Migrant Caravan Quotes

[Author's Note:] It took me four years to research and write this novel, so I began long before talk about migrant caravans and building a wall entered the national zeitgeist. But even then I was frustrated by the tenor of the public discourse surrounding immigration in this country. The conversation always seemed to turn around policy issues, to the absolute exclusion of moral or humanitarian concerns. I was appalled at the way Latino migrants, even five years ago - and it has gotten exponentially worse since then - were characterized within that public discourse. At worst, we perceive them as an invading mob of resource-draining criminals, and at best, a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass, clamoring for help at our doorstep. We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings. People with the agency to make their own decisions, people who can contribute to their own bright futures, and to ours, as so many generations of oft-reviled immigrants have done before them.

A December 2018 study by MIT Media Lab showed that over the course of 2018, coverage of the movement of Central Americans toward the U.S. border had shed the words “refugee” and even “immigrant” and shifted instead to “migrant.” Study author Emily Boardman Ndulue wrote, “‘Migrants’ convey[s] individuals who are by nature itinerant, while ‘refugees’ impl[ies] those affected by situationally-forced migration, and ‘immigrants’ impl[ies] that the individuals will be entering and settling in the US. The media’s adoption of the phrase ‘migrant caravan’ and ‘migrants’ is further evidence of the adoption of Trump’s anti-immigrant framing and rhetoric.

Following Trump’s lead, everyone, it seemed, took to calling the procession a “caravan.” The journalist Luke O’Neil pointed out that the word’s Persian roots conjured the image of “people trekking across the desert with camels (i.e., terrorists of course).” What if journalists had resisted adopting Trumpian language in this case? They might have described the procession as the spontaneous movement of thousands who were fleeing a place more than they were pursuing a destination. They might even have called it an exodus, a term and an image that would have appealed to empathy—and tapped into religious associations—rather than to fear. A December 2018 study by MIT Media Lab showed that over the course of 2018, coverage of the movement of Central Americans toward the U.S. border had shed the words “refugee” and even “immigrant” and shifted instead to “migrant.” Study author Emily Boardman Ndulue wrote, “‘Migrants’ convey[s] individuals who are by nature itinerant, while ‘refugees’ impl[ies] those affected by situationally-forced migration, and ‘immigrants’ impl[ies] that the individuals will be entering and settling in the US. The media’s adoption of the phrase ‘migrant caravan’ and ‘migrants’ is further evidence of the adoption of Trump’s anti-immigrant framing and rhetoric.