ABSTRACT

I turn to the mediated coverage of the campaign for the lessons it offers rhetoric and argument scholars interested in immigrant activism and its disruptive potentials. These disruptive possibilities demand critical attention, for in negotiations of citizen and immigrant, and arguments about border and nation, social change is possible. In this essay, I examine the discourse of the campaign and argue that its juxtaposition of absurdity and reality, combined with its shift from the border to the fi eld, disrupt prevalent anti/immigrant discourses in ways that prevent easy association of immigrant with threat/danger/pity while still relying on essentialist notions of migrant-as-other.