The Long American Tradition of Categorizing Immigrants as Either Good or Bad

An essay by Hidetaka Hirota, Asian American Research Center faculty affiliate, was just published in TIME Magazine. Hirota discusses how advocates of strict border policing typically divide noncitizens in the United States into two groups: "natural" and "unnatural"  immigrants, then disparage the latter as “illegal aliens” and call for their deportation. After describing the history of this artificial binary and its negative impact on various ethnoracial groups, he concludes that today the category of the “illegal alien” stigmatizes Latinx migrants, regardless of their immigration status, and legitimizes radical and inhumane approaches to border policing.