. . . Anti-immigrant rhetoric is not only a recent phenomenon in the United States. In the nineteenth century, Irish immigrants were seen as leeches draining taxpayer resources (Hirota 2017). After World War I, German immigrants were stereotyped as invading barbarians (Little 2019). During World War II, Japanese Americans were portrayed as rats (Yam 2017). More recently, anti-immigrant sentiment has been directed predominantly at the Southern border, and its rhetoric is more self-consciously reliant on biological metaphors. Extremist right-wing blogs characterize undocumented immigrants as parasites (Musolff 2012). In a 2018 tweet, New Jersey’s deputy mayor Rick Blood referred to undocumented immigrants as noxious vermin (Garber 2021). Such anti-immigrant rhetoric had its most prominent incendiary in former President Donald J. Trump. In a 2019 White House Statement, he claimed that an influx of illegal aliens was “overwhelming our schools, overcrowding our hospitals, draining our welfare system, and causing untold amounts of crime” (The White House 2019). He, too, mapped biological metaphors onto immigration. He argued that the Democratic Party wanted “illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our country” (Zimmer 2019). On a visit to the U.S.-Mexican border, he said, “We have a sick country . . . it’s sick in the border” (Pager 2021). The then-president thus extended the biological metaphor beyond immigrants. In his thinking, the United States is an ailing organism, perhaps a human body that is sick with symptoms – corruption, exhaustion, depletion – because it is overrun by pathogenic undocumented immigrants. According to his rhetoric, to be “Great” (or healthy) again, the United States must be purged of and resistant to the cause of its diminishment (or sickness): undocumented immigrants. Paulo Mendoza’s insistence that Immigrants Are Essential flies in the face of this logic. That they are “essential” qualifies immigrants as necessary and beneficial to the United States; it characterizes them not as foreign or alien to the nation but as part of it. They are not pathogens in Mendoza’s framing but vital, as certain organs are to the body. In this regard, Mendoza’s chosen locations for her installation are compelling. If we extend the metaphor and map a human organism onto the United States, Washington D.C. – where coequal branches decide and direct how the body moves – is the equivalent of the brain. New York City is the heart, pumping the commercial lifeblood of America. On Pennsylvania Avenue and Broadway, the installations not only situate immigrant faces at vital centers of the United States, but their bright visibility also converts those locations into contact zones, as theorized by Mary Louise Pratt. Pratt defines contact zones as “social spaces where cul11
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