Alexandros Orphanides’s June 19 anti-imperialist tirade on The Huffington Post has as much jargon as a chemistry textbook, but fewer defensible arguments than the National Inquirer. According to Orphanides, the immigration problem facing us today isn’t the influx of illegal immigrants into the U.S. in 2016, but the illegal immigrants that infested North America in 1607.
To begin: Orphanides takes on the patriarchal establishment that is the Spanish language. “Latinx is used in place of the commonly-utilized Latino, because as a gender-neutral descriptor, it better encompasses the many Latinx communities in the U.S.” Orphanides never provides a pronunciation guide (but it’s probably safest to avoid colonizing the Spanish language with an American pronunciation of the letter “x”).
Colonization is a big deal, according to Orphanides. “There is a direct connection,” he explains, “between the colonization of the U.S., the development of its imagined community, and the criminalization of Latinxs as the embodiment of ‘illegality.’” (Wonder if Santa Anna regarded the U.S. an “imagined community” when the U.S. took Chapultepec and occupied Mexico City?)
The horribly exclusionary idea that land can belong to a particular group of people as “property” comes from the same Europeans that, according to Orphanides, committed genocide against the Native Americans and enslaved the Africans.
“The U.S., as a settler colony, developed out of European settlements in North America, enacting genocide on indigenous communities, appropriating land as property, forcefully incorporating enslaved African people.” Yes, better get rid of private property.
The evil fruits of private property, of national borders? “By creating a construct of illegality and assigning it to a broad and diverse group of people, the U.S. racializes a category of human beings who, in the eyes of many in the dominant culture, embody illegality.” Yes, geographic borders create the “construct of illegality”—the idea that some people are allowed to be here and some aren’t.
What’s wrong with that? Orphanides explains. Geographic borders cause racial borders. “Regardless of their actual status,” people who look like they are from another geographic region are grouped into the “illegal” category. “This erects both a real and imaginary border to police the boundaries of an imaginary community.” To support this claim, Orphanides cites two nasty tweets from thoroughly unimportant Twitter accounts.
“In this way,” he concludes, “people visibly racialized as Latinx, usually those perceived as non-white, cannot fully belong to the imagined community.”
“Illegality, or the perception of illegality,” Orphanides continues, “tells us that some people do not deserve human rights.”
Suddenly the picture becomes clear! If the U.S. says some people are on U.S. soil illegally and others are there legally, then the U.S. creates a culture in which some people have human rights and some don’t. But everyone deserves human rights. So, by modus tollens, we must abandon the concept that some people can be in the U.S. “illegally,” that some people are citizens and some aren’t. Open border for everyone!
