migrated so that I wouldn’t have to. And in another context, they change again. When I am not in the United States, I am the migrant, and others are the citizens. Whether we know it or not, whether we admit it or not, “we are all becoming migrants.”2 For that profoundly ordinary fact of human existence, none of us deserve to see the inside of a prison.