The US is facing a border crisis unlike anything in its history.

This week in 1798, John Adams passed the Naturalization Act, the first of four laws collectively known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. These laws were highly controversial in their time and remain so today; all but one was struck down within four years, but echoes of their intended policies ring through to our current, rapidly-escalating national immigration and sanctuary crisis.

In the song “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)” from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton Mixtape, the settlement of the Americas is framed through liberal understandings of arrival that transform chattel slavery and forced labor into the exceptional narratives of pulling oneself up from hard labor to freedom. It reflects current political mobilizations against xenophobia and immigration bans that insist that we are all immigrants to the Americas.