Every election season needs its scapegoats and every four years immigration debates are once again resuscitated. As the end of Trump’s first term approached, the time was ripe again for adding more personae non gratae to the list of threats to both public safety and national security, threats embodied by his vitriol in the undocumented migrant. As the real threat of coronavirus loomed on the horizon, in late February 2020, Trump added six countries to the list of seven majority-Muslim nations under US travel bans, a list that now includes countries as populous as Nigeria, and as genocidal as Myanmar. Ever the pataphysician of enumeration, Perec would have been able to wring out the poetry of the list: Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Iran, Libya, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Venezuela, Yemen . . .
No “big, beautiful wall” protected the world from coronavirus, and the wreckage it has left in its wake will be here for the foreseeable future. But who would have expected Trump to show some sympathy for fellow humans? His calling Covid-19 the “Chinese” virus — an othering epithet — carries on his relentless weaponization of fear. Coronavirus might be novel, but the anti-immigrant rhetoric is not. Some of the cartoons in the Ellis Island museum date back to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and others depict impossible-to-climb walls and overflowing “melting pots” of “unassimilated aliens.” “The immigration problem again!” reads the caption of a 1921 Newark News cartoon with a woman carrying a trash can that says “undesirables for America”: she stands on a riverbank; on the other side, Uncle Sam, with a club labeled “US public sentiment,” drives a sign into the ground — “No dumping ground for refuse.” Immigration advocates’ views are represented in these galleries too. A 1916 cartoon from Puck shows a Native American chief telling a pair of pilgrims: “You can’t come in. The quota from 1620 is full.”
How would Perec have written about people fleeing violence
and poverty, held without trials and locked up as criminals for indefinite amounts of time, their families torn apart, when their one wish is to find sanctuary? For Perec, Ellis Island was “a factory for transforming emigrants into immigrants.” Does the now commonly used term migrant point to their being in limbo, neither here nor in their places of origin, ensnared in endless litigation processes and political pandering? Are they today’s occupants of that nonplace Perec found in Ellis Island? The place where place is absent, no matter how confined?
Perec understood the absurd logic of boundaries. As he wrote in Species of Spaces of walls: “There are pictures because there are walls. We have to be able to forget there are walls, and have found no better way to do that than pictures.” Or as he noted of doors: “We protect ourselves, we barricade ourselves in.” And yet, as he added on borders: “Countries are separated from one another by borders. To cross a border is quite a moving thing to do: an imaginary limit . . .”