A. Naomi Paik

The keywords include/inclusion and exclude/exclusion appear as binary terms that seem to oppose each other. To include means to incorporate what had been excluded. It redresses exclusion. Inclusion stands as a core liberal value, expanding the circle of who and what gets folded into the society and space of participatory democracy and rights.

In the US context, the narrative of liberal progress begins in an origin story where liberal rights, freedoms, and abilities to engage with political processes were reserved for the few deemed fit for political power by their white, male, property-owning positions. The origins of liberal democracy were limited, banishing broad swaths of people who lived in the same society, under the laws and rules made by others and over which they had no say. Over time, the narrative tells us, the country became more inclusive, incrementally opening closed doors to the formerly excluded. It is a comforting narrative. We have come to know and do better by including subjects whose fitness for democracy used to be denied.

And it is not just a narrative. The abolition of slavery, Reconstruction, women’s suffrage, and civil rights achievements for multiple groups excluded from the rights, protections, and privileges of enfranchisement were never a given. Social movements of oppressed and excluded peoples fought, sometimes to death, for these expansions of rights, for greater inclusion into the promises of the liberal nation-state.

These are the very achievements that the US state is working furiously to claw back, to return the country to its roots as a white patriarchal capitalist nation that excluded all who could not claim these unearned powers. Even the words are deemed unspeakable in federal communications, which prohibit any utterance of inclusion and deny the continued and intensified powers of state-sanctioned exclusion. These bans on words shed light on a political culture in which eliminating certain ideas is one step towards constricting, even eliminating, the people who might benefit from them.

This moment, of course, does not stand alone in our history. Every move towards greater inclusion has been met with revanchist state and extra-state repression in a dialectic that George Lipsitz identifies as “slavery unwilling to die(opens in a new tab).”¹ For example, the promises of the post-Civil War Reconstruction were clawed back with the Black Codes, enslaved imprisoned labor, and racist terrorism inflicted by state-supported vigilantes like the Ku Klux Klan. Civil Rights achievements were truncated by the War on Drugs, mass incarceration, and the gutting of social safety nets for those held in poverty.

Inclusion wields such power over life chances because liberal orders are fundamentally rooted in and defined by exclusion. Regardless of how it expands or contracts, the boundary of inclusion only exists because it excludes others. The assertion, “If you don’t have Borders, you don’t have a Country(opens in a new tab)!,” might be crudely stated, but it points to this core pillar of liberal democracies. We can’t just let anyone in. And we have to protect the good citizens from the dangers that threaten them—foreign-born, imprisoned, gender-violating, nonwhite, or otherwise excluded by necessity.

Today’s ascending anti-immigrant nationalists justify the rampant efforts to exclude the unworthy as protecting the worthy. They seek to “keep out (what is already outside(opens in a new tab))” by militarizing borders, closing “America’s doors … fully to asylum seekers(opens in a new tab),” and weaponizing bureaucracy to delay and deny legal pathways to immigration (except for white South Africans).² They seek “to expel(opens in a new tab)” what has already gotten inside by creating more deportable people by cancelling Temporary Protected Status and other similar programs and by massively expanding policing capacities to abduct, detain, and deport people.

As we’ve witnessed, these efforts to exclude the unwanted who cannot fit the profile of an ideal, original citizen—white, male, heterosexual, property-owning, able-bodied—do not stop at the foreigner. They work simultaneously with and alongside attacks against citizens deemed illegitimate, whether by race, sexuality, gender, political activity, and even caring for one’s neighbors. Anyone can be targeted for exclusion.

And yet, because the United States is an imperial state, wielding its political and economic power as a global hegemon, everyone is in some way included into its project. Some are included—to “incorporate as part of a whole(opens in a new tab)”—in the liberal, democratic sense of expanding enfranchisement into the nation-state. Others are included, which also means “enclosed, confined, surrounded, shut in(opens in a new tab),” in a US “homeland” whose security concerns and economic interests encompass the entire world, transforming it into a realm of labor and resource extraction. How do we think these two definitions of “include” and how they function for the US imperial state?

The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act speaks to this question. Its passage, like other legislative achievements of the civil rights era, sought to include the formerly excluded into America’s promise. It abolished the racist, eugenicist restrictions that had guided US immigration policy since the 1920s(opens in a new tab) that had once inspired the Nuremburg laws and thereby “opened” the US to increased immigration from non-European nations, thereby making the nation more inclusive and diverse.³

And also, the racist restrictions the law sought to reform were impeding US efforts to win the hearts and minds of the darker nations of the Third World during the Cold War. Reforming immigration to make it more inclusive, with equal quotas for all countries of origin, was driven less by the generous beneficence of an increasingly liberal state than by the needs of US imperialism to secure global power against the USSR and Cold War foes. Inclusion of foreign others into the nation of immigrants was a tool of empire. Not so ironically, immigrants moved to follow capital and at least try to find more livable lives that were made impossible in the places they already lived by the consequences of imperialism.

While the teleology of the immigrant to citizen defines a classic liberal narrative of exclusion to inclusion, it is worth asking: what, exactly, are any of us being included into? What is the cost of that inclusion? Put bluntly, why would anyone interested in a shared future for all people and lives want to be included in any political community whose ostensible rights and freedoms depend fundamentally on the exploitation of everyone and everything else?

Liberal political orders have no answer to these questions. They are proving incapable of challenging, much less overturning, the rising authoritarian powers justified through fascist logics pitting “us” against “them,” because they depend on this very binary—the included versus the excluded. Indeed, liberalism and its key framework of inclusion/exclusion have enabled us to think of the US as a democratic country rooted in inclusion, while in fact fomenting anti-democratic forces against excluded others both at home and abroad. Achieving a shared future that recognizes our interdependence must let go of this binary divide.

A. Naomi Paik is the author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II and coauthor of the updated edition of Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror for Young People: A History of Multicultural America (2026). She coedited four special issues of the Radical History Review and currently coedits the “Borderlands” section of Public Books. She is a part of the Migration Scholars Collaborative, the Sanctuary Campus Network, and Sanctuary for All UIC.

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