We are living in a particularly anti-immigration moment in the US. The Trump administration and many right-wing Republicans depict immigrants as dangerous criminals who must be contained and deported from the country. As most of us are aware by now, neither ICE nor the Department of Homeland Security makes any distinction in practice between documented and undocumented immigrants, nor do they pay any attention to whether targeted individuals have broken any laws, nor do they care whether the individuals they target are even immigrants as long as they look vaguely foreign (which generally means non-white). Many have (rightly) expressed outrage at these practices, and many have responded by pointing out that immigrants commit crimes at much lower rates than do citizens, that immigrants contribute significantly to the economy while being denied basic benefits, that citizens should be allowed to walk the streets without harassment from government officials, etc. Many citizens seem to be swayed by these claims, at least in areas that have been hit hard by deportations and by ICE violence. Yet the logic of these responses is a bit worrisome; it goes something like: “they” are not the threat they are portrayed to be; “they” are actually good for “us;” and “we” should be left in peace. While these approaches are important correctives to the faulty assumptions that fuel anti-immigrant sentiment and practice, I want to ask a deeper question: what if “we” allow “them” to question precisely who “we” are? What if we hold open the very notion of citizenship itself in the face of immigrants? What if “they” are always already part of “us”? To explore this notion, I turn to political theorists Bonnie Honig and Seyla Benhabib’s analyses of democratic foundations, both of whom see the limitations of “the people” as posing difficulties for democracy as a legitimate form of government.
Honig and Benhabib both argue that the founding of a democracy is paradoxical. By grounding government in “we the people,” democracy replaces the arbitrary nature of, say, monarchy (which is based on nothing but the force of the ruler) with the will of the governed; the people as a whole decide for themselves what they want their common world to look like. The idea is that the people determining their collective fate is good for all. Illegitimacy is thus replaced with legitimacy; arbitrary rule enforced on the ruled is replaced with the vision/desires/will of the ruled. The problem here is that the people as a whole can be just as arbitrary as the will of a single leader such as a king or queen. As Benhabib puts it, while democracies are based on universal principles—equality, freedom, rights, and the laws that guarantee them—any particular democracy is indeed particular—it is composed of a group of specific people whose interpretations of these principles might be at odds with their universal impulse. Honig finds it suggestive that Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract gets around this problem by having a foreigner found the ideal democracy; as an outsider to the community thus founded, the foreigner is less likely to be biased and hence more likely to be impartial in establishing the laws that are to guide it. Perhaps because foreigners are likely to have their own biases, Benhabib suggests that only a god could fulfill such a role. In either case, democracy requires foreignness, otherness, in order to aspire to something other than mere force. The outside to any democracy is a reminder that “inside” is necessarily limited by the “we” as it is currently constituted.
Democracies are thus imperfect, partial, and in need of continual renewal and revision—what Benhabib calls democratic iterations. Consider the wording of the preamble to the Constitution: “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union…” Not “perfect” but “more perfect,” better than what came before. It’s certainly true that the US was founded as less-than-perfect: Black people (both slave and free) and Native Americans were considered non-citizens, and women were positioned as less than full citizens without the right to vote. “We the people” thus included only white men, the result of the founders’ limited, biased worldview; Blacks, Native Americans, and women were “them,” other. While Blacks and Native Americans were seen as direct threats to the nation, women were more seen as in need of protection, playing their proper role within the nation by being wives and mothers. Subsequent social movements expanded who “we” are to include those previously excluded. “They” redefined “us.” Honig refers to these expansions as “the staging of a nonexistent right” through which “sometimes, new rights, powers, and visions come into being,” which is not unlike the colonists themselves, who began acting like sovereign subjects without the King’s permission or recognition.
Rather than seeing “us” as a coherent unity, rather than seeing expansions of rights as progress toward to a goal of full inclusion, Honig suggests we acknowledge and even embrace the foreignness at the heart of “us.” Doing so may allow us, along with James Baldwin, “a sense of the terror of belonging, the hope and betrayal that come with the inextricable intertwining of people in one another’s live across lines of difference and power.” If we see democratic community as always riven through with foreignness, with Otherness, with difference, then who are we is a question always up for debate, for renegotiation, for re-making, based on living with others who are in effect strangers to us. Constantly grappling with the strangers among “us” can lead to asking who the heck we are and who we want to be.
If we understand that who “we” are is always very much up for grabs, then perhaps we will not be as surprised as I have found myself at current attempts to shrink the “we:”
- efforts to curb voting rights that would disenfranchise millions of citizens (including married women who changed their names, trans people, anyone who lacks easy access to often expensive identity papers)
- some right-wing podcasters’ claims that women should never have been granted rights
- the destruction of trans people’s right to self-determination through countless legislative acts across the country
- numerous states’ petitions to the Supreme Court to overturn the Obergefell decision that granted same-sex couples the right to marry
- the targeting of people of color, regardless of citizenship status, by federal agents in the name of anti-immigration rhetoric
- the targeting of immigrants themselves for removal from the US, and the horrible, inhumane conditions in which they are kept in detention facilities
These moves position women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, and immigrants as threats to the nation, as outsiders rather than as part of the “we.” If we see outsiders, “them,” as resources for a thriving democracy rather than as threats to it, then we may be better positioned to contest these attempts at marginalization, to insist that the “we” be held open in the face of “them.” When those of us who are used to being considered part of “us” are threatened with relegation to “them,” the best response is not to insist that “we” really belong while “they” do not. Rather, it is to work across our differences to claim together a different understanding of who we are.
This approach makes sense of the response to ICE violence and aggression by community members in Minneapolis: they have refused the positioning of their immigrant neighbors as threats to their communities, insisting that “they” are very much part of “us.” And they have literally put their lives on the line for the right to define who they are in these terms. Their actions have emboldened others to ask who we are in broader terms, with protesters across the country taking up the banner. They have insisted that foreignness as such is not a threat to democratic community but its very foundation.
Sources:
Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner
Seyla Benhabib, Another Comsopolitanism
