Trump’s Other Hold on the Americas: The Visa
By Sophie Naimi ·
The persistent focus on border walls and visa restrictions is never about security; it is always about defining who belongs and who must be expelled.
The State’s Right to Draw Lines on Human Lives
The persistent focus on border walls and visa restrictions is never about security; it is always about defining who belongs and who must be expelled. What we see in the repeated policy maneuvers of Donald Trump—from promising a wall on the Mexico–U.S. border, which he vowed Mexico would pay for, to his historical policies of family separation—is not governance. It is state-sanctioned exclusion. The rhetoric alone, describing illegal immigration as an "invasion," sets the stage for profound injustice.
When Citizenship Becomes a Weapon Against the Other
The mechanism at work here demands attention. We are discussing systemic power establishing rigid hierarchies that define rights by group identity. This echoes the brutal logic of Apartheid. Apartheid was a system where citizenship and status were determined by race, ensuring political, social, and economic dominance by a minority. Trump’s actions mirror this pattern: denying entry to citizens from specific Muslim-majority countries (a ban later upheld in 2019), reducing refugee admissions to record lows (from an annual limit of 110,000 before his term down to 15,000 in 2021), and even signing executive orders restricting birthright citizenship, as reported by thehill.com. These are not policy adjustments; they are institutionalizing exclusion.
The Global Echoes of Exclusionary Power
The violence inherent in these policies has a global resonance that we cannot ignore. We see the fallout when state power becomes so obsessed with defining its internal borders that it forgets the human cost—the separation of over 4,400 children from their parents at the U.S.–Mexico border between 2017 and 2018. Even now, geopolitical tensions flare as seen by apnews.com, where the son of former Mexican President López Obrador appeals directly to Trump after a visa revocation. The pattern is clear: those who are deemed inconvenient or foreign—whether they come from Venezuela, North Korea, or simply lack sufficient documentation—are subjected to arbitrary and cruel control.
This relentless campaign against global mobility proves that the American political machine treats humanity as fungible commodity. It attempts to re-engineer citizenship into a privilege granted by the state, rather than an inherent right. The market will never price this kind of injustice, but history has proven it repeatedly: when power defines belonging through exclusion, the only lasting legacy is systemic brutality.