Words are curated to construct competing realities about the U.S.-Mexico border. For some, closing the U.S.-Mexico border is the only way to protect against invasion and death. For others, an increasingly closed border promises death for many.
Words, whether in spoken, written or signed form, are unique to and at the center of human life. We are so immersed in the life of words, particularly, in a society so heavily inundated with media messages of all forms that it is easy for us to think of words as common and of little consequence. We may imagine that words are “cheap” and have no impact because of dominant cultural expressions that tell us to value “action” over talk. Of course, references to phrases like “talk is cheap” and “words can never harm me” in themselves demonstrate the power of words to shape our beliefs and attitudes.
While the linguistic relativity principle, the idea that the language we speak shapes our reality, has been debated among linguists and social scientists; it is certain that language plays a powerful role in shaping social views and relationships. Our language, therefore, plays a powerful role in the policies we establish and support that bear real-world impacts on people and environments.
As with the careful selection and display of objects in a museum exhibit to highlight certain experiences and create stories about these experiences, words can be curated to emphasize specific perspectives over others and construct an understanding of a given reality that is in keeping with these perspectives. In other words, discourse in everyday and political life can be curated to construct realities that people respond to through their actions, even when facts are presented that challenge or falsify those constructed realities.
For those residing in the United States, different realities have been constructed regarding the U.S.-Mexico border. For some, it is a site of promise for those moving south to north in search of a better and less imperiled life in the United States, despite the many barriers that have been built to limit this movement. It is a protected boundary worth pursuing entrance through, despite the many dangers in doing so, for those in Latin America already in imminent danger or with limited options to provide a secure life for themselves and those they love. For others, it is a site of imminent danger itself; viewed as an insufficiently protected portal that allows the entrance of a variety of perils posing threats to good people who should be protected against danger at all costs.
The language used in these early orders describes Latin American cartels as “terrorist” organizations and Venezuelan cartels in particular as an “irregular armed force of Venezuela’s government conducting a predatory incursion and invasion into the United States.” The unusual language of “predatory incursion and invasion” by Venezuela to describe drug cartel activity is intentional as it draws from the Alien Enemies Act of 1798; an act that gives a U.S. president power to freely detain or deport any native or citizen of an “enemy nation,” regardless of whether they hold U.S. citizenship or legal resident status in the U.S., when a nation threatens “invasion” or predatory incursion” of U.S. territory.
At the center of these drastically different conceptualizations of the U.S. southern border are differently constructed discourses about this border and what it should mean in terms of U.S. policies for its enforcement and management.
The Myth of the U.S.-Mexico Border as “Open”
Strong perceptions of the U.S. southern border as an “open border” among many U.S. Americans began to form during the Obama Administration, as conservative opponents to Obama’s proposed immigration reform increasingly used this phrase to describe the U.S.-Mexico border as under-restricted and at risk by any proposals to facilitate its crossing by Latin Americans through official U.S. ports of entry.
The idea of the U.S.-Mexico border as “open” conflicts with the reality of a border that has been increasingly monitored and enforced through the application of significant federal resources over the past several decades, with a dramatic increase in Border Patrol operations to stop unauthorized crossings during the Clinton Administration as well as record construction of physical border barriers and significant U.S. National Guard deployment for U.S.-Mexico border enforcement in the two U.S. administrations following the September 11 attacks. A record number of deportations also occurred during both the Obama and Biden Administrations.
Despite the increased efforts of each incoming U.S. administration to more fully close the U.S.-Mexico border to unauthorized crossings, conservative political leaders at all levels continue to refer to the U.S.-Mexico border as “open” and non-Republican approaches to U.S. border policy as “open-border.” In his first presidential run, Donald Trump misquoted Hilary Clinton as using the phrase “open borders” to describe her approach to immigration policy and also linked this to “open trade” which he described as allowing foreign countries “to cheat” the U.S. “out of millions of jobs and trillions of dollars.”
More recently, Governor of Texas Gregg Abbott described President Biden’s policies on immigration and border enforcement as “reckless open border policies” that allowed “record levels of illegal immigrants and deadly drugs [to] pour into Texas” to justify Abbott’s Operation Lonestar which deploys Texas National Guard and state public safety officials on the U.S.-Mexico border, sometimes working in conflict with U.S. Border Patrol operations.
Abbott’s language in defense of Operation Lonestar is in keeping with Trump’s conceptualization of the U.S. southern border as an unprotected “vacuum” that Latin American drug cartels use for “sucking drugs and death right into the U.S.” Like Trump, Abbott has also used the language of “invasion” to describe Latin American movement across the U.S.-Mexico border and to justify his office’s extraordinary border enforcement activities.
Discourse from the New Trump Administration
In the first hours of his second U.S. presidency, Donald Trump established his intent to follow through on promises made during his recent presidential campaign regarding immigration and U.S.-Mexico border policy. Just prior to the inaugural address, Trump emphasized his “tough on immigration” stance and placed it in direct contrast with the outgoing Biden Administration’s supposed “open-border” policies, directing the Defense Department to “seal the border” and declaring the current situation at the U.S.-Mexico border a “national emergency.” An official of Trump’s incoming administration told the media that “The last four years have created an unconscionable risk to public safety, public health and the national security of the United States.”
In response to these claimed threats against the safety of U.S. citizens, Trump promised in his inaugural address that “all illegal entry will immediately be halted and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the place from which they came,” in order to “repel the disastrous invasion of our country.” If Trump’s language brings to mind images from a horror or dark science fiction film, with thoughts of alien monsters emerging in droves from the dark and unknown places “from which they came” to take, or take over, the lives of good people in peaceful American towns, that is because this language precisely aims to evoke such images, striking fear and panic in the minds of U.S. citizens.
The protection of “American borders,” was the first issue addressed in Trump’s inaugural address, stating “It [the government] fails to protect our magnificent, law-abiding American citizens but provides sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions, that have illegally entered our country from all over the world. We have a government that has given unlimited funding to the defense of foreign borders but refuses to defend American borders or, more importantly, its own people.” He then went on to immediately and erroneously link the current southern border situation to the U.S.’s struggle to deal with recent U.S. natural disasters including Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and the wildfires in southern California.
Several of Trump’s first day executive orders focused on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border, through which Trump officially declared a “national emergency” on the U.S. southern border, allowing the federal government to redirect Department of Defense funds to carry out a number of actions including increased border barrier construction, the mobilization of military personnel at the border, and a directive to NORTHCOM to “seal the borders and maintain the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of the United States by repelling forms of invasion including unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, human smuggling and trafficking, and other criminal activities.”
The language used in these early orders describes Latin American cartels as “terrorist” organizations and Venezuelan cartels in particular as an “irregular armed force of Venezuela’s government conducting a predatory incursion and invasion into the United States.” The unusual language of “predatory incursion and invasion” by Venezuela to describe drug cartel activity is intentional as it draws from the Alien Enemies Act of 1798; an act that gives a U.S. president power to freely detain or deport any native or citizen of an “enemy nation,” regardless of whether they hold U.S. citizenship or legal resident status in the U.S., when a nation threatens “invasion” or predatory incursion” of U.S. territory.
Dehumanization of Latin American Migrants
Through a close examination of Los Angeles Times articles published over a period of two years, critical discourse analyst Otto Santa Ana (1999) found that the dominant metaphor used to characterize Latin American (im)migrants was “IMMIGRANTS ARE ANIMALS,” even in news stories that aimed to promote a pro-migrant perspective. Santa Ana states “The correspondence allows American public discourse to use the same frame of reference to reason about [Latin American] immigrants that is often employed to reason about animals” (203). Migrants as “flood” was another common metaphor found that conceptualized migrants as a dangerous force that poses a threat to the United States.
More recently Santa Ana and other discourse analysts (2020) point to more overt language used by Trump that dehumanizes Latin American migrants in the U.S. and portrays them as violent criminals who threaten the safety of U.S. citizens and the United States as a whole. This study also identifies more overt statements by Trump describing Latin American migrants as violent and dangerous animals. One example is found in Trump’s remarks to law enforcement officials in 2017 used to argue for the importance of U.S.-Mexico border wall construction: “They butcher those little girls. They kidnap, they extort, they rape and they rob. They prey on children. They shouldn’t be here. They stomp on their victims. They beat them with clubs. They slash them with machetes, and they stab them with knives. They have transformed peaceful parks and beautiful, quiet neighborhoods into blood-stained killing fields. They’re animals.”
Trump’s discourse about Latin American migrants and its resonance with the many supporters who elected him for a second presidential term point to the continued pervasiveness of such discourse over the last several decades. Such language reduces Latin Americans entering the U.S. through the U.S.-Mexico border to “illegal” beings who commit criminal and frequently violent acts, and who “cheat” U.S. citizens out of resources that protect their well-being. It significantly shapes perceptions about the border for many in the U.S. for whom this language establishes the U.S.-Mexico border as a vulnerable point in a metaphorical U.S. fortress (Santa Ana et.al 2020), posing an extreme threat to human safety and well-being.
Indigenous Peoples on the U.S.-Mexico Border and Counter-Curation
When the U.S.-Mexico border was established, it divided numerous Indigenous peoples and Indigenous traditional territories. While the first peoples of what is now the U.S.-Mexico border region struggle to maintain their sovereignty and traditional connections to their homelands due to increasing U.S.-Mexico border enforcement, Indigenous Peoples are not typically represented as stakeholders in mainstream discourse about the U.S. southern border. Indigenous grassroots and tribal leaders, however, engage in counter-discourse to address their concerns about the border. In contrast to the dominant metaphors of mainstream U.S. discourse about the U.S.-Mexico border that construct it as an “open” site for the entrance of criminality, drugs, and death; Indigenous peoples speak of the U.S.-Mexico border as an “imaginary line” and “colonial weapon” used against Indigenous peoples in acts of ongoing genocide and theft of Indigenous territories.
While Indigenous discourse about the U.S.-Mexico border is not prominent in U.S. media discourses about immigration and border enforcement, it plays an important role in Indigenous action to address their cultural, environmental, and sovereignty concerns in relation to the border. Inter-tribal strategic planning through the Tribal Border Alliance, Indigenous efforts to oppose border wall construction on their traditional lands, and grassroots movements to protect Indigenous rights to movement across the border, testify to the enduring power of Indigenous discourses about the border that communicate the need to fight against a strict enforcement which harms Indigenous peoples and lifeways. Indigenous peoples on the U.S.-Mexico border demonstrate the importance of curating discourses that contest dominant representations of political reality to build toward different and more humane realities.
Image: “Mexico-US border at Tijuana” by Tomas Castelazo, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
