Immigrants, fear, and media spectacles (we have been here before)

Oh look, immigration is once again one of the big issues this election cycle. This is so shocking. 

Oh, right. It’s not shocking at all. Immigration and border issues are, almost without fail, always a big part of every election cycle. This isn’t something that just started happening with Trump in 2016. 

You know what else isn’t new? The whole pattern of creating media spectacles based in fear, prejudice, and xenophobia in order to drum up political support. 

The whole Trump/Vance lie about pet-eating migrants is just one of the latest versions of something that has been ongoing for decades and decades. I think it’s helpful to have an understanding of the histories here in order to better understand what we’re seeing in the present. It’s also helpful to see and recognize that there is a pattern here.

Back in 2008, the anthropologist Leo Chavez wrote a book called “The Latino Threat.” For those of you who either did not exist at that time, were not paying attention, or were too busy watching The Backyardigans, this book was written at the tail end of the GW Bush presidency and the start of Obama’s first term. 

Chavez opens the book by talking about what was happening around 2005, right in the middle of the second Iraq War. This was only four years after 9/11, and xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiments were running high.

Chavez highlights the Minutemen, which was this group of self-proclaimed patriots who made it their mission to protect the US-Mexico border from invasion. This group wasn’t really trying to stop immigrants directly as much as it was trying to go down to the border, create a spectacle, and bring media attention. This is what Chavez calls a “media spectacle.” 

So what were these people trying to do? What was the bigger picture? Chavez explains that these groups were using media spectacle as a way to define the differences between “citizens,” on the one hand, and “aliens,” on the other. 

According to Chavez, these are all public performances that are meant to shape ideas about citizenship, rights, and belonging. The Minutemen portrayed themselves as the patriotic defenders of national sovereignty, while depicting the migrants as a threatening horde that would destroy American culture and society.

Sound familiar? It should.

In his book Chavez focuses specifically on narratives about Latino immigrants. His argument examines what he calls the “Latino Threat Narrative.” What is that? Chavez tells us it’s a narrative directed specifically at Latino immigrants that depicts them as categorically different from other waves of immigrants in the United States. Those people, the narrative goes, aren’t like the others who came before. Why? Because they supposedly won’t assimilate and therefore represent a unique threat. Chavez spends much of the book breaking down that whole dehumanizing narrative.

There’s something extremely important that Chavez points out at the beginning of his book before he delves into the rest of the argument. While the ‘Latino Threat Narrative’ might seem like some new thing, it’s not. Instead, it is, as Chavez argues, part of a “grand tradition of alarmist discourse about immigrants and their perceived negative impacts on society” (2008: 3). Such narratives about the supposed intrinsic differences–and threats–from Latino immigrants are related to older narratives about other immigrant groups in the past, including Germans, Italians, Catholics, Chinese, Japanese, and others. 

One critical point here is that these narratives change and can be applied, at will, to any number of potential targets. Dehumanization and xenophobia are flexible tools that have been, and continue to be, wielded to define “us” against “them.” 

We have certainly been here before. What we’re seeing in Springfield, Ohio today is the latest iteration of much deeper processes and histories. But none of this is inevitable. This does not have to continue. It is possible to disrupt such processes and patterns. One first step–and this is something Chavez does very well in his book–is recognizing that things we’re seeing today are, in fact, part of an ongoing pattern of decisions and actions that humanize some people while selectively dehumanizing others. The open question, as always, is who will be targeted next…and who will remain silent as it happens.