ABSTRACT
The view that migrant artifacts and sites trash the fragile ecosystem of the Sonoran Desert can be found across the political spectrum from American border militias and anti-immigrant activists on the far right to humanitarian groups and environmentalists on the far left. By devaluing these objects, if not the people who carry them, this perspective gives rise to conservation efforts to remove all material traces of undocumented migration to landfills. Rather than engaging in tired and cyclical political arguments about whether undocumented migrants are friend or foe, we gaze forward to see how these processes shape the material record of clandestine migration, as a form of heritage, now and in the future. As with those who believed that European immigrants in the 19th century would “contribute little of lasting value” many anti-immigration proponents today consider the material record of border crossing to have no heritage value.
