The American Alien Argumentative Essay

When SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Life) Institute revealed that they had detected a strange signal 94 light years away from Earth, they were hoping that this revealed the presence of extraterrestrial life. However, the signal was debunked to be no more than interference from a military satellite. Although they were hoping for an interaction, prominent physicist, Stephen Hawking, predicts that with any interaction between Earth and extraterrestrial life, “…the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the American Indians.” Hawking’s prediction is based off of the fear of foreigners or foreign ideas taking over a community, which is also known as xenophobia. Today, the

Scott and Kevin Johnson, as they do not agree or disagree with a definite side of the argument. According to Scott, in his article “The American Alien: Immigrants, Expatriates and Extraterrestrials in Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction”, he believes that only a certain group of people in the United states are considered “aliens”, which are generally those who are of Latinx origins. Scott believes this, because while there might be fear of foreigners who are of different ethnicities or nations, they do not receive the same level of scrutiny as the Latinx community, because they would not typically be called “aliens” (Scott 19). Ultimately, this relates the question of whether or not xenophobia is comparable to the fear of extraterrestrial life, because according to Scott, this is not the case unless the race being discriminated against is explicitly referred to as an

Rather, his theory is that in most countries, especially like the United States, foreigners are only discriminated against some of the times. He states that “the use of the word “alien” to refer to noncitizens, concluding that the term ‘greatly influences thinking in the United States about acceptance of immigrants from other countries’” (1518). In this statement, Johnson associates the pattern of foreign citizens in America not being called aliens as the United States accepting them into their country. On the other hand, for those who have not earned their citizenship, they are referred to as aliens. Due to this generalization, Johnson does not believe that there is a basic level of xenophobia that can be generalized to all immigrants, and therefore, it cannot be fully compared to the fears of extraterrestrial