Borders, liminality, and the American Dream: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s first House address

In 2019, newly elected lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to the House floor for the first time and argued to re-open the government from its partial shutdown based on the story of a model immigrant, her constituent Yahi Obed. While Donald Trump’s border rhetoric accelerated anti-immigrant sentiments based on associations with criminality, Ocasio-Cortez used the neoliberal narrative of the American Dream to frame Obed as a hardworking immigrant-citizen who worked as a federal employee and American border protector, rather than as a “drain” or “pollutant” on U.S. society. To achieve this, Ocasio-Cortez positioned Obed as a model immigrant who realized the American Dream, she blamed Trump for the failure of the government shutdown which disrupted the reward of the Dream, and she expanded the normative borders of civic belonging to symbolically include immigrants. In this essay, we argue that Ocasio-Cortez’s first House address reinforces democratic and neo-liberal norms through legislative authority to define the national borders of belonging; further, we argue that this address presents one possible avenue for congresspersons to rhetorically combat the growing threat of authoritarianism, though it is complicated by simultaneous use of both democratic and neoliberal values.