This session explores myth-making in public and political debates about migration. As exemplified by the current U.S. administration’s plans for “the largest deportation operation in American history,” myths involving categories of race and religion are a crucial element for understanding people on the move. Concentrating on contemporary North America, the papers in this session offer empirical as well as evaluative explorations of how such myths about migration are conceptualized, communicated, critiqued, and countered.
In contrast to literature on religion and migration that has often recently emphasized Muslims (with metaphors of “tides” or prevailing “Muslim questions”), this paper takes up a contrasting case to theorize the ease experienced by nonreligious white migrants. Specifically, we consider post-2016 white French nonreligious immigrants, the most important immigrant group to Québec and among the most important to Ontario, Canada. Methodologically, we draw upon: (1) literature addressing the privilege and banality of the nonreligious (Le Renard 2019; Oliphant 2021) and intersecting whiteness (Ahmed 2007; Beaman 2019; Lépinard 2020); (2) fieldwork and interviews with French immigrants in Montreal and Toronto; and (3) critical discourse analyses of immigration policies and bilateral agreements. We consider how intersections of whiteness and nonreligion individualize and mainstream them, while prevailing narratives of cosmopolitanism, economic need, shared culture, and the perceived absence of religiosity invisibilize them.
After the results of the 2024 presidential election, violent anti-immigrant rhetoric and media depictions of “militarized mass deportations” increased. Response to the threats of mass deportation were varied. Human rights organizations and grass-roots immigration advocates were not derailed by the 2024 presidential election outcome. Organizations such as the Detention Watch Network avidly held Know Your Rights campaigns and Family Preparedness Plans to meet the moment. While organizations and advocates responded with preparation, some Christian churches responded with silence and others responded with practical resistance tactics. This paper will summarize key observations about local, regional, and national responses to the threat of mass deportations championed by Trumpian politics. Based on an emic ethnography, this paper engages three predominant responses to the Mass Deportation Rhetoric: preparation, silence, and resistance.
Familiarity with the discourse around U.S. immigration policy seems to suggest a tension bordering on a paradox, which is heralded by the two iron giants of the U.S. border: the Statue of Liberty, with its beacon-promise of welcome, and the borderwall, with its death-dealing rebuff. But historians of immigration policy have challenged this reading by revealing how practices of inclusion and exclusion are not a paradox but a production, working in tandem to constitute legal and symbolic Americanness. In this paper, I build on such historical work by arguing that the production of Americanness is driven by a theo-logic, which seeks to construct a chosen nation against a heathen other using policies of inclusion and exclusion. To illustrate my argument, I read two key moments in U.S. immigration policy—the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act creating the national origin quota system and the 1965 Hart-Celler Act ending it—through this theo-logic.
During the Cold War, hundreds of West African students flocked to the United States in search of higher educational opportunities that would equip them to usher in a new Africa free from colonial rule. Meanwhile, U.S. religious, educational, and political leaders grew concerned that students’ perceptions of the U.S. might harm the nation’s image abroad. Given that many of these students previously attended missionary schools in their homelands, they were often referred to as “products of missions” in popular U.S. media—that is, forever indebted to U.S. missionary contributions. In this presentation, I consider how West African students complicated and countered this religious rhetoric. Through a rhetorical analysis of U.S. newspapers and West African student writings, I explore how religious metaphors surrounding African student migration contributed to the formation of affective bonds between West African students and U.S. Christians—bonds that were often tested as students encountered U.S. racism firsthand.