Since the beginning of 2019, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign launched more than 2,000 ads on social media that warn people of the supposed threat of Latinx people. The aim of the ads was to mobilize support for a border wall and for border security by heightening fears of a migrant “invasion”. As a scholar who is working on a book about the history of border enforcement technologies such as drones, I know this is not the first time that Latinx people have been targeted by racist and xenophobic discourse that treats them as an invading force. Calls for border security today cannot be disentangled from the longer history of racist, white anxiety about black and brown bodies.
The notion that Latinx people constitute a “threat”, and more specifically an “invasion”, has not been a fringe view for decades. Instead, it has been an integral part of the border security framework throughout the second half of the 20th century. The former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) commissioner Leonard F Chapman told the Congress in 1975 that the service was overwhelmed with a “deluge of illegal aliens, particularly on the United States/Mexico border, [that] must be checked”. Read full story
Iván Chaar López is a Mellon Diversity Postdoctoral Associate in Latina/o Studies/Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University.
