Fear of the 'other' in a nation of immigrants

THE U.S. HAS ALWAYS HAD A TRICKY RELATIONSHIP WITH immigrants and refugees, even if part of the American mythology is that we are a land of newcomers. In this mythology, they—migrants—are a part of us.

- BY VIET THANH NGUYEN

At the same time, the U.S. has also gone through periodic spasms of intense anti-immigrant feeling. So it is now, with the Trump Administration promoting a moral panic about strangers coming to our shores. When these people, including those who are also Americans, become seen as a threat to the nation, they are no longer a part of us. Instead, they become the “other” to our collective self as a country.

This is not new. In the late 1800s, many Americans believed that Chinese immigrants brought disease, crime, and vice, along with an inhuman work ethic. The result was the burning of Chinatowns, the lynching of Chinese immigrants, and the banning of most Chinese immigration. With his tariffs, President Donald Trump may yet target the Chinese even more explicitly than when he characterized COVID-19 as the “kung flu.” But in 2015 he campaigned on sealing American borders to protect the nation against Mexican “rapists” and in 2025 against alleged Venezuelan gangsters. His promised deportation campaign recalls the 1920s and 1930s, when the government indiscriminately rounded up roughly 1 million Mexicans and Mexican American citizens and dispatched them to Mexico.

Punishing this other takes the form of theater and spectacle, meant to entertain and satisfy some while silencing and disciplining the rest. Thus, renditioning Venezuelans to El Salvador on flights operated by ICE is flaunted before cameras that record them as subhuman, heads shaved bald, anonymous, and humiliated in infantilizing uniforms of white shirts and shorts. Renditioning is a more appropriate word than