Of Aliens and DREAMers: Congressional Te stimonies of Undocumented Migrants in the United States

The cursory glance at the terms 'Illegal Aliens', 'Defectives', 'Peons', 'Indigestibles', 'Floods', 'Pollutants', and 'Invaders' used in public immigration rhetoric in the United States immediately reveals how the role of undocumented migrants in relation to the nation's identity has long been a struggle. A recurring strategy can be identified that racializes migrants and particular immigrant groups, presents them as the 'racial other', and implicitly or explicitly excludes them from the American (imagined) community. Since 2001, however, a (re)negotiation of the trope 'illegal alien' has entered public mass media discourse: the self-representation of young undocumented migrants as 'DREAMers'. This new identity ascription, which developed in close connection with the United States DREAM Act, seems to contradict the dominant logic of migration representations that was found in earlier studies. By examining three testimonies that undocumented youths presented during a Congressional Hearing in 2007, this paper scrutinizes how far such self-representations have for the potential to counter or 'shift' rhetorical representations of undocumented migrants in contemporary America.