We are knot
All Immigrants
The Easy Bite
“We Are All Immigrants.”
It’s the kind of phrase that looks good on a sign, sounds good in a speech, and feels good when you repeat it.
It’s meant to soften edges, to make America’s jagged history palatable.
It tastes like unity. But swallow it, and you start to choke on what is missing.
What the Slogan Erases
Indigenous Nations
They were here long before ships, long before the idea of America. Calling them immigrants erases colonization and genocide. It is not semantics. It is survival. They are not immigrants. They are sovereign nations whose land was stolen, whose treaties were broken, whose children were buried in unmarked graves.
Black Communities
They did not immigrant; they were enslaved. The Atlantic crossing was not a voyage of hope, it was a crime against humanity. To fold that into an immigrant story is to erase chains, whips, and centuries of legal apartheid. They were not immigrants. They were property in the eyes of the state and that truth scars everything built since.
Immigrant Struggles
Yes, millions did come voluntarily. Hunger, war, hope, and labor pulled them here. Their stories are real and deserve respect. But to say “we are all immigrants” flattens the distinction between those who chose and those who were forced. It trades hard truth for soft comfort.
The Machinery
What binds all of these stories together is not sameness but the machinery of belonging. The state deciding who counts. Slave patrols giving way to police. Indian removal echoing in ICE raids. Reservations, plantations, detention centers; different uniforms, same function: control.
Who Tells the Story
It matters whose voice shapes the narrative.
When politicians mouth we are all immigrants, they are laundering history into comfort. It is branding, not truth.
The state has always chosen a narrow view, built on lies it finds useful. The “shining city on a hill,” the “pure Christian nation,” the myth of innocence. These are not foundations, they are facades. They erase Indigenous cosmologies, Black survival, immigrant plurality. They paper over the fractures with hymns to a false unity, written in a single language, sung to a single god.
The right people telling the right stories means Native voices naming stolen land. Black voices tracing the afterlives of enslavement. Migrant voices describing the cages of today. Without them, the story isn’t solidarity; it’s erasure.
Knot the Slogan
That’s why we are all immigrants cannot stand. It’s sugar that dissolves on the tongue, leaving emptiness behind.
The truth is sharper: we are all bound. Bound by borders, laws, histories that knot us together whether we admit it or not. Bound by the same machinery that decides who belongs, who is caged, who is discarded. Bound, too, by the false creed of a “pure Christian nation” that narrows belonging to faith and skin.
The phrase we carry is not we are all immigrants.
It is: We Are Knot.
Knot as in tied together.
Knot as in bound.
Knot as in refusal.
We are knot your erasure.
We are knot your comfort slogan.
We are knot your scapegoat.
We are knot your myth of purity.
The Gut Punch
America’s story is not a melting pot. It is a rope braided out of conquest, enslavement, migration, and myth. That rope is still knotted around us. Some choke on it. Some pull it tighter. Some pretend it is not there.
But knots don’t vanish with slogans. Knots hold. Knots constrict. Knots must be cut.
We are knot. And when this knot is finally undone, it will unravel not just the lies of origin, but the whole lie the nation was built on.
ICE raids are not new.
They’re the same machinery wearing a new badge. Slave patrols, Indian removal, chain gangs, internment camps: the state has always chosen a narrow story of who belongs and who doesn’t.
When agents drag families from homes and workplaces, it isn’t about safety. It’s conditioning. It’s rehearsal. It teaches the public to see force as normal, and it teaches the agents to flex it without question.
This is what the lie of a “pure nation” demands border-marked bodies, disposable lives, and fear as governance.
We are knot. Knot your scapegoats. Knot your comfort. Knot your silence. If these raids continue, the knot will only tighten until the whole lie unravels.
TOW
ICE raids are the latest mask on an old machine.
Slave patrols, Indian removal, chain gangs, detention centers
The state keeps narrowing who “belongs”
and broadening who can be brutalized.
This isn’t about law. It’s about control.
Conditioning agents to use force,
and conditioning the rest of us to accept it.
If we don’t cut the knot, it only tightens.
ETHER
See the agents at dawn, boots breaking doors,
families dragged into vans. It is not new
only the uniform has changed.Patrols of old reborn in ICE blue.
The state whispers of purity,
of borders, of safety,
while the rope is drawn tighter.But we are knot. Knot erased.
Knot silenced. Knot theirs to bind.
And when this knot bursts,
it will not be quiet.
