Textual Barriers to United States Immigration

Abstract

The ideological project of keeping the USA free from illegal aliens is often captured in images of an actual physical border to be defended, asserting bounded, nationalist space. We see and read news accounts of the border patrol holding back the ‘flood’ of illegal immigrants from Latin America. Accounts of these Latin Americans trying to reach the USA — sometimes dying of heat or cold in the desert-like land of the south-western states or chased out by vigilante ranchers protecting their property — appear frequently in US newspapers and news magazines. If they are still alive when found, they are ‘processed’ back out of the country. Alternatively on both coasts, media reports warn of the dangers of attempting to enter the USA without formal application, when yet another container ship from East Asia filled with weakened, dying or dead bodies of illegal immigrants is discovered. They, too, are processed out as soon as they are physically able. The Coast Guard patrols the waters off the coast of Florida, too, keeping Haitians at bay. The Immigration and Naturalization Service maintains these images in their own in-house publication, occasionally publishing graphs and pie charts extolling their abilities to meet the quotas on ‘alien removal’ for the year.