The Spectacle of the Unsheltered: Kristi Noem’s Televised Citizenship Game

A train, thick with nostalgic steam and nationalist fantasy, will trundle across a land once stolen by muskets and manifest destiny. It will be draped in flags and high-definition dreams. Onboard: not pilgrims or presidents, not refugees seeking refuge, but contestants. Contestants. Human beings reduced to players in a state-sponsored reality show; auditioning, quite literally, for the right to belong.

Kristi Noem, draped in the pristine confidence of power unshaken by nuance, has not orchestrated an idea that sounds less like governance and more like dystopia by Disney. “The American,” they are calling it. A show where immigrants compete in tasks inspired by the cartoon version of American history. Gold panning in San Francisco, Model T assembly in Detroit, logrolling in Wisconsin. Presumably, they’ll be judged not just for skill but for narrative arc, for the tears in their backstory and the flags in their eyes.

This isn’t satire. This isn’t fiction. It is the real proposal of a television producer who once brought us “Duck Dynasty” and who now believes citizenship can be earned not by virtue, or need, or contribution, but by contest. A game. A spectacle. A bootcamp of belief, streamlined for primetime.

Here, in the trembling margins between state and stage, immigrants become gladiators in an arena curated for the comfort of the already-arrived. The nation, ever afraid of its own story, has decided to turn others’ desperation into entertainment. It is the colonizer’s impulse reborn: to turn people into plot, to make their pain perform.

We are told it will be educational. A tribute. A celebration of what it means to be American.

But tell me, who educates whom when the test of worthiness is gold panning and choreographed loyalty? Who benefits from this gaudy rebranding of belonging? What of the mother who crossed three borders with two children strapped to her chest? Will she now be asked to assemble a Model T in thirty minutes while the camera zooms in on her fatigue?

This is not a show. This is humiliation with a marketing budget.

The proposal arrives with a chilling symmetry to Secretary Noem’s immigration policies: no sanctuary, no tolerance, no empathy. She has revived the Alien Registration Act like a ghost fed on bureaucracy, demanding self-reporting within thirty days or face criminal consequences. She has pledged to strip asylum-seekers of the CBP One app and slammed the shutters closed.

Now, she flirts with a grotesque inversion: let the worthy perform for their supper, for their citizenship, for their chance at being considered human by a nation that cages their kin.

It is not just cruelty. It is performance cruelty. The kind that masks itself with theme music and clever editing, that hides behind slogans about hard work and the American Dream while erasing the nightmare it inflicts.

Here is that forgetting at work. A sacred erasure. The truth of immigration and the centuries of exploitation, of invisible labor, of bodies offered up to the altar of capital, is scrubbed clean and replaced with a sanitized obstacle course. Noem’s America wants its immigrants not real but mythic: humble, hopeful, heroic, and willing to dance for their documents.

The steps of the U.S. Capitol will become the final stage, the altar where one winner will be granted the prize of citizenship, as if it were not a right but a reward. A stage-lit blessing, bestowed not by law but by applause.

And what of the losers? The ones who sweat and weep and reveal their scars, only to be voted off the train like contestants in a grotesque carnival?

This is not policy. This is parody played in earnest. And the cost of the joke is human dignity.

In a saner world, this proposal would be torn at the seams and laughed out of the room.

But we do not live in a saner world.

We live in one where pain becomes content. And where citizenship is auctioned to the highest-rated bidder.