An immigrant’s life as a bargaining chip in US politics

On the one-one year anniversary of his presidency, Donald Trump tweeted, « If there’s no Wall, there’s no DACA, » pitting his longtime promise to manufacture a fence alongside the southern US border against the Deferred Movement for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) protection, launched by ragged President Barack Obama in 2012.

For Trump, his base, and a cohort of Republican leaders in states the do xenophobia is resonant and the Latinx population is yet to emerge as a political pressure, opposition to DACA is a cornerstone of the broader look that scapegoats immigrants for all the pieces, from terrifying financial cases to nationwide security.

Final week, DACA, and the more than 800,000 young immigrants enrolled within the programme, were the topics of a congressional face-off that positioned the destiny of the programme, and the futures of the enlisted (and eligible) « dreamers », within the balance. On the Senate floor, the lives of tens of millions of students and workers, sons and daughters, were reduced to a political bargaining chip.

The « dreamers », the as much as the moment archetypes of that mythological « American dream » so central to American id, were framed more as an inconvenient political speak than a mosaic of lives that contributed immensely to society.

The wall

Shortly after announcing his presidential campaign bustle in 2015, Donald Trump announced his plot to manufacture a « colossal, colossal wall » alongside the Mexican-American border. The wall, which many pundits disregarded as mere rhetorical bluster, used to be basically the most radiant manifestation of a campaign that positioned xenophobia, and namely anti-Latinx xenophobia, as a cornerstone of the Trump campaign. The wall gave upward push to raucous again at Trump’s terrifying campaign rallies, and, on election day, registered prominently within the minds of voters.

Immigrants, and namely brown-skinned, Spanish-talking inexperienced persons from the south, were caricatured as « criminals, drug dealers and rapists » – vile stereotypes that percolated correct through the conservative grassroots but were now uttered from the unfiltered lips of the eventual president. Trump’s wall, however its extravagant heed and « moronic » impracticality, satiated xenophobes’ despise. 

Nonetheless, the wall used to be no longer merely a campaign talking point. It used to be a promise that Trump’s base demanded him to fulfill after he grew to turn into president, and he sought to carry. Correct luxuriate in with the « Muslim ban », President Trump moved to form this campaign proposal a political fact early on in his presidency. This used to be evident, another time, in some unspecified time in the future of ultimate week’s Senate funds hearings, and the fallout in some unspecified time in the future of the government shutdown they prompted, when President Trump – and his Senate backers – maintained that no security or pathway to citizenship for the « dreamers » would be extended with out upward of $20bn to manufacture the wall. 

A political deal will likely comprise no provision preserving the oldsters of the « dreamers », and it would perhaps well allow the construction of a giant and colossally costly border fence.

A dream divided

The « American dream » is predominantly instructed through intimate vignette experiences climaxing with particular individual triumph, whereby an immigrant’s industry fuels his or her capacity to scale hurdle after hurdle and attain success in a land the do one thing else and all the pieces is said to be conceivable. 

This epic of transcendence, and making one thing out of nothing, is the touchstone of the romanticised immigrant yarn and, indeed, the existential gauntlet wherein a newcomer transitions from bootstrapping immigrant to bona fide American. The famed Horatio Alger novels, illustrating success experiences of impoverished Irish or Italian boys, are deeply entrenched within the American imagination, and prominent within the ever bellow talking choices that echo, « nothing is more American than immigration. »

But, the fact of that tenet – and the dream tethered to it – rests largely on the racial id of the immigrant. The Irish or Italian protagonists of Alger’s experiences were white and from Europe, the occident to his oriental « shithole » nations, great luxuriate in Trump’s coveted Norwegian immigrants and his once-immigrant accomplice, Melania. Their lawful do as immigrants is rendered unimportant by their whiteness, which enables the imagining of their « success » experiences and the telling of their dream that is framed in distinctly particular individual phrases. 

Right here’s no longer agreeable for Juan, the undergraduate political science pupil at UCLA hoping to assist law college. Or Clara, a registered nurse in Chicago who carried out her skilled dream, and is ready to present for her family, thanks to DACA. Or Jorge Garcia, a 39-one year old college father of three who lived in Michigan for 30 years and embodied the immigrant triumphs on the pages of Alger’s novels, but who used to be deported to Mexico and eradicated from his family because he used to be « too old college for DACA ».  

These names, and their experiences, were no longer phase of the debate on the Senate floor final week and the political discourse that adopted. The controversy used to be somewhat the extension of a deeply rooted yarn that sees white immigrants as transcending and triumphant participants, and Latinx immigrants as a leeching monolith and menacing collective. 

A collective reduced to a political wedge and bargaining chip that, no matter their particular individual achievements or contributions to American society, shall be granted a tenuous promise of the American dream. But this might perhaps perhaps happen simplest if their fathers and mothers, elder siblings and grandparents, are completely walled off from the likelihood of also realising it.

The views expressed in this text are the creator’s possess and discontinue no longer basically mediate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.