When the Trump administration registered the domains Aliens.gov and Alien.gov in March, UFO conspiracy theorists questioned whether or not they may lastly get solutions they’d lengthy awaited.
But approaching the heels of the Pentagon’s anticlimactic release of files associated to UFOs and extraterrestrial life, the debut of Aliens.gov final week proved much more disappointing: The website was no “Disclosure Day,” however a parody, serving no obvious function however to disparage undocumented immigrants.
“THEY WALK AMONG US,” the location declares in massive, neon inexperienced textual content. Crawling kind then begins to fill the display: “For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret. Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives.”
Along with faux “declassified” labels and a clunky reference to “The X-Files,” the website additionally options an interactive map monitoring “alien encounters,” or purported arrests of immigrants, and asks customers to report “suspicious aliens.”
In asserting the new web site on X, the White House additionally posted an AI-generated animation depicting a UFO beaming up an undocumented immigrant over the southern border wall. It’s not the primary time Trump and his administration have engaged in wordplay round “aliens:” The president not too long ago shared an AI-generated image displaying him strolling alongside a chiseled alien in shackles.
Long earlier than “alien” conjured photos of otherworldly beings, the phrase was used to denote one thing different, unusual or overseas to one’s personal sphere. “Alien” entered into English from Latin and French across the 14th century and through the years took on a particular authorized that means. Black’s Law Dictionary defines an alien as “a person who resides within the borders of a country but is not a citizen or subject of that country.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: NCS’s “Word of the Week” brings you the that means behind the phrases within the information.
Other types of “alien” convey key dimensions of the human expertise — to really feel “alienated” is to expertise a way of loneliness and nonbelonging; a partner who claims a 3rd celebration has broken their marriage can sue them for “alienation of affections.” But on the Trump administration’s new website, “alien” is used to imply inhuman: “They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences. With one exception — they do not belong here.”
In US jurisprudence, “alien” seems within the nation’s first immigration regulation, the Naturalization Act of 1790, which stipulated that “any Alien being a free white person” of excellent character and who has lived within the US for not less than two years might develop into a citizen. The phrase additionally figured closely within the Alien and Sedition Acts, a set of 4 18th century legal guidelines that restricted citizenship, expanded the president’s authority to detain and deport foreigners, and criminalized dissenting speech. (Trump continues to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, towards Venezuelan males.)
In early US historical past, “alien” functioned largely as a bureaucratic time period. Around the Nineteen Forties, the phrase started to shift into basic use in reference to Mexican laborers on momentary US visas, says Michael Lechuga, a University of New Mexico professor and writer of “Visions of Invasion: Alien Affects, Cinema, and Citizenship in Settler Colonies.” He says some employees found upon arriving that the farms or firms the place they’d been contracted to work had already met their quotas.
As a outcome, he says these employees had been deemed “illegal aliens,” stripped of their papers and marked for deportation. “The term really did come about in this enforcement around laws that were around one’s status as a laborer, but also really out of their control,” he provides.
The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which changed nationwide origin quotas with a system that prioritized expert labor, additional popularized the time period, says historian Mai Ngai, writer of “Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.” Though the regulation ushered in a wave of each approved and unauthorized immigration from Mexico, the “illegal alien” label took maintain.
When George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan had been requested in a 1980 presidential debate about whether or not kids of “illegal aliens” must be entitled to free public schooling, each candidates used the time period of their solutions, even whereas calling for amnesty and broader pathways to legalization. Bill Clinton additionally referred to “illegal aliens” quite a few occasions in his 1995 State of Union address.
“By the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, racism against Mexicans was all couched in this assumption that all Mexicans were illegal, which has never been true,” she says.
Space “aliens,” in the meantime, had been an invention of twentieth century science fiction. The Oxford English Dictionary cites early examples from the pulp journal “Wonder Stories” across the Nineteen Thirties, and by the Space Age the time period was widespread. Crucially, Ngai says, the time period for extraterrestrials flowed from the phrase for foreigners, not the opposite means round. “When people spoke of beings from outer space, they likened them to foreigners,” she says. “It’s not like people saw an immigrant and said they look like they’re from outer space. They saw an image of a being from outer space and said they look like a foreigner.”
The Trump administration casting immigrants as extraterrestrials, then, isn’t notably novel. Sci-fi tales about alien invasions have usually functioned as political allegories for anxieties round empire and immigration, Lechuga says. Take H.G. Wells’ quintessential alien invasion novel “The War of the Worlds.” By one account, Lechuga explains, Wells mentioned his depiction of Martians invading Victorian England was impressed by European colonization of the Aboriginal Tasmanians; by one other, the writer billed it as a warning concerning the want to strengthen England’s army capabilities. Steven Spielberg’s 2005 movie adaptation of “The War of the Worlds,” set in a post-9/11 landscape, is alternately understood by viewers as being about American fears of terrorism and concerning the US invasion of Iraq.
“What the White House did was an ultimate association of immigrants with not being human,” Ngai says. “To say that they came from a spaceship means they’re not human beings.”
Use of the time period has political implications, too. The authorized scholar Keith Cunningham found that US Supreme Court opinions that used language comparable to “aliens” had been extra probably to ship unfavorable outcomes for immigrants, and proposed that judges use phrases comparable to “migrants”.
Over the years, as immigrant rights advocates sought to remove “alien” from the lexicon, it appeared that mainstream language round immigrants and asylum-seekers was shifting. People and establishments swapped “undocumented” for “illegal,” and “non-citizen” and “immigrant” for “alien.” California struck “alien” from its labor code in 2015; states together with Oregon, Colorado and Washington have since taken related measures. In 2021, President Joe Biden issued a memo directing the nation’s immigration enforcement companies to use “non-citizen” and “migrant” instead of “alien” and “illegal aliens.” A commentary in The Guardian that very same yr referred to the phrase “illegal aliens” as “now-defunct.”
The White House defended its use of the time period. “Identifying an individual as an ‘illegal alien,’ is not demeaning, it’s factual,” spokesperson Abigail Jackson mentioned in a press release. “The Trump Administration will continue deporting illegal aliens without apology.”
Jose Antonio Vargas, a journalist who was introduced to the US with out authorization as a toddler, recollects seeing the phrases “resident alien” stamped on his solid inexperienced card and pondering it appeared like one thing out of a online game. “That term ‘alien’ strips people really of personhood, making people easier to villainize,” he says. “How do you legalize people you call ‘illegal’ or ‘alien’? You don’t. You just call them ‘illegal’ or ‘alien.’”
The Trump administration takes that outlook to the purpose of utilizing nonhuman pronouns to refer to immigrants: “If you’ve witnessed an Alien abduction, do not be alarmed. The Alien is in good hands,” the website reads. “We will take care of it… and return it safely to its place of origin.”
NCS’s Catherine Shoichet contributed to this report.