Content area
Full text
Abstract: Intersectional binaries of innocence and culpability, deservedness and unworthiness, vulnerability and threat again dominate contemporary U.S. immigration controversies. Deployed across the political spectrum, these debates tiredly explore whether a pathway to citizenship for undocumented youth, dubbed Dreamers, will incentivize future groups to migrate without authorization, undercutting supposedly worthy American citizens already vulnerable socioeconomic rights. Building from immigration justice scholarship exploring both the transformative and exclusionary effects of the Dreamers activist tactics, this article investigates how the youth have negotiated this positioning since 2009. It performs a discourse analysis of self-proclaimed undocumented, queer and unafraid activists manifestos, student publications, organizational talking points, direct actions, conference calls, and art to assess how they simultaneously engage with and challenge narratives of exceptionalism and vulnerability. The activists pull apart binaries of deserving and undeserving migrants and create queer and feminist coalitions based on precarity by (1) exposing how the roots and impacts of migration are embedded in systems of transnational vulnerability; (2) aligning migrants with marginalized citizens of color by invoking histories of racialized injustice to reveal the political impossibilities promised in the exceptionalist rhetoric of the American Dream; and (3) leveraging their sympathetic status to expose the human rights and legal violations ostensibly less deserving unauthorized migrants face.
Keywords: queer and feminist coalition politics, immigration, Dreamers, undocumented youth, activism, vulnerability, deservedness, American Dream, sympathy, transnational
Black and white narratives of vulnerability and threat, innocence and culpability, have long dominated debates over immigration but have again intensified since 2015.4 Donald Trump notoriously launched his bid for the presidential nomination by claiming he would build a border wall because Mexico is "not sending their best people" but instead those who "brin[g] drugs ... crimes" and "are rapists"5 In a piercing form of what Ian Haney López terms "dog whistle politics," Trump ignited unconscious white fears over the browning of America by unapologetically invoking time-worn racist and gendered claims that migrant men's supposed hypersexuality and deviant social behavior will imperil national safety.6 He thereby made visceral abstract threats to national security by the bodily reference to rape.
This sense of national vulnerability is heightened by the way that Trump crafted seemingly commonsense binaries of what Mae Ngai terms "deserving and undeserving" undocumented migrants.7 Scholars observe that immigrants who deserve...