“We live in a land where the past is always erased and America is the innocent future in which immigrants can come and start over, where the slate is clean. The past is absent or it’s romanticized.”
—Toni Morrison1
“The heroic quest, the triumph over weakness, the promises of salvation, prosperity and progress: this is the American feeling, the style of life, the ethos and spirit of being.”
—Lisa Lowe2
“. . . those committed to social justice have a formidable task: articulating the value and rights of the immigrant without relying on anti-Black and pro-capitalist tropes.”
—Tamara K. Nopper3
What do the borders of the American nation-state represent? What does it mean to “belong” to the U.S.? Who is a “citizen” and who is not? How are conceptions of “American-ness” intricately tied to constructions of what it means to be “human”? What’s at stake in asking these questions? And whose particular interests do the answers to these questions serve? We cannot begin to break down the confluence of imperialist interests behind the questions of immigration unless we fully understand how ideologies of American exceptionalism and innocence inform both immigration discourse and policy. American exceptionalism has narrowed the discourse by dividing up immigrants into categories of “good” and “bad.” Moreover, as we attempt to show in this chapter, discourses from both liberal and conservative circles often rely on settler-colonial, anti-Black, capitalistic, and imperial tropes to frame the immigration debate. The U.S. has historically been in constant need of an enemy. Just like in Hollywood film, villains legitimize the hero. One cannot exist without the other.4
Donald Trump made the issue of immigration central to his 2016 campaign. The real estate billionaire vowed to “build a wall” on the U.S.-Mexico border to keep “illegals” from entering the country. In campaign rally after campaign rally, Trump characterized immigrants from Mexico as “criminals” and “rapists” worthy only of immediate deportation. His comments and policy promises regarding immigration were a reflection of decades of American imperial history. However, rather than discuss how Trump’s anti-immigrant political orientation was a product of this history, ruling class opposition to Trump made the conscious decision to exploit the issue of immigration for its own gain.
Immigration is a complex issue best analyzed on many fronts. Forced migration is a consequence of “globalization.” People travel to and from the U.S. for a host of reasons. Some are fleeing the political turmoil of war caused by the U.S. itself. Others are leaving their country of origin due to economic hardship and poverty, which is oftentimes a product of the underdevelopment imposed by American-led imperial policies. However, some migrants are given special status protections in the U.S. They are not referred to as “immigrants” at all, but rather a voting bloc or a special interest population. Take, for example, Cuban immigrants. Cubans “fleeing” the socialist state have historically opposed their government on the basis that after the revolution of 1959 they no longer could monopolize and sell off the nation’s assets to the U.S. at the expense of workers and peasants. It is public record that the CIA paid and trained wealthy Cubans in the U.S. only to send them back to Cuba to commit terrorist attacks, a practice that climaxed in the failed “Bay of Pigs” invasion in 1961.
Contemporary immigration debates have largely ignored the tiered immigration system that exists in the U.S. Instead, the focus of immigration policy discussions in Washington have centered on migration from Mexico and Central America. Migration from these regions is the result of what Martin Luther King Jr. called the “triple evils” of capitalism, racism, and militarism. To avoid a public conversation about the origins of migration, two competing narratives have emerged over the course of the last several decades. These narratives are interrelated and rely heavily on American exceptionalism to reproduce the nation’s white supremacist and capitalist relations.
Democratic and Republican Administrations alike have used both narratives to forward their respective agendas. And both narratives ultimately render the root causes of immigration from the Global South, particularly from Latin America, invisible. The first narrative primarily concerns the criminality and racialized inferiority of “illegal” migrants. This narrative has masqueraded as a fear that migration is eroding the long standing white majority that has existed in the country since its formation. However, what it really represents is a deep desire on the part of corporate and imperialist interests to control an exploited, racialized labor force. This ideological framework for understanding immigration has been materialized in several policies in Washington.
The second narrative directly complements the first. It presumes that since the U.S. is “a nation of immigrants” then it logically follows that any and all immigrants should be “accepted” by American society. Immigrants from Mexico and Central America take jobs that “Americans” don’t want, pay taxes without benefits in the form of Social Security, and make the country a more “bilingual” and accepting place. Oftentimes, advocates of this narrative reside in the Democratic Party and support piecemeal measures that on the one hand promote “assimilation” for some, while escalating the militarized state machinery that targets millions of “illegal” immigrants on the other.
The immigration debate makes clear, then, that borders in the context of U.S. imperialism are merely demarcations of war and corporate plunder. American exceptionalism has justified the lines of demarcation on both sides of the debate. The focus on “illegal” immigrants has produced a convenient dialectic for the ruling class. Martha Escobar summarizes the dialectic of the debate as follows:
We are fixed in a polarized debate that does little to arrive at the root causes of migration and the role the US has in creating and maintaining it. The criminality component of the debate differs little from this pattern. When immigrants are represented as criminals, the reaction is to distance immigrants from criminality and move them closer to “American”-ness by stating that immigrants are not criminals, immigrants are hard workers. However, this effort is framed within the context of a criminality that is mutually exclusive from the national “American” identity that is wedded to whiteness. Thus, immigrant Americanizing efforts are negotiations between racial whiteness and racial Blackness.5
In other words, the very attempt by the U.S. ruling class to engulf those who fall outside the scope of citizenship into the confines of “American” identity is a response to the unrest caused by oppressive immigration policy. This is partly how the ideology of American innocence creates a dangerous naïveté when it comes to the rise of the U.S. Latino population. Many well-meaning people claim that white supremacy will end once Latinos become the country’s majority. As many authors have shown, however, the reality might be more complicated.6 In fact, much of today’s immigration discourse in Latino communities is rooted deeply in anti-Blackness. As Escobar notes, “when we claim that immigrants are not criminals, the fundamental message is that immigrants are not Black, or at least, that immigrants will not be ‘another Black problem.’”7
However, representatives of both political parties in the U.S. have historically utilized the narrative of the “invading hordes” of “illegal” migrants to justify the intense militarization and exploitation of undocumented people. The immigration debate over citizenship has never fit neatly into the narrow two-party system. Democrats have historically been no better than Republicans in enforcing policies that protect “illegal” immigrants. Whether Democrat or Republican, presidential administrations in Washington have taken a similar position on “illegal” immigration. Democratic President Bill Clinton, for example, blamed “illegal aliens” for drug crime and job insecurity. His speeches often equated democracy with “secure borders.” This led to the passage of both the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996. The former greatly restricted access to welfare benefits for “illegal” immigrants while the latter expanded the U.S. government’s capacity to deport “noncitizens” with criminal records. In 1986, just 1,978 immigrants were deported for criminal violations. By 2004, that number increased to 82,802.8
Clinton-era policies were continued under George W. Bush. These policies sparked intense resistance to deportations, arrests, and detentions of “illegal” immigrants. In 2006, for example, millions of undocumented people around the country proclaimed “A Day Without Immigrants” and marched off their respective jobs. The protests channeled Lisa Lowe’s conclusion that “the state declares the universal extension of rights to all citizens, yet U.S. history has shown that access to rights has always been unevenly distributed, requiring social movements to call upon the state to establish liberties for subjects who are guaranteed rights in theory.”9 More specifically, the protests came in response to HR-4437, a bill passed by Congress that greatly increased funding for border control and placed harsher penalties for immigration crime violations. Many believed that the bill would lead to massive deportations.
The protests were unable to reverse the bill or the broad range of policies that made mass deportations possible. Over two million immigrants would be deported under Bush during his two terms while over three million were deported under Obama during his tenure.10 The deportation spike under Obama had much to do with his administration’s decision to charge “illegal” immigrants apprehended at the border with a federal crime.11 Obama’s harsh treatment of undocumented migrants led his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to conclude in 2014 that tens of thousands of unaccompanied youth from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador should be deported.12 The unpopularity of these draconian immigration policies did eventually catch the interest of a section of the ruling class, compelling this class to steer immigration advocates toward acceptable means of protest. American exceptionalism was thus deployed by the U.S. ruling class to frame opposition to the criminalization of “illegal” immigrants as an assimilationist striving, or a striving for what Escobar calls “American”-ness.13
The Democratic Party in particular has been in the driver seat of the assimilationist narrative. Since the dissolution of the Dixiecrats in the 1960s, Republican lawmakers and administrations have appealed primarily to the anxieties produced by white supremacy. The Democratic Party stood alone at the mantle of imperial “progressivism.” When immigrant rights activists marched off the job in 2006 and protested the Obama Administration over deportations in 2010, the Democratic Party and their wealthy corporate backers believed that immigrant constituencies from Mexico and Latin America represented a valuable voting bloc. Democratic lawmakers and politicians utilized American exceptionalism to create a softer narrative on immigration. Immigrant labor was valuable to the U.S. economy, they claimed, so it only made sense that immigrants were treated as “Americans” were treated.
American exceptionalism and innocence thus began to mold the issue of immigration in its image. Immigration became a debate over the moral values of American society instead of a political struggle for power. Competing views over what made the U.S. exceptional in the first place took precedence as immigrants themselves were rendered voiceless. Republicans remained outwardly hostile toward the very notion of “insecure” borders and the decline in the “white” population it facilitated. To them, America was exceptional because of its white majority. Democrats, on the other hand, attempted to appeal both to immigrant constituencies and its corporate backers. On the one hand, advocacy for the assimilation of immigrants gave the U.S. the veneer that it was an inherently welcoming society. This narrative utilized the “melting pot” framework to hide from plain sight the root causes of immigration and their impact on immigration policy.
America was exceptional, the argument goes, not because it was a “white” nation but because it was a nation that provided opportunity to diverse populations. Democrats utilized the inclusion narrative to effectively cater to both sides of the immigration debate. Because a consensus emerged from Democratic constituents that not all undocumented immigrants were criminals (i.e., as Escobar reminds us, they weren’t “black” or going to be “another black problem”), piecemeal policies such as the Obama Administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) became acceptable to the U.S. ruling class. DACA was an executive order from Obama in 2012 that protected unauthorized immigrants with a two year period of respite from the threat of deportation. The policy reflected Lowe’s analysis of U.S. immigration policy, where “immigration law reproduces a racially segmented and stratified labor force for capital’s needs, inasmuch as such legal disenfranchisements or restricted enfranchisements seek to resolve such inequalities by deferring them in the promise of equality on the political terrain of representation.”14 While DACA provided temporary safety for some, it did not enact a path to citizenship that many immigrant rights activists demanded. The U.S.-Mexico border remained militarized, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continued its policy of terror and deportation of “illegal” immigrants, and multinational corporations that rely on cheap, migrant labor continued to rake in profits.
The Democratic Party has thus relegated the issue of immigration to the margins of inclusion politics. Policies such as DACA provide critical relief for some but leave the structure of U.S. imperialism intact. U.S. imperialism is reliant upon both the cheap labor of “illegal” immigrants and the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border. It is also reliant upon “free trade” agreements such as NAFTA and CAFTA that allow American corporations free-reign in Latin America and the military domination required to enforce them. These critical aspects of the immigration question have been largely ignored in place of negotiations over whether “illegal” immigrants should be treated like all other “Americans” or not.
The truth is that no one should have to live with the state-sanctioned terror imposed on “illegal” immigrants. In order for this to happen, however, the definition of citizenship cannot be relegated to an identification with the American nation-state. Immigration policy is not merely a question of whether “illegal” immigrants are criminals or not. It is not a choice between two versions of American exceptionalist mythology that assume the nation either to be a “sanctuary” for immigrants or a strictly “white nation” that must be protected from criminal, job-stealing invaders from south of the border. Immigration policy is a question of power and always has been.
History shows that immigration is no partisan issue. Immigrants have been targeted by white supremacist terror throughout U.S. history as a means to divert attention away from the crises of American capitalism and imperialism. Kelly Lytle Hernández explains that as early as the Civil War, American capitalists took advantage of the “open door” it imposed on China to encourage Chinese contract workers to migrate to the U.S. as a replacement for African slaves.15 The spectre of emancipation caused plantation owners and other capitalists to fear a possible labor shortage in the waning years of slavery. Chinese workers were regularly derided as “coolies,” however, and racial tensions boiled over into the passage of the Anti-Coolie Act of 1862. The Act prohibited the importation of “coolies” on the basis that they represented another slave labor force. However, as Frederick Douglass retorted, the problem was not the Chinese immigrant but rather the system that forced the African and Chinese worker to be a “slave and a coveted article of merchandise.”16
Racism and capitalist exploitation continued to shape immigration policy in the years that followed. Chinese contract workers regularly experienced violence in the form of lynching and often faced discrimination on the job. It was not uncommon for Chinese workers to be portrayed as “pollution” or “debased.”17 The U.S. fully excluded Chinese contract workers in 1882 amid hysteria that they posed a danger to “free white labor” throughout the country. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 laid the basis for quotas or limitations to migration from countries in Asia and Eastern Europe. And in the early 20th century, migration from Mexico became the focus of the United States’ so-called “border control” policy.
U.S. imperialism waged a brutal war of expansion against Mexico in the mid-19th century only to subject the nation to economic subservience. Mexican migrant workers became a critical contributor to the United State’s southern economy, leading to the Bracero Program in 1942 which encouraged Mexican workers to contract with American corporations for low-wage work. Between 1942 and 1964, over four million Mexicans worked in the U.S under the program. Yet their presence came into direct conflict with the contradictory policy of immigration enforcement. The formation of the Border Patrol in 1924 was a direct response to the numerous laws that the state had placed on “illegal” migration. This culminated in a 1954 campaign called “Operation Wetback” to deport Mexican workers racially targeted as “wetbacks” from the country.18
The prevailing contradiction of immigration and “border control” has little to do with the tension between the “melting pot” theory of a welcoming, inclusive America and anti-immigrant bigotry. Anti-immigrant sentiment is a product of racism and imperialism. How racism and imperialism have been enforced has depended on the particular requirements of these systems at various points in history. Immigrant labor has provided a steady stream of low-wage labor for American monopolies and an avenue to strengthen white supremacy as a buffer from the root causes of immigration. “Citizenship” has thus been a concept defined by one’s proximity to whiteness. When the U.S. saw Japan as a threat to its economic interests in East Asia in WWII, it did not hesitate to strip the citizenship of Japanese Americans by imprisoning them in brutal internment camps throughout the country.19 The policy was enforced by President Franklin Roosevelt, revered by many as the nation’s most “progressive” and “exceptional” presidents in the realms of peace and worker-friendly policies.
Recent history also proves that the benefits of “belonging” to the American nation-state are mainly conferred to white Americans, especially property owners. Joel Olson explains that:
The democratic problem of the white citizen is that tension between the desire for equality and the desire to maintain one’s racial standing results in a narrow political imagination that constrains the way white citizens understand citizenship (as status rather than participation), freedom (as negative liberty), and equality (as opportunity rather than social equality). The white imagination exhibits little incentive to expand participation in public affairs because it construes citizenship as an identity to possess rather than a power to employ.20
Since the U.S. was founded on the premise of white citizenship, immigration policy has utilized whiteness to reinforce the power of the ruling class at the expense of “others.” The so-called “land of the free” has been anything but for undocumented migrants deemed criminals by the state. American discourse on immigration has centered on the false dichotomy between American citizenship and criminality to discourage conversation about the central issue of oppression and liberation. The criminalization of “illegal” migrants has not occurred in isolation. “Illegal” immigrants exist for the same reasons that Black Americans experience racist state terror despite having the “privilege” of citizenship conferred upon them. Citizenship narrows the parameters of the debate by burying the true reasons for the exploitation of undocumented labor in the graveyard of American exceptionalism and innocence.
American exceptionalism and innocence portray “illegal” immigration either as a clean up project or an assimilationist project.21 Immigrants either must be assimilated into society or eliminated from it. Such a choice is little different than that which Black Americans face everyday when confronted with police terror, incarceration, and economic discrimination. And entire nations such as Syria and Iran must decide everyday whether to accept the oppression of the American nation-state or risk the threat of nuclear annihilation by fighting back. Ideologies of American exceptionalism and innocence thus operate together to create the illusion that only two options lie on the table: America must either “purify” the nation of unwanted invaders or civilize it further by including more “diverse” populations into its ranks.
Violence is endemic to the making of an exceptional America. To be a “citizen” of the U.S. is to uphold and even celebrate the oppressive structures and policies critiqued in this book. Raúl Al-qaraz Ochoa states plainly that citizenship “legitimizes the global capitalist order, as well as their borders and their nation states. So when we talk about citizenship today, we should ask who/what benefits from the exploitation of an illegal class.”22 U.S. borders have come to embody the structures and policies that facilitate the existence of U.S. imperialism. We must understand these structures and policies if we are to truly understand the root causes of migration and the subsequent criminalization of immigrants in the U.S.23
Over the last four decades, the structure of U.S. imperialism has altered in ways that precipitated the phenomenon of “illegal” immigration.” Global capitalism has been going through a neoliberal transition where technology and monopoly have cut into the long term profitability of the system. Finance capital has leveraged debt to keep monopolies and banks profitable, but only at great cost to working people and poor people the world over. A conscious decision was made to turn everything into a potential “market,” including the social welfare systems of the U.S. and its Western allies. Unions have been dismantled, social welfare policies defunded, and public sector institutions privatized. Millions of American workers have seen their wages decline sharply over this time as jobs have either been fully automated or shipped ashore to countries with lower wage scales. Homelessness, poverty, and unemployment have become permanent fixtures of an American capitalist economy wracked by constant uncertainty.
These conditions coincided with the heavy-handed response of the U.S. to domestic and global revolutionary movements for self-determination and social transformation. The Black liberation movement and movements for independence around the world forced the U.S. to greatly expand its military apparatus on all fronts. Black Americans were criminalized in a “War on Drugs” that directly followed the arming of police with military grade weaponry beginning in the 1960s to put down urban rebellions in Black cities. By defining Black Americans as criminals, the U.S. effectively found a convenient narrative to justify the dismantling of welfare and the escalation of the military state. Black Americans were “super predators,” “welfare queens,” and “thugs” that required incarceration to, in the words of Hillary Clinton, “bring them to heel.” Hysteria over “illegal” immigration came in the context of the anti-poor, “tough on crime” policies that originated as a response to social upheaval and the subsequent degeneration of the American social order.
The criminalization of immigrants is rooted in the criminalization of the Black and the poor. But it is American imperial warfare that has sent migrants coming to the U.S. in the first place. The economic engine of American warfare has come in the form of corporate “free-trade” agreements such as NAFTA. Free trade agreements have privileged the rights of American corporations to dominate the economic organization of oppressed nations. In the case of Mexico, NAFTA devastated Mexican farm workers by removing critical state subsidies.24 Hundreds of thousands were forced to the cities to find jobs at American factories that could not hire them. This sent a large wave of Mexican workers northward to the U.S.
American military warfare has also played a large role in migration. When Central American migrants from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador came in the tens of thousands in 2014, few commentators connected the development to U.S. foreign policy. Yet it was the Reagan Administration’s funding of the brutal contra mercenary forces in the 1980s in nations such as El Salvador and Guatemala that led to the instability and poverty that has sent so many fleeing their homeland.25 The Obama Administration followed Reagan’s footsteps in 2009 by sponsoring a coup in Honduras that led to the empowerment of paramilitary forces in league with American interests. These forces violently repressed social movements and forced many Hondurans to seek asylum outside of their nation of origin.
“Belonging” to the U.S., then, is to identify with the violence, oppression, and exploitation that facilitates migration. To be a “citizen” is to believe that the American nation-state is the “home of the brave” when in fact it is the home of dispossession, anti-Black terror, and imperialism. At this point, it is worth recalling Lisa Lowe’s precaution against not simply the violence of exclusion but the violence of inclusion as well. U.S. immigration policies merely reinforce the “longevity of the colonial divisions of humanity in our contemporary moment,” Lowe writes, “in which the human life of citizens protected by the state is bound to the denigration of populations cast in violation of human life, set outside of human society,” And “while violence characterizes exclusion from the universality of the human,” she continues, “it also accompanies inclusion or assimilation into it.”26 A new concept of citizenship is required to break the cycle of criminalization and racism that shapes the debate around immigration. This means that not only is it time to question the policing of borders but to imagine a world without borders altogether.
Andrea Smith urges activists and scholars to challenge the notion of the United States’ inherent exceptionalism. “Rather than a pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness that depends on the deaths of others,” she writes, “we can imagine new forms of governance based on the principles of mutuality, interdependence, and equality. When we do not presume that the United States should or will continue to exist, we can begin to imagine more than a kinder, gentler settler state founded on genocide and slavery.”27 When we question the permanency of the American nation-state, we question the legitimacy of its borders. The borders of the American nation-state were drawn from the colonization of Indigenous people, the enslavement of Black people, and the destruction of nations abroad. Borders represent the imaginary lines of plunder that have produced conditions where half of the American population makes less than $30,000 per year, with “illegal” immigrants and Black workers trailing far behind the average worker. Borders indicate exactly who and what owns the land and labor of the U.S. and who does not. They indicate who deserves to live and who deserves to die and who deserves a life of poverty, oppression, and incarceration and who doesn’t. Imagining an end to these logics is what Andrea Smith means by the “Indigenous dream”; that is, imagining “a world without an America.”
An alternative to the American settler colonial and imperialist arrangement cannot emerge if the preservation or reform of the American nation-state remains the framework of our social movements. Citizenship makes up a crucial piece of American innocence. Struggles to reform or alter the U.S. legal structure, for example, leave its foundation as a settler colonial and imperialist system intact. Reforms make identification with the U.S. more desirable, as if we’re all banding together to form a “more perfect union.” “In the classical liberal tradition,” Paisley Currah writes, “the state is thought to be a neutral umpire, meting out judgment according to the rule of law [. . .] According to this tradition’s contemporary script, that governments have denied rights based on distinctions of race and gender, among others, in the past is an unfortunate historical contingency, one that betrayed the principle of equality and that has now been, or soon will be, rectified.”28 The U.S. is thus seen as a nation that has “lost its way,” and that can ultimately be redeemed by living up to its founding principles. Yet in pursuing mere tweaks to the system, the war, racism, and exploitation that has forever fueled our “union” remain left unaddressed, and therefore become even more deeply entrenched.
This doesn’t mean that “illegal” immigrants should cease their struggle for dignity or decriminalization. It means that this struggle cannot be separated from the oppression of all people under the rule of imperialism. The U.S.-backed destruction of Yemen and Syria, for example, have facilitated refugee crises around the world. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama have relied on the neoliberal logic of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor not only to militarize their assault on undocumented people, but also to justify the privatization of schools in Black neighborhoods and their silence when twelve-year-old Black children like Tamir Rice are gunned down in the streets by police at increasing rates.
Such structures of domination lead innovative scholars like Bianca C. Williams to chronicle the lives of those involved with Girlfriends Tours International, a group of “Black women who feel they cannot experience happiness regularly within U.S. borders because of American racism and sexism.” By temporarily fleeing the U.S., she writes, “they begin to search for ways to fulfill their ‘inalienable right’ . . . drawing on diasporic connections and imaginings, and pursuing happiness and belonging in Jamaica.”29 The questions raised by Williams and her friends highlight the urgency of rethinking borders, belonging, and the nation-state: “What about these women’s lives as Black women pushes them to repeatedly leave the ‘land of opportunity’ to pursue happiness?” She asks. “What happens when Black American women begin to look beyond their nation’s borders for happiness and fulfillment?”30
The interconnectedness of oppression under U.S. settler-colonialism and imperialism opens up the possibility to facilitate the “end” of the American nation-state. This should not be equated with an act of “terrorism” or reckless violence as political elites often retort. Rather, the “end” of the American nation-state would mean that the conditions of oppression and exploitation are eradicated through the formation of a new social arrangement. Under such an arrangement, solidarity replaces borders. Self-determination guides the development of nations instead of the uneven power and hegemony of one nation-state and its “citizens” over all others. Racial distinction and profit no longer represent the motivating forces of society. In its place, the needs of those dispossessed and exploited by the system determine who has control over the means of production and how that control is wielded toward the benefit of the planet.31
The materialization of such a society does not have to be confined to the imagination. But it must start there. We can imagine a new world only through an understanding of—and struggling against—the oppressive conditions of the system. The abolition of borders and citizenship are not mutually exclusive to the demands of undocumented people to find safety and dignity in the U.S. But such goals must redefine citizenship, not as a place of belonging or “inclusion” for oppressed populations, but as a transnational fight for a world where oppression no longer exists. As Smith further explains, “a liberatory vision for immigrant rights is based less on pathways to citizenship in a settler state, than on questioning the logics of the settler state itself.”32 This liberatory vision was demonstrated by immigrant rights activists in September 2017 when they interrupted a press conference by Democratic Party leader Nancy Pelosi with the chant, “All of us, or none of us!” Their chant, if extended to those who have been separated by borders yet united by their oppression, could signal the beginnings of a new revolutionary movement capable of dismantling imperial and settler-colonial logics. A movement capable of bringing about the Indigenous dream.