Beyond Borders

Drawing inspiration from Kristina Baines’ and Victoria Costa’s Shifting Stereotypes project, this project invites audiences to confront the language of authority and critically question the assumptions embedded in familiar stereotypes. Baines and Costa encourage us to “make familiar stereotypes strange,” echoing anthropology’s approach of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Through this lens, this project encourages viewers to examine how political discourse often reduces complex migrant experiences to simplified, narrow stereotypes, obscuring the broader social and economic forces that shape migrant people’s lives.

For this project, students researched direct quotes from politicians in various countries who stigmatize or scapegoat migrants. They then analyzed these quotes using concepts from John Torpey, Douglas Massey, Caroline Brettell, and Paul Spickard to reveal how political language influences societal views on migration. These theoretical tools highlight the intersecting causes of migration, the power dynamics migrants encounter, and the historical continuity of exclusionary narratives, as opposed to simplistic stigmas.

Massey’s (1999) synthetic approach emphasizes that migration results from intersecting factors – global economic inequalities, household strategies, labor demands, and social networks – that are often oversimplified, if not outright ignored, in political rhetoric. By analyzing political language that reduces migrants to stereotypes, such as economic threats or cultural “others,” students reveal how these narratives obscure the structural challenges that compel migration.

John Torpey (2000) explores how states gained control over movement by monopolizing the “legitimate means of movement” through passports and border controls. These tools are not just practical measures to manage entry, but mechanisms that define who is legally allowed to move and who gets to have the label “illegal,” creating a division between citizens and non-citizens. Torpey argues this system of control relies on continuous surveillance, where the state watches without migrants knowing when or how, reinforcing state authority and shaping public views of migration as a security threat rather than a social or economic reality.

Brettell (2018) adds insight into the contradictory expectations of receiving societies, which demand migrants’ assimilation while simultaneously maintaining barriers to their inclusion. Students drew on Brettell’s approach to show how political discourse often frames migrants as outsiders who must prove their value while facing systemic exclusion. This framework allowed students to examine how political language often casts migrants through lenses of suspicion and conditional acceptance, obscuring their economic and social contributions.

Spickard’s Almost All Aliens (2007) provides a historical critique, challenging the “Ellis Island paradigm” that centers European immigrant success stories while marginalizing non-European experiences. Spickard critiques this Anglo-centric narrative, which positions English-descended Americans as “natural” natives, casting non-European and non-White migrants as perpetual outsiders. His work reveals how American immigration history often overlooks racial dynamics, with certain migrant groups depicted as inherently foreign regardless of their generational ties to the U.S. Students applied Spickard’s insights to examine how political rhetoric in various contexts reinforces a hierarchy of belonging, privileging some migrant groups as “model minorities” while stigmatizing others as “undesirable.”

This exhibit invites you, like Shifting Stereotypes, to reflect on the assumptions embedded in political scapegoating of migrants. By critically examining political rhetoric, students here reveal how these narratives are constructed and manipulated, challenging the simplified portrayals that often dominate public, political, and mainstream media discourse. We hope this activity inspires you to question these portrayals and to develop a more nuanced, humane understanding of migrants and their journeys.