Text by Xiaowei Wang
In the field of experts, one must never enter into the first person singular. My mind is a jumble of left and right, turning the steering wheel as I try to parallel park in front of my house. Public radio plays on the car stereo. The host reports that the Centers for Disease Control predicts 362,000 Americans will have died from Covid-19 by 2 January 2021. The host does not mention how she feels about this. When I finally manage to park my car, I stay inside, listening to the news, waiting for a follow-up about measures to prevent such a catastrophe. The host has moved on to discussing the weather.
During this pandemic, I have hated calling my mother. I also hate writing about my mother because of her suffering – at least what I perceive to be her suffering. Her suffering becomes easy to flatten under an American gaze: the story of a Chinese immigrant mother who works hard, suffering for her children to have a better life. She never graduated high school, is still unable to spell cauliflower correctly, has broken English despite 20 years of being in the US. I hate calling my mother, only to hear about her latest complaints about work.
She’s a cafeteria worker at a private university still open during Covid-19. The nature of the higher education system in the US is convoluted and complex, but tinged with profit-driven motives across a patchwork of non-profit and for-profit universities charging high prices for bachelor’s degree credentials. At a private university, students and their parents are customers, and as customers they need to be kept happy, given the full university experience, even in a pandemic, as a reminder that their $50,000 a year tuition is not going to waste. Part of the university experience is the environment – being on campus, wandering through the vaunted halls of knowledge, eating with friends in a dining hall while discussing the chemistry final.
On the phone, my mother complains and complains. Students refusing to wear masks while waiting for the dining hall, always with an excuse despite signs requiring face coverings. Grandparents and parents arriving for the annual campus-visit programme. “Don’t people understand it’s not a normal time to visit? Stay at home!” my mom remarks. Cafeteria workers are required to undergo two Covid-19 tests a week and quarantine if they test positive; the students have no such testing requirement. Every few weeks, new cases pop up among workers at different dining halls, leading to closures, straining a system under pressure. Students complain about long waiting times to access a dining hall already understaffed due to social-distancing requirements. Recently unionised, the university has given workers extra sick days, which end up quickly used during a pandemic, not that they actually matter much to employees. “Now that we’ve unionised, the university has moved to using more and more contracting companies. Soon we’ll all be out of a job anyways, replaced by an army of contractors,” my mom reflects. And when the dining halls become too overwhelmed, the university contracts out the job of feeding students entirely. For the holidays, the school has given its students Uber Eats vouchers for area restaurants to buy themselves a nice meal and stay indoors. The reality of being an essential worker in America: essential to whom?
Acquaintances like to ask how my family is doing in these times; I try not to mention my mother. I work in tech and culture; most of the time it’s depressing for the other party to reckon with their class privilege. Sometimes they ask if my mom has faced discrimination at work, given Trump’s “Kung-Flu” rhetoric; I shrug. Occasionally I look at my phone and scroll past posts about “discriminAsian”, about how Chinese immigrants are looking for a sense of belonging in the face of heightened hate crimes. I shrug again – it’s a false sense of belonging, haunted by history. The truth is, the settler colonial state of America always needs what writer Laila Lalami terms “conditional citizens” for the project of empire and expansion. Striving for belonging while holding an American passport is a tempting act, made empty under racial capitalism. We tend to think of citizens as full members of a nation, subject to fair protection under law, free from harassment, guaranteed privacy, with their interests represented under democratic governance. Yet everyone is an American until they aren’t. When the US goes to war, in the Pacific, in the Middle East, in North Africa, when politicians seek re-election and cater to xenophobic sentiments, when corporations rely on immigrant labour and spend millions in lobbying for immigration law, who is considered a citizen, with all its protections, becomes dialled up and down as a result of American empire building.
What of history? Seen as concubines and prostitutes carrying germs, Chinese women were forbidden entry to and naturalisation in the US for reasons of “public health” in 1875 by the Page Law. Scholar Eithne Luibhéid writes in Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border, that sex with Chinese prostitutes “seemed to be the vector through which white supremacy and the perpetuity of the ‘the white race’ was directly threatened”, with the American Medical Association carrying out studies to determine the extent of Chinese “pollution” in the nation’s bloodstream.
The Page Law was the first time in US history when immigration was determined by national origin or ethnicity, creating a legal precedent for subsequent immigration laws. Despite the popular liberal perception that immigration law is a benevolent force that incorporates the marginal into the fold, constructions of race, citizenship and what it means to be an American are produced through an imagined, idealised immigrant, with these imaginaries solidified by immigration law.
“Immigrants, we get the job done!” goes the line from hit Broadway musical, Hamilton. No one is born an immigrant. Just as people become immigrants, people in power shape the idea of what it means to be an immigrant. By virtue of being immigrant, you can never belong, but you can aspire to become a certain kind of American. In the case of Hamilton, to be the idealised immigrant is to get the job done, even if the job includes upholding what Christina Sharpe terms the weather: a climate of empire, racial capitalism, white supremacy and anti-Blackness.
The dominant narrative in the US is that immigrants arrive as voluntary seekers of the American dream, which flattens stories of migration to reinscribe narratives of American power. Liberals sing the praises of industrious immigrants as the ones who built America. The right intones that immigrants are tolerated as long as they contribute “positively”, but that by nature, Americans should be distrustful of immigrants. In the narrow, colonial imagination, the immigrant symbolises the Other, the non-white, the continuation of cheap labour, whether positive or a threat. The conceptual question of immigration becomes a near impossible one to answer, if you have any vestige of ethics, as it forces you to accept the pretences: a world of borders, of lasting, legitimised national power in all its violence. Legal scholar Leti Volpp argues in The Indigenous as Alien that this sleight of hand is central to the project of settler colonialism. By labelling the US as a “nation of immigrants” or “built by immigrants”, it naturalises the settler colonial state – a national government formed by conquest, subjugation and violence. It is a state that lays claims of governance to land, with founding fathers seizing power to draw lines on a map. Scholar Mahmood Mamdani reminds us to be wary of conflating immigration and settlement, for “immigrants join existing polities, whereas settlers create new ones”.
Hand in hand with this naturalising of borders and the settler colonial state is a parallel move made by contemporary empire: the strategic use of the foreign, the Oriental, as a way to uphold anti-Blackness and imperialism. Under racial capitalism, Ju-Hyun Park argues in her essay “The Alien and the Sovereign”, certain US leaders have positioned shutting down the American economy during the pandemic as pure Oriental communism, against the grain of “freedom”. Park writes that the “‘threatening aliens’ of US Orientalism function to stabilise settlers’ claims to the land while also facilitating the elaboration of state powers which originate in racial slavery and Indigenous dispossession”. If we say that the US has always been a nation of immigrants, we are asked to confront who exactly has been in power to extend citizenship, which powers shape the meaning of citizenship, and who profits from delineating the lines of freedom and belonging.
Political ideology always relies on crafting a vision, building imaginations. The fear of the immigrant Other has long perpetuated a domestic climate of racism and anti-Blackness: from the popularity of eugenics during the Progressive Era of the 1920s with its fear of immigrants, to the Cold War, the War on Terror and the present American moment. The immigrant is a ghostly figure, emptied of any actual being, wielded in our minds by political narrative. In a state of exception, the spectre of the immigrant can be used to deprive citizens of existing state benefits – as politicians normalise a category of people deserving less, we all come to expect less. If some people, by virtue of being immigrants or migrants, do not deserve food stamps or welfare checks, who else can the powerful exclude?
No one is born an immigrant and yet, more often than not, it is through the vectors of US imperialism that a person becomes one. The imagined immigrant is an industrious figure, helping build America, doing the job that no one else wants, contributing positively. The actual immigrant has a range of reasons for leaving their country of origin, but, whatever those might be, has made the difficult choice to leave behind family and networks. Dig deeper into history and you will find that few countries have been left untouched by American influence: a long list of proxy wars, CIA influence, military support towards authoritarian regimes, endless violence, US-led IMF economic restructurings as a form of debt imperialism, and economic destabilisation. An immigration lawyer I talked to summarised it neatly: US immigration policy is driven by an afterthought of apology – sorry for the destabilisation, here is a voucher for an apartment outside a war zone and four years of education. The imagined immigrant is the ideal neoliberal subject – willing to ignore larger, structural violence in favour of individual work and success. This kind of idealised subjectivity proliferates, especially as companies vow to feature more Black, Indigenous and people of colour in leadership and media, especially as new forms of racialisation emerge in response to increasingly privatised economies.
The actual immigrant engaged in actual work has different meanings. Two years ago, my mother and her co-workers did unionise, overcoming the illusion of “individual” work; after all, those in power rarely view labourers as individuals. Rather than the imagined politics that erases race in favour of class, the work of untangling multi-dimensional, intersectional experiences became central to the work of organising. It required understanding and discussions about how being an Ethiopian immigrant could mean having a different approach to management than for a Haitian-American or Brazilian migrant. In the lived reality of work, by establishing lived experience as the crux of solidarity, it opened up a set of new questions, beyond the ways that being American means being the ideal worker. It required new imaginations of belonging, new articulations of identity, turning the monolithic “immigrant” into grounded specificity. It required seeing “the immigrant” as human, with human experiences. And it required a new relationship to work, which requires a new imagination of what being “American” means.
As my mother conveyed it, it ultimately became absurd and obvious that a group of non-white employees were clamouring for the right to work, the right to continue working so hard for a white management class in which “management credentials were bought not earned”. As Rinku Sen writes in Are Immigrants and Refugees People of Color?: “An immigrant rights strategy that can’t handle race, both historically and currently, may leave us with policy that allows immigrants only to clean toilets for 23 hours a day, leaving their families thousands of miles away, or one that provides no protection from abusive law enforcement for anyone perceived to be Muslim.” Despite or perhaps in response to unionisation, the university is slowly starting to replace employees with contractors, who are overwhelmingly a new generation of migrants to the US.