This is Part Two of a two-part reflection on immigration, citizenship, and the political future of the hemisphere. In Part One, I argued that the present immigration crisis did not begin with the current administration. The enforcement apparatus being used today was constructed over decades through laws, institutions, detention systems, technologies, surveillance, bipartisan policy choices, and the gradual absorption of migration into the national-security framework.

I also argued that the dominant narratives available to us remain incomplete. The right criminalizes immigrants and uses the language of invasion to authorize extraordinary state power. Progressive narratives often respond by presenting immigrants primarily as innocent, vulnerable, and deserving of protection. These are not equivalent forms of power. The right currently commands and expands the coercive apparatus of the state. Yet both orientations can obscure immigrant political personhood and prevent us from understanding the larger hemispheric relationships through which migration is produced.

There is a distinct formation almost entirely absent from this conversation. I call the people who emerge through this formation Terrenales.

Terrenales are a distinct hemispheric formation emergent from the ruptures created by colonization throughout the Americas. They are not all Indigenous people, all Black people, all immigrants, all displaced people, or everyone subjected to colonialism. Terrenales emerge among descendants whose lineages were formed through the forced relationships created by Indigenous genocide and displacement, Black enslavement, colonial enclosure, movement, and the reconstitution of peoples across the Americas.

What defines Terrenales is not rupture alone. Terrenales are also defined by their own creative efforts to create coherence and make life possible within conditions designed to dispossess, exploit, divide, and contain them. Through those efforts, they created relationships, cultures, lineages, political practices, and ways of living that colonial orders did not intend and could never fully control.

Terrenales therefore carry both the consequences of hemispheric rupture and the knowledge generated through the reconstitution of life. The term names a distinct structural and political formation that cannot be reduced to nationality, legal status, race, language, or a generalized language of diversity.

Terrenales are not outside citizenship as a category. Many Terrenales are U.S. citizens. Others are citizens of countries throughout the Americas. Still others live under U.S. power while being denied citizenship or the protections associated with it. Citizenship names a legal and political relationship to a state. Terrenales names a hemispheric formation arising through particular histories of descent, rupture, forced relation, movement, and the continuing work of making life possible.

I am a U.S. citizen, and I am a Terrenal. I am therefore not asking the question of citizenship from outside it. I am asking from within the political body whose choices, silences, institutions, and uses of power will help determine what comes next.

I know that not everyone reading this is a U.S. citizen. When I ask, “Who will we be?” I am speaking from within U.S. citizenship to those of us who share that legal and political status. I am asking what we will do with the protection, access, standing, and institutional power citizenship gives us, especially when those protections are not equally available to the people with whom our lives and futures are already bound.

To truly see Terrenales requires us to acknowledge that the story of the United States has never been solely national. It has always been hemispheric.

This brings us to a question largely absent from both conservative and progressive accounts: What kind of hemisphere are we creating?

The hemisphere is not the exclusive political terrain of the right wing. One political orientation claims the Americas through domination. It understands the hemisphere as territory to be controlled, a source of labor and natural resources, a field of military and economic influence, and a boundary to be defended. It seeks coherence through hierarchy, extraction, containment, and force.

But this is not the only possible claim upon the hemisphere. Another political orientation can claim the Americas through relationship. It can begin from the recognition that the peoples and futures of the hemisphere are already interconnected through conquest and extraction, but also through kinship, migration, labor, culture, resistance, democratic imagination, and the continued creation of life across borders.

To claim the hemisphere through relationship is not to claim ownership over it. It is to accept responsibility within it.

The United States cannot withdraw from relationships that have always been constitutive of its own existence. The choice before us is between different ways of inhabiting those relationships. One orientation organizes the hemisphere for domination, extraction, militarization, and exclusion. Another can organize it for reciprocity, democratic responsibility, shared survival, and the collective construction of a loving future.

Our power as a country has never rested only on military strength, economic influence, or the ability to control territory. An important source of our democratic legitimacy and global influence has also been a narrative that places the value of human life at the center.

The United States has repeatedly violated that promise. Its history includes genocide, enslavement, exclusion, war, extraction, abandonment, and the unequal distribution of whose lives are protected and whose lives are treated as expendable. But the contradiction between that history and the country’s democratic claims does not make those claims meaningless. It makes us responsible for deciding whether we will continue betraying them or begin organizing our power in greater alignment with them.

People throughout the world have been drawn not only to the material possibilities associated with the United States, but also to its professed promise that a human life can matter here, that a person can possess rights, and that government can be held responsible for protecting human dignity.

When we abandon that narrative in practice, we do not become more powerful. We may increase our capacity to control people while diminishing our capacity to lead. A country that secures itself through dehumanization, disappearance, abandonment, and force weakens its democratic authority and one of the deepest sources of its influence.

People from across the world move through the Americas in an effort to reach the United States. They travel through South and Central America, cross Mexico toward the southern border, and also seek entry through Canada. The routes differ, but together they make the hemisphere a central passageway for people moving through war, political instability, climate disruption, economic dispossession, persecution, and the search for a place where life might become possible.

Our failure to create lawful and coherent structures around this worldwide movement has allowed vast informal and criminal economies to grow along the routes people travel. Transportation, shelter, food, documents, border crossings, employment, protection, and information become commodities within systems that often operate outside meaningful public accountability.

Some of these informal economies are created by communities trying to survive and respond to immediate human need. Others are controlled by smugglers, criminal networks, corrupt officials, exploitative employers, and institutions that profit from detention, surveillance, and enforcement.

People in movement do not create these conditions simply by moving. These economies expand because governments have failed to acknowledge and responsibly govern the relationships that already bind the United States to the rest of the hemisphere. When lawful pathways are scarce, coordination is weak, and responsibility is continually transferred from one country to another, people are pushed into routes where nearly every basic need becomes an opportunity for extraction.

Our lack of capacity to acknowledge and regulate our entanglement with the rest of the hemisphere is fueling violence and death. It creates conditions for extortion, kidnapping, trafficking, sexual violence, labor exploitation, disappearance, abandonment, and death along the routes. It also destabilizes the communities through which people move by placing extraordinary demands on local institutions while allowing informal and criminal markets to become some of the most organized actors in the field.

This is not evidence that human movement itself is the threat. It is evidence that denial is dangerous.

We are already entangled with the rest of the hemisphere through migration, labor, trade, extraction, security policy, climate consequences, family, and history. Refusing to govern those relationships does not make them disappear. It abandons them to the actors most willing to profit from disorder and human vulnerability.

A hemispheric response cannot consist of extending U.S. enforcement farther south or north, turning neighboring countries into containment zones, and forcing people into increasingly dangerous routes. We cannot secure our own lives by making life less secure everywhere around us.

The Shield of the Americas, a U.S.-led regional security framework organized around counter-cartel cooperation, is not the response we need because its emerging architecture remains grounded in domination.

It places real concerns about organized criminal networks, drugs, weapons, migration, and community vulnerability within an orientation of military coordination, expanded enforcement, territorial control, and containment.

A response does not become hemispheric simply because it operates across the hemisphere. When the United States projects its security priorities into neighboring countries and asks other governments to enforce them, it is extending U.S. power across the Americas. It is not participating in the shared creation of security among the peoples and nations who live here.

The Shield of the Americas organizes the hemisphere around what the United States wishes to keep out and what it intends to control. It reproduces the claim that the United States is entitled to define the hemisphere’s priorities and secure itself through the management of other peoples’ lands, institutions, movements, and lives.

It may create a coordinated security apparatus, but it cannot create hemispheric coherence. Coherence cannot be imposed through military hierarchy. It must be created through relationships capable of holding difference, responsibility, consequence, and the material conditions required to make life possible.

We need a hemispheric response capable of securing our lives, not only our borders. Such a response must protect people in movement, the communities through which they travel, the people who receive them, and the citizens whose institutions are being transformed through increasingly militarized systems of enforcement.

It must create lawful and humane pathways, coordinate protection across countries, strengthen transit and receiving communities, regulate labor recruitment and employment, interrupt predatory markets, and address organized crime without militarizing entire societies. It must also require governments to assume responsibility for the political, economic, military, and environmental conditions that contribute to displacement.

Our failure to build a humane and governable hemispheric structure is not neutral. It helps produce and sustain the conditions under which people are exploited, disappeared, and killed.

The Americas have an opportunity to model a response to global displacement that is both humanizing and transformative. We can demonstrate that security does not have to be created through dehumanization, abandonment, or force. We can create forms of protection, governance, and relationship that recognize the dignity and political personhood of people in movement while strengthening the communities and institutions responsible for receiving them.

This is part of what it means to construct a loving future. It means securing the conditions that make life possible under profound movement and uncertainty, not by denying complexity, but by creating the coherence necessary to navigate it together.

But this analysis must lead to action.

The work before us is not a collection of individual acts of kindness. It is the construction of sufficient civic and institutional power to change how the United States participates in the hemisphere.

Four responsibilities follow from this analysis.

First, we must demand coherent federal and hemispheric policy.

Those of us who are U.S. citizens are political actors within the country whose laws, resources, institutions, and power shape much of what is happening throughout the hemisphere. We must refuse the idea that immigration is a problem for immigrants, border communities, attorneys, or service organizations to solve on our behalf.

We must press elected officials to move beyond raids, detention quotas, border theater, and the externalization of enforcement. Congress and the executive branch must create lawful pathways for migration, protect asylum and due process, fund humane reception and regional coordination, regulate labor recruitment, hold exploitative employers accountable, interrupt trafficking and predatory markets, and support the countries and communities carrying the material consequences of movement.

We must also oppose the use of military and security policy as a substitute for governance. That includes refusing frameworks such as the Shield of the Americas when they organize the hemisphere through domination rather than shared responsibility. Any hemispheric policy must be accountable not only to U.S. security priorities, but also to the lives, sovereignty, democratic institutions, and political leadership of people throughout the Americas.

Second, we must interrupt coercive power within our own institutions.

Schools, hospitals, libraries, courts, workplaces, unions, faith communities, universities, philanthropic institutions, and municipal governments all make decisions that either extend enforcement or create protection. We can demand policies limiting cooperation with abusive enforcement, protecting personal information, preserving access to counsel and public services, and preventing institutions from becoming sites of disappearance and fear.

Those of us who work within institutions must recognize that professional decisions are political decisions. Administrators, educators, healthcare workers, attorneys, employers, funders, journalists, public officials, and organizational leaders can either normalize the expansion of coercive power or interrupt it. Institutional neutrality is often only another name for allowing the most powerful actor to determine the outcome.

Third, we must move resources toward community-controlled political capacity.

Legal defense, transportation, rent, food, childcare, bond, income replacement, rapid-response networks, and solidarity funds remain urgently necessary. But these resources should strengthen immigrant-led and Terrenal-led organizations, community-controlled structures, and the political capacity of people directly affected.

Moving resources is not benevolence. It is a democratic act through which citizens decide whether money, access, and institutional standing will reinforce systems of control or strengthen the capacity of communities to protect life, exercise leadership, and participate in governance.

Our responsibility is not to become benevolent managers of other people’s vulnerability. It is to use the access and leverage citizenship gives us without claiming authority over the people whose leadership and knowledge are necessary to the response.

Fourth, we must transform the public narrative while defending constitutional limits.

We must refuse the language of invasion, criminality, and deservingness. We must refuse to defend only those immigrants who appear innocent, productive, compliant, or exceptional. Human dignity cannot depend upon a successful performance of innocence.

We must tell a more truthful story about movement: that people from throughout the world travel through the Americas; that our governments, economies, institutions, and histories are already entangled; that the absence of lawful and coherent governance creates opportunities for extraction and violence; and that militarization does not resolve that failure. It deepens it.

We must also resist the normalization of extraordinary state power. Governments almost never expand surveillance, detention, masked enforcement, diminished due process, and weakened judicial oversight for only one population. Such powers are tested first where public resistance is weakest. Once normalized, they become available for broader use.

Protecting immigrant rights is therefore an act of solidarity and constitutional stewardship. It is also an exercise of our own political agency. Through elections, protest, refusal, institutional participation, the movement of resources, and the stories we are willing to believe and repeat, we help determine what forms of power become possible.

For those of us who are both Terrenales and U.S. citizens, this responsibility is not exercised from outside affected communities. Our citizenship does not erase our Terrenal formation. We may carry both the relative protections of citizenship and direct relationships to the histories, families, communities, and movements targeted by immigration and hemispheric policy. Citizenship creates another location from which we can intervene.

Terrenales have not simply endured the United States. They have helped make it, alongside Indigenous nations, Black freedom movements, immigrant communities, labor movements, and others whose political work has expanded the country’s democratic possibilities.

Indigenous governance offers living traditions of political relationship across difference. Black freedom movements transformed the meaning of citizenship, equality, liberty, and democracy. Farmworkers, labor organizers, immigrant communities, sanctuary movements, mutual-aid networks, and generations of people building life across borders have widened the country’s democratic imagination.

The people treated as outside the American story have repeatedly been among its democratic authors.

Terrenales carry knowledge generated through the creative work of creating coherence and making life possible under conditions of rupture. That knowledge is not incidental to the future of democracy. It is necessary to it.

The future of the hemisphere must not be surrendered to those who can imagine it only as territory to dominate, extract from, and control.

Another political orientation is possible.

We can understand the hemisphere as a field of relationship and shared responsibility, and as the ground upon which we construct a loving future together. The future of the United States will not be created against the hemisphere. It will be created through the way we choose to live within it.

What the United States becomes will depend, in significant part, on who we decide to be: whether we allow it to become a force of domination, organized around control, containment, and the expendability of human life, or help it become a force for the creation of a shared loving future.

Will we remain observers and beneficiaries of power exercised in our name? Or will we become conscious political actors capable of interrupting domination, defending democratic life, securing the conditions that make life possible, and building a future grounded in relationship, responsibility, and the value of human life?

The question is whether we are prepared to assume that responsibility and act.