I usually hesitate to write the words “I told you so.” Yet in this moment, as we watch international students face visa revocations, immigrants threatened with deportation to suit political ends and birthright citizens treated as if their rights are provisional, it’s hard not to feel my disappointment being tinged with a sense of vindication.
Amid growing student protests, the federal government has ramped up visa cancellations and deportation threats. Students have had their F-1 statuses revoked for minor technicalities. Others face the possibility of being forcibly removed from the country — not because of any crime, but because they dared to speak out, organize or protest. On campuses across the country, international students are being targeted and are very likely not the only ones in danger. Permanent residents, i.e. green card holders like Mahmoud Khalil are not protected by their legal status. President Donald Trump’s comments about sending “homegrown criminals” to foreign prisons raise further concerns for those of us who are naturalized or have family members who are. The administration is currently asking the Supreme Court to effectively change the definition of birthright citizenship to bring even more targets into the fold. These recent actions are not about “the law.” It’s about sending the message that our right to be here is based on obedience.
For many of us, whether we’re immigrants, children of immigrants or just students trying to learn in an increasingly hostile environment, this isn’t new. This is what happens when belonging is treated like a privilege instead of a right. When your acceptance into a community is conditional, based on how well you fit in or how non-threatening you appear, it becomes easier to understand that assimilation, the golden ticket into an American identity, is not a shield against violence. It is an empty promise made to bait the vulnerable into staying silent.
The myth of “successful” assimilation encourages its followers to stay silent for the sake of security, yet it fails to deliver anything but tacit approval that can get revoked at a moment’s notice. Complying with such a request only validates the underlying message that “full assimilation” is both desirable as well as achievable — neither of which are true. Assimilation is not a destination one can reach after years of proving loyalty to the dominant regime; it is a moving target. Someone can accept and even embrace the trappings of the dominant culture all while those in power have retained the ability to retract their approval at will under the claim that their “assimilation” has not gone far enough. No amount of English fluency, American-sounding nicknames, pop culture knowledge or separation from one’s ethnic community changes the fact that we hold rights only within a certain territory under arbitrary conditions that the reigning class can change based solely on our willingness to stay quiet and go along with their agenda.
This conditional belonging fosters dangerous hierarchies within immigrant communities and the outside world’s perception of us. When assimilation is the goal, it allows society to start classifying people into those who will conform and those who must be separated out — a division within which neither side can ever “win.” People seen as unable to assimilate are pushed into “their own” communities, making it easier to round them up in the future and justify their removal. The “self-relocation” — more accurately recognized as forced emigration – of Jewish communities in Nazi Germany was encouraged by the state before outright extermination began and rested on this same logic of encouraging the “unassimilable” to isolate themselves, making their eventual removal more logistically feasible and more ideologically justified. This bears striking resemblance to the Trump administration’s policy of using scare tactics and threats to encourage their targets to “self-deport.”
This isn’t a new tactic by any means; the U.S. is built upon it. The U.S. government’s forced removal of Native peoples during the Trail of Tears was not framed as the blatant land grab it was, but as a solution to the “problem” of cultural difference that could benefit all parties. Those who did assimilate were not any more protected from racially-motivated violence. The Gnadenhutten settlement in present-day Ohio was home to Christian missionaries and Lenni Lenape who had converted to Christianity. Their sect believed in pacifism and so did not take sides in the Revolutionary War, but because of this, they were forced to evacuate their city. A few months later, a number of them were allowed to venture back toward Gnadenhutten to gather supplies when they were met by Pennsylvania militiamen, seeking revenge for ongoing frontier violence between Indigenous people and Anglo settlers. The militia feigned friendliness to convince the Lenape to turn over any weapons before accusing the party of being spies and “sentencing” them to death by a vote. Following a night of imprisonment, the militia murdered and scalped a total of 96 innocents for the crime of looking too much like an “enemy.” It did not matter that these were peaceful noncombatants who allegedly spent their last night praying and singing Christian hymns. Their identity as the “other” was not to be overcome.
Since then, America has tried to distance itself from this narrative, acknowledging it as the senseless massacre it is, but we have failed to move away from the core principles that fueled the attack — a willingness to demonize the “other” for perceived failures to live up to a hypocritical and unachievable standard. We see this at play in the slew of recent deportations, supported by justifications that attempt to suit modern sensibilities by claiming activists are “undermining U.S. foreign policy” — a level of fearmongering that harkens back to the “national security” concerns used to target Japanese Americans during World War II and justify Islamophobia and mass surveillance after 9/11.
We have to stop believing in the promise of assimilation as our path to safety. The fact remains that merely by living here, we are bound to integrate some aspects of American culture into our own worldviews and behaviors — that would be the “multi” part of multiculturalism — but Americanization should not be a requirement for recognizing our personhood. Rights that can be revoked when you dissent, organize or speak out were barely yours to begin with, and true inclusion is not dependent on one’s willingness to align with arbitrary standards of identity.
On a collective level, we need to build coalitions across marginalized communities that don’t depend on conformity with dominant values but on our shared experiences within a system that attempts to divide us along ideological lines, classifying ourselves and others via our degree of acceptance within existing hierarchies. Would I and my fellow writers at The Retrograde be safer if we wrote for an administratively backed paper like The Mercury? Not in the slightest, because believing that there’s a level of acceptable yet honest criticism that can be made by operating within a system that harms us is no better than saying that I can safely walk down the sidewalk in a blindfold just by hoping I don’t get pushed into the street. If we keep buying into the myth that we’ll be safe once we’ve “proven ourselves,” we’re not just lying to ourselves, we are reinforcing the very system that puts us all in danger.
Students at UTD have already demonstrated a commitment to coalition-building by standing together on May 1 last year and the ensuing attacks on students, by starting The Retrograde in defiance of administrative attempts at censorship and in the future by refusing to engage with the reanimated corpse of The Mercury. College campuses have always been flashpoints for protest, resistance and for attracting political backlash, which is exactly why they are so integral to broader radical movements. Thankfully, I have full faith in our ability to uphold that legacy and refuse assimilationism’s siren song here.