As it became clear last Thursday that the Titan submersible had blown up and killed all five people on board, the New York Times homepage ran four different stories relating to the tragedy, including an item in which James Cameron, director of the film Titanic, warned of the dangers of the doomed vessel’s design.
I wasn’t alone in being reminded of a different maritime disaster that had unfolded just days before, when the Andriana, a fishing trawler that set forth from Libya carrying more than 700 Pakistani, Egyptian, Syrian, and Palestinian refugees, capsized off the coast of Greece. Nearly all on board were killed, including hundreds of women and children who’d been locked up in the hold, in what is thought to be the worst migrant shipwreck in history. Greek immigration officials were later blamed; press reports claimed the authorities may have tried to avoid the administrative burden of receiving the migrants by forcing the trawler, overloaded with hundreds of crying, dehydrated people, into Italian waters.
I searched US news outlets in vain for stories that put names, faces, or human qualities to even one of the hundreds who died on the Andriana. But just as immigration officials appear to have determined whose life was worth saving, media editors chose whose story was worth telling. The gatekeepers of global media chose the dramatic and gripping tragedy that unfolded in real time, the easy, familiar story. That’s how media works, as a narrative engine that attracts attention, ratings, pageviews, clicks.
This is particularly evident in the media’s treatment of Ukrainian refugees displaced by war, who appear to us in a very different guise from the victims of the Andriana. The little blond girl singing Frozen songs in a bomb shelter is familiar, charming, and telegenic, so media’s collective lens readily focuses the gaze of the world on her—maybe, in part, because we remember our own children singing the same song. The kids in Gaza know the lyrics of Disney movies too. American culture is accessible to all, but hospitality is far more freely extended to those who look like “us,” or those whose humanity is reflected back to us.
If we don’t know the universal human contours of a migrant’s story, or recognize some part of our own humanity in their struggles, they can remain safely distant; a policy problem for someone else to solve, sparing western readers any empathetic considerations, let alone a thought for the complicity inherent in our affluence.
The two tragedies at sea came during a particularly hawkish phase of the immigration debate in the United States, amid a slew of xenophobic, biased, and dehumanizing articles warning that America’s broken system was bracing for a “deluge” of immigrants with the expiration of pandemic-era restrictions. The familiar warnings of the dangers of unchecked immigration came just last week from Dexter Filkins, writing in the New Yorker (“Borderline Chaos: The U.S. Immigration System at a Breaking Point.”)
Title 42 is the ambiguously-worded provision of a 1944 public health law which, at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, was interpreted by the Trump administration as a legal rationale for the immediate expulsion of asylum seekers. According to Filkins, and reporters at many other western media outlets, the expiration of Title 42 would create chaos in towns across the United States’ 2,000-mile southern border—which, Filkins says, have already been “transformed” by millions of asylum seekers over the past few decades.
Filkins paints a fearsome picture of unmanned drones in pursuit of the nameless “bodies” of migrants attempting to cross the Mexican border, while smugglers speed down highways eluding detection. Already-strained emergency rooms in border towns from California to Texas struggle to treat the influx of needy migrants. Though he admits it’s “remarkably difficult” to determine the true number of illegal immigrants who have entered the US or the number who’ve been turned away, Filkins claims that “it is clear that the numbers have risen considerably under Biden. Since the start of the Administration, there have been more than five million apprehensions of migrants trying to cross the southern border—almost as many as in the previous 12 years combined. About half that number were turned back.”
Filkins is strikingly silent on the economic benefits of migration in general, which were outlined unambiguously in a different New Yorker piece published a few weeks earlier, or the near-total dependence of agriculture in Texas and California on the labor of illegal migrants. He says nothing about the humanitarian crisis at the border. Nor does he discuss whether deterrent policies have been effective in curbing immigration, or enumerate the dangers posed by the millions of people who risk their lives, often multiple times, in search of a safer, better life. Filkins briefly quotes a single LGBTQ asylum seeker, but generally treats migrants as a monolithic political problem to be solved, rather than a matter of the future of real, individual human lives.
The human moments in Filkins’ piece are reserved for the anonymous but heroic Marlboro Men defending the homeland from the all-American confines of a pickup truck.
“The border is wide open,” an agent near Comstock, Texas, told me, sitting in his pickup. “We’ve never had enough agents.” He looked out on an expanse of scrubland, fading in the late-afternoon light. “Just wait until the sun goes down.”
We never do learn what might happen when the sun goes down. But Filkins acknowledges that the immigration hawks who’d predicted a flood of arrests at the border after the expiration of Title 42 were wrong. “There were, on average, five thousand arrests a day in January and seven thousand in April; the high-water mark of ten thousand was reached not in the days after Title 42 expired but in the days before.”
Is the system at a breaking point because of increased immigration, or because politicians have continually cut immigration funding in order to appeal to anti-immigrant voters? And who is to blame for the straitened resources of hospitals in low-income communities?
With respect to the question of deterrence, Jerusalem Demsas of the Atlantic recently linked the chaos at the border to its increased militarization by politicians (“How Deterrence Policies Create Border Chaos.”)
“For 30 years, politicians of all stripes have pursued prevention-by-deterrence,” Demsas writes. “And yet migration flows have stubbornly resisted these policies… Deterrence doesn’t work, because by deciding to cross borders, migrants have already accepted the tremendous risks that come along with that… Title 42 did not deter migrants from trying to cross; instead, it seems to have caused them to try crossing multiple times, because their claims were never successfully heard or processed.”
Filkins does interview some sources with more nuanced views on immigration, like Bruno Lozano, the former mayor of Del Rio, Texas. Lozano rose to internet fame in 2021, when he pleaded for federal help to deal with a sudden influx of 16,000 Haitian migrants camped out under a bridge in his community of 34,600 residents. Though Lozano has noted in other outlets that Del Rio was overwhelmed by ever-expanding tides of migration under both the Trump and Biden administrations, Filkins writes, “Lozano reserved most of his ire for Biden officials. “The Administration is saying, ‘Oh, there’s no problem, there’s no crisis, we’re doing the best we can, we’re sending you this, we’re sending you that’—and we’re not getting anything,” he said. “The situation here is burdening all the border towns and communities and you’re saying everything is fine. It’s just bullshit.”
But Lozano’s thoughtful and constructive views on how the federal government should deal with the humanitarian, economic, moral, and bureaucratic crises he managed in Del Rio go unmentioned in Dexter Filkins’s account. In fact, Lozano has refreshingly pragmatic ideas, some of which he shared with WBUR:
[The following radio excerpt was edited for clarity and length.]
Let’s revisit employment opportunities and let’s revisit visa programs. There’s still a migrant population that goes out to the north and picks the fields, you know, during the summer. It still exists. It’s just not legal. [We can] reenvision or reimagine the visa process.
And I actually like to throw this out there, too: We allow individuals to come study at our universities to [prepare for] lucrative jobs, like rocket science. We will give visas out to these different individuals from countries like India or China. And they’re treated like this elite population: Come do this in America, and study, and do this job. But then, on the flip side, we still need workers in our hotels, or working our crops, or as cleaners. And we don’t give them the same opportunity for visa programs.
They’re villainized, and they’re demonized. We, the American system itself, already has a caste system. We put a greater value on being a professor, being a student, you know, or being a rocket scientist than we do on that same individual who’s cleaning, or providing food or what have you. It’s not equal treatment at all.
For every story like this one or Demas’s that appears in a publication of record, there seem to be hundreds of others reinforcing the militarized and inhumane status quo.
In the months ahead, as the rhetoric about an impending border crisis ramps up, Democrats will blame Republicans for gutting the bureaucracy while Republicans will fearmonger, but their policies aren’t meaningfully different. The real casualties of hawkish deterrence narratives will be the faceless, nameless people whose humanity is diminished by politicians and the media.
