Overview

Our goal is to win immigration and border processes that allow immigrants and border residents to choose how we live and thrive. We are up against well-defined and consistently iterated and reiterated anti-immigrant rhetoric and stories that are used to manipulate citizens and keep immigrants exploitable.

If we are going to change immigration policy, we need to change the conversation about immigration policy. In order to change the conversation, we need shared stories about why immigration system is the way it is, how it hurts us and how we can change it. We need a narrative.

Narrative is often defined as a collection or system of related stories that are articulated and refined over time to represent a central idea or belief. Narratives present assumptions about the way the world works. They put bounds on the individual and collective imagination of what is possible and impossible.

Strategic Racism: Blocking Progress on Immigration

The dominant anti-immigrant narrative is built on a strategy that uses racism strategically to scapegoat immigrants and hide the ways that attacks on public resources and institutions hurt us all. While overt racism might only appeal to the most extreme conservatives, anti-immigrant rhetoric using coded racism has broad appeal among conservatives and persuadables, including those in border and immigrant communities. Coded racism is so powerful because it is paired with the idea that there is not enough to go around and that people must compete for scarce resources.

The anti-immigrant narrative strategy has the following components:

• Deploy dog-whistle racism and xenophobia strategically to scapegoat immigrants and Black and brown people.
• Exploit divisions to rig the rules to pad the profits of the richest 1% and cut funds, programs and services for the rest of us.
• Use the scarcity that those cuts create in order to reinforce the perception that white people, natural-born citizens and “legal” immigrants are competing against Black and brown people and new immigrants.

This narrative is popular among the right’s base at the same time that it mobilizes persuadables, especially Latino persuadables. Our narrative has to take on this coded racism head-on and disarm it. But we also need to vy for the same persuadables the anti-immigrant narrative is vying for.

Disarming Strategic Racism: Race Class Narrative

A recent body of research and practice has shown that it is possible to do that by using the Race Class Narrative framework. Race Class Narrative has proven to mobilize our base and resonate with the middle in a variety of geographies and contexts.

The Race Class Narrative has the following components:

• Discuss race overtly in order to connect with our base and prime persuadables against scapegoating
• Name scapegoating based on race as a tactic that hurts us economically
• Emphasize uniting across race and background in order to call persuadables to their higher ideals
• Remind people that we have won before
• Make it clear that working together is how we make government work for all

RCN Through a Border Lens

But we can’t stop there. We are border communities and our position and unique experience makes us powerful advocates for a new vision for the border. The narrative that border residents deploy must incorporate our history and culture, as well as position border residents as the heroes who will deliver a new, liberatory approach to border governance.

Our narrative, therefore, includes the following components:

• A union of residents at the nation’s doorstep, welcoming with dignity anyone who finds themselves on the nation’s doorstep
• We have a long history of uniting across race and on both sides of the border to fight for and win the things all people need – farmworker rights and protections, Mexican American civil rights, streetlights and drainage in colonias, etc.
• We rise to some of the nation’s and world’s biggest challenges – refugees and humanitarian aid, climate damage-fueled flooding, increased costs of healthcare, the disproportionate impact of the pandemic, etc.
• We name corporations that profit from militarizing the border and keeping immigrants exploitable and the politicians they buy as the true roadblock to progress on immigration
• We present a vision of the Rio Grande Valley as a shining light on the border, a beacon for good government, human rights and shared prosperity. We win that future by uniting across race and background, like we have done in the past.

LUPE’s Border and Immigration Core Narrative

The narrative below outlines a shared story members of the LUPE community can use when talking to friends, family, colleagues, decision-makers and the media. LUPE has built out this narrative with help from Red Cypress Consulting. To see a narrative report, sample messages, and a phrasing guide, visit lupenet.org/narrative.