Abstract

Analyzing digital texts created by the activist group the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, this article demonstrates how in some im/migrant activism, the nation is imagined as a familial home so that im/migrants framed as members of the heteropatriarchal family can argue for belonging. Although seemingly persuasive, such rhetoric reproduces the moralizing agenda of neoliberal ideology in terms of heteronormative family values. While im/migrant activism challenges the exclusion of undocumented im/migrants from the U.S. national imaginary, arguments based on family and home can also reproduce heteropatriarchal discourses that rationalize im/migrant discrimination at the intersections of race, gender, and sex.