Trump’s Essentialist Border Rhetoric: Racial Identities and Dangerous Liminalities

Abstract

Our article focuses on the emergence of a racialized border rhetoric that functions to cast Mexican (im)migrants, refugees, US DREAMers, and undocumented persons in the US—specifically those coming from south of the US border—as social burdens who threaten the sovereignty of the nation-state. We describe the new essentialism in Donald J. Trump’s tweets and speeches that is a hybrid of overt and covert racism working to cast brown bodies as dangerous, deviant, pollutants as a means of controlling their movements and re-centering Whiteness. At the same time, we identify a dangerous liminality that refugees, (im)migrants, and potentially DREAMers find themselves navigating as a result. Attention is also given to counter-narratives that have been advanced to resist this essentializing rhetoric.

Keywords:

• Border rhetoric
• Trump
• immigrants
• race
• U.S.-Mexico border
• vernacular discourse

Notes

1. DACA implemented by the Obama administration in 2012 as a response to the US Senate’s failure to pass immigration policy reform that would provide provisions for undocumented childhood arrivals living in the United States.

2. DREAMer is an acronym for those who sought provision under the proposed Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, commonly known as the DREAM Act).

3. Upward mobility and progress are characteristics of White values and ideals. See Heuman & Langford, 2010 and additional Whiteness Studies scholarship.

4. The notion of US society having achieved post-racial status was largely due to the election and re-election of former President Barack Obama, who self-identifies as African American.