How The Media's Recent Defense of Using "Illegal Immigrant" Misses an Entire History | Alyssa Figueroa

Assigning legality or illegality to human beings crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has always been hinged to the Anglo-American denial of the inherent belonging-ness and inextinguishable presence of Indigenous peoples on the lands that the colonizers’ ancestors invaded and occupied.  It is this central and most obvious power relationship between those who inherited the settler constitution and the Indigenous peoples across North America that is most often masked and obscured in the debates over the so-called ‘illegal.’  The entire debate needs a more relevant framework, as seen through Indigenous peoples’ lenses.  Without it, it is only the preacher preaching to the choir.  Before folks can conceptualize the broader dimensions of migration and immigration in the United States, we need to address the underlying ideologies and discourses that Anglo Americans use to recreate the Anglo as ‘native’ and the Indigenous as ‘Other-foreigner,’ which is the story of the settler society. 

And so this concept of the “illegal” — there’s no such thing as “illegal.” Illegal is connected to the concept of terrorist, the terrorist is connected to the concept of the enemy, the enemy is connected to the concept of just war. And all of these concepts were originally developed in the European and Spanish courts when they decided to go global. And we still see this play out today. Apaches were one of the first people in the United States to be legally constructed as an enemy of the Spanish crown. The militarists and politicians constructing this entity we now call the United States absorbed this concept and then re-invented the concept of the ‘Apache’ in the Department of War.  Concurrently, the Spanish crown was inventing the concept of enemies in Africa and Asia; we have to understand what ‘illegal’ is functioning as at its root in a global context.

When we understand this discourse of the ‘illegal’ as a regurgitated and re-spun 21^st century song of 19^th century settler societies in a global context — from Israel, to Argentina, to South Africa, to Texas — we then can comprehend and engage migration, movement, and borders in the United States as an ongoing policy of exterminating Indigenous peoples, cultures, identities, and polities, and in displacing families and communities in order to appropriate Indigenous lands and resources on a hemispheric level. 

This has always involved policing and managing the displaced Indigenous labor, ‘biopower,’ within and across the arbitrary boundary line that is the Mexico-U.S. border, which bifurcates many Indigenous nations.  This deep inequity between the colonizers and the colonized has been ‘feeding’ the consumption levels of the dominating group for the last two centuries.  It is a formula of deep social, economic and political oppression, inherently violent and exploitative, is dependent upon and fuels adversarial, militarized systems of dependency and warfare.  In a nutshell, it will not and cannot sustain life.  Any system that feeds off of suffering, misery, and subjugation can only manufacture immense imbalances.  This kind of a system incrementally numbs members of society to violence and suffering. This is the system underlying the concept of the ‘illegal’; this is unacceptable on any terms.

There is a hidden history of atrocity that these borders are based upon — conquering, subjugating, and if that doesn’t work, massacring people to get them out of the way of the local, regional and national elites’ objectives of expansion, such as the ongoing U.S. expansion into Mexico. However, these words ‘Mexico’ and ‘Mexican’, are so saturated with race and hate oriented discourse and ideology, that most people cannot distinguish the two terms from their naturalized sense of privilege and power over those they perceive to be from ‘Mexico’ and those they perceive to be ‘Mexican.’ It is frightening how powerfully saturated these two ideologies function across the U.S., and even in Canada. In fact, many Native Americans in the United States today don’t completely understand how they too have come to adopt the Anglo-American genocidal ideologies connected to “Othering” and hatred toward Indigenous peoples of Mexico.  Furthermore, many Native Americans are in constant turmoil about the obvious factors that Indigenous peoples of Mexico peoples are literally the blood descendants of their own ancestors as well. The entire U.S.-Mexico border region is one of the most diverse regions of indigeneity, and yet, as a result of the anti-Mexico/Mexican rhetoric and practices on the ground, most Native Americans vehemently deny any relation to Mexico — illustrating the depth of internalized anxiety and even anti-Indigenous hatred we have absorbed across generations. 

Nobody teaches Native Americans in the state-funded schools that the border is a construct of the global system of domination. American teachers don’t ever teach us that borders never existed until their ancestors occupied Indigenous peoples’ lands. The mainstream Anglo-American centric media never discusses alternative viewpoints of borders and walls from an Indigenous view of self-determination and anti-colonialism. However, for millennia up to the current period, our ancestors have worked out differences in very different ways. We did not commit mass extermination. We developed games and competitions and other forms to engage peoples with differences or conflicts so that we can share resources. There were never any walls in the Americas or the concept of ‘illegals.’  Walls were never used by the ancestors to create a continent of open-air prisons.