ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the arguments from Jordan’s speeches and their context related to immigration from the 1990s. It explores how networked publics have embraced and contested Jordan’s memory used in favor of stricter immigration policies in the 21st century. The chapter describes how argumentation scholars might better account for this “new digital temporality of memory” in other instantiations of public argument. Nearly 20 years later, Jordan re-emerged in mainstream contemporary public arguments over immigration. On November 10, 2015, during a commercial break from the Fox Business Network’s broadcast of the Republican presidential primary debate, an advertisement calling for immigration restrictions featured media footage of Jordan. The chapter suggests that argumentation scholars should pay greater attention to how publics remember, repurpose, and recirculate memories of famous figures through networked media to intervene in contemporary public argument. Networked arguments operate at the nexus of citation and circulation; they will necessarily move and mutate across time.
