Sanctuary

Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to xenophobia, murder, enslavement, other violence, and challenges faced by immigrants.

Xenophobia is the dislike of and/or prejudice against people from other countries, including immigrants. Sanctuary imagines for the US a dystopian future in which xenophobia has become even more pronounced. In a discussion at the close of the novel, Sher argues that this novel is not actually dystopian; instead, “it is just a few steps into ‘What if…?’” (308). Many dystopian novels imagine the future in order to critique the present. Dystopian futures often aim to show what could happen if society continues down a dangerous path upon which it is already traveling. Sanctuary critiques not only the human cost of xenophobia as it exists in the imagined version of the 2032 US, but also as it exists in the present-day US. The novel alludes to present-day political phenomena to illustrate how the problems in fictional 2032 are rooted in issues that already existed when the novel was published in 2020.

In the novel, the xenophobic measures against immigrants are widespread and increase consistently as the narrative continues. The US has taken new measures to combat what the president calls an “infestation” of immigrants. They build a wall and place land mines along their borders to prevent undocumented immigrants from entering the country. They also implant ID microchips into each person to prove they are documented and create a new law enforcement agency called the Deportation Force (DF). The president allows DF agents to arrest people and search premises without warrants. These measures show levels of xenophobia that are rooted in present-day reality. The US already has walls along some of its borders and has an agency (ICE) dedicated to detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants. Individual politicians and civilians speak about undocumented immigrants as if they are a dangerous, threatening problem that must be stopped. This approach ignores the reality that undocumented immigrants are often civilians fleeing danger or seeking a better life.

Although in the novel the president argues that walls and land mines are “protecting” the US from dangerous people who seek to harm American citizens, the American government is actually the group that propagates xenophobia and enacts the most harm against undocumented immigrants throughout the text. As Vali points out about the “Great” border wall, “There was nothing great about it. More like grotesque” (2). When a teenaged girl in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt attempts to cross the border, she is killed by a mine, and Vali remarks that “[t]he underground reporters would […] call her brave, defiant, fearless. And the government news would call her disease-ridden, illegal, criminal. But as I watched it with my own eyes, I saw that she was just a girl my age” (1-2). The deadly land mines that were allegedly meant to eliminate danger caused danger instead. After this, protests emerge on both sides of the border, and the US government shoots at people on both sides. Here, the US is harming and killing civilians, both non-US citizens and US citizens, all under the guise of “protecting” the borders against the “danger” of people from other countries. This illustrates how xenophobia can have a very high human cost, in terms of literal lives lost in its name.

In addition to death, xenophobia and aggressive policies against undocumented immigrants come with the human cost of separating family members from each other, sometimes permanently. For example, Vali and Ernie lose both parents when Mami and Papi are taken from them by ICE and DF, with little hope of ever reuniting with their mother and no hope of reuniting with their father, who was deported and murdered. Some immigration policies depicted in the novel are imagined, but present-day policies include deportation, detainment, and the separation of families. Unfortunately, sometimes people can lose touch with each other throughout these experiences and be left wondering what happened to certain friends or family members. Families of undocumented immigrants, or families in which some members are documented and others aren’t, are in fact sometimes separated in the US due to deportation or due to being placed in separate ICE detention centers. In this sense, this aspect of the novel is not entirely “dystopian” because it exists in present-day reality. Enslavement of undocumented immigrants is more clearly dystopian; this part of the novel examines what can happen when people from other countries are viewed as less than humans, a result of xenophobia. When people are viewed as a “threat,” they may also become viewed as not deserving of human rights.