When I was four years old, my parents decided to immigrate to the United States for the promise of a better life. They wanted my brother and me to have the opportunities to succeed, and here, in America, they believed we could pursue our dreams.
I have retold this iteration of the “American Dream” story for the past 17 years, but it’s not my true immigrant story, nor is the story of America an ahistoricized story of immigration to the “promised land.”
The American Dream is a lie. The United States was founded upon a process of colonial settlement, racial genocide and territorial acquisition. Settlement of the Americas was motivated by sovereignty over land and indigenous people and the wealth and power associated with both.
The simultaneous regimes of chattel slavery and indigenous genocide were critical to settlement and acquisition. Anthropologist Patrick Wolfe notes that indigenous peoples were killed, driven away and fenced in not as the native “owners” of the land but as people of color, just as Black people were racialized as slaves. Consequently, slavery and settler colonialism are inextricably linked, as both seep through the same veins of capitalism and white supremacy.
U.S. immigration policy perpetuates these same processes of containment and assimilation of people of color through racialized quota systems, labor exploitation and cultural erasure. Immigration to the United States is still based on country-of-origin quotas. My parents, who were born in Kenya, spent nearly 13 years on the green card waiting list because of restrictive quotas that are inherently biased against people of color from the Global South.
The pursuit of capitalist wealth accumulation requires the exploitation of disposable labor, which began with chattel slavery and continued in part under immigration policy. Demand for railroad construction workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries led to the allowance of an influx of Chinese and Punjabi immigrants. The Bracero Program in the ’40s and ’50s allowed for temporary Mexican immigration for farming purposes.
These same processes of exploitation and containment persist close to home. Last week, the state legislature passed House Bill 318 “Protect North Carolina Workers Act,” which would enact stringent identification requirements and local compliance with federal deportation policies. The construction of borders, nation-states and sovereignty over land and people buttresses the conditions that make Latino/a people, who are indigenous to the Americas, “illegal.”
The United States still treats immigrants and indigenous persons as disposable and Black lives as surplus. We still teach students that enslaved Africans were “immigrant workers” and white colonists were “indentured” immigrants. We still detach immigration from its colonialist and capitalist underpinnings. We still believe in the ahistorical American Dream, and it’s time for us to wake up.
