| Summary: | In Matthew Frye Jacobson’s book, "Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples At Home and Abroad, 1876-1917," he quotes the 1911 Dillingham Immigration Commission, a federal bipartisan effort to study issues related to immigration from 1907-1911: “We should exercise at least as much care in admitting human beings as we exercise in relation to animals or insect pests or disease germs.” This quotation implies that immigrants need to be regulated in the same way as the animals usually considered the least valuable on anthropocentric hierarchy scales. These kinds of xenophobic comparisons are historic and commonplace in American history even though they have changed over the course of time based on different targeted groups and historic, international, and cultural events and conflicts. With President Trump’s proposition to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it, these immigrant-pest correlations continue to escalate. In this poem, I explore what various politicians have stated about immigrants using pest metaphors while interweaving pest control discourses. A pest is an animal that is “out of place.” Immigrants, too, are often “out of place” or “uprooted” or in between places. They live between the world in which they are from and the world in which they inhabit presently, never fully fitting into either world. As there is a multiplicity of immigrants who choose to cross the border from Mexico, there is also a multiplicity of pests who cross different kinds of borders and boundaries. Pests and immigrants are liminal beings, making some people uneasy. My intention here is not to universalize the figure of the immigrant nor the figure of the pest, but instead to explore the complications of immigration-pest discourse in US political cultures.
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