Decolonial Migration, Crimmigration, and the American Dream Nightmare in Ibi Zoboi’s Spirit Worlds

Abstract

I n contemporary United States of America, Black people live with the threat of death. Criminalized, over-policed, and mired in systemic oppression, two institutions causing continuous harm and collateral consequences are the system of mass incarceration—and the state apparati created to funnel people into it—and the immigration system, built to detain and deport people fleeing countries in which the conditions are a byproduct of neoliberal politics and American imperialism. To create a more just world, we must abolish the twin systems and create better ones in their place. Creating an anti-racist immigration system is integral to accessing true freedom in the United States; it is the first step to making the American Dream possible for all. When we view the migration of marginalized peoples both as a refutation of social and financial death as well as rejection of forced family separation, we can see an articulation of a decoloniality of migration. This paper examines this theme using first the history and trajectory of the criminalizing of immigration as developed by legal scholars. Second, it examines the ways this issue is expressed by writer Ibi Zoboi whose American Street directly describes the ways the American Dream become a nightmare when the dreamer is a Black Haitian girl. In conclusion, it connects to contemporary social justice demands for divestment and points to some of what is needed so as to create an anti-racist immigration system within which marginalized peoples can thrive and continue to make America what it need become so as to fulfill the dreams of the subjugated.