This article by Carly Goodman is being circulated by the Quaker-based American Friends Service Committee. I found it very useful, and recommend it as part of your Sunday reading.
How to talk about the migrant caravan
bu Carly Goodman, October 24, 2018The president continually portrays migrants and migration – including the families traveling here as part of the migrant caravan – as a threat to the United States. Reporters, analysts, and even advocates may be unwittingly reinforcing this framing – and undermining humane treatment for all people. Here’s how you should talk about the migrant caravan to avoid reinforcing this harmful framing:
1. Migrants are people who move – and they have human rights.
Always use inclusive language that doesn’t “other” migrants and that emphasizes our shared humanity and rights. Most of us move from where we were born; movement is a common part of the human experience.2. Avoid water metaphors – people do not constitute a flood, flow, or wave.
The media commonly uses water metaphors to describe migrants and migrations, but this language is corrosive. Floods and tidal waves are mortal dangers – hard to contain – and using these terms to describe migrants helps reinforce the migration threat narrative. Migrants are people seeking a better life for themselves and their families – not flows of water.3. Avoid the language of invasion.
In some egregious cases, reporters are describing the migrant caravan as if it is an invading army. The New York Times describes the caravan as “defiant,” for example. The AP tweeted that the caravan was like a “ragtag army of the poor” and has since apologized; likening the families to a military force reinforced Trump’s view that they are a threat to the United States. The president has tweeted that people on the caravan are criminals, and he often frames migrants as emissaries sent by hostile governments (“they’re not sending their best,” for example) – perhaps as a pretext for suggesting a military response rather than a humanitarian one. But people who have joined the migrant caravan are traveling together because there is safety in numbers, and they are looking for safety and peace. They deserve our empathy.4. Seeking asylum is a right – and our system should treat all people with dignity and humanity.
There are many reasons why people leave home and seek a better life abroad. Rooted in post-World War II domestic and international laws, our system allows refugees to seek asylum in the United States if they are fleeing persecution. Many of the people in the migrant caravan are traveling here to escape violence and to seek asylum, something they have a legal right to do. Ensuring that the United States builds a fair and generous asylum system is critical.But we must also build a system that treats all people humanely. People’s reasons for migrating are complex, and economic instability and violence are interconnected. We must therefore reject policies that criminalize migration more broadly, militarize our borders, and treat people like those in the migrant caravan with cruelty and brutality.
So when talking about the migrant caravan, focus on humane treatment for all, not the narrow legality of asylum claims.
5. Be careful about the language of crisis. Calling immigration a crisis feeds punitive and exclusionary polices.
The Trump administration often talks about migration as if it’s a crisis. This language makes immigration seem like a serious threat demanding a strong emergency response. But the fact is, border crossings are not surging and are near historic lows. Immigrants and arriving migrants do not constitute an existential threat, even if white nationalists and nativists portray them as such. Don’t repeat the administration’s framing of immigration as a crisis.That is not to say that nothing serious is happening. For families traveling in the migrant caravan, the situation may feel like a personal crisis. The decision to leave one’s home due to life-threatening violence and poverty can never be undertaken lightly. And how the Trump administration is treating migrants and immigrants – including those in the caravan, those arriving at the border, and people who have made their lives in the United States – is creating a moral and humanitarian crisis. But that’s quite different than migration and migrants themselves being the source of crisis.
All of us can show support for migrants and help build support for a compassionate response through our language and framing.
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well & great! but where will you house those number of migrants?, we have to house them feed them, clothes them, etc. All states have a lot of homeless
people sleeping in side walks & parks, these are local families that cannot afford to rent a place. Should we attend to them first? Just my 2 cents in.
I refer back to the post on a human rights perspective. This is an international issue. This is a very good example of why “America First” is a very bad idea, since we need to be able to work jointly with other countries to deal with such problems.
This convoy is very small. To get a sense of the size, they total around 10% of the capacity of Aloha Stadium.
These migrations are legal, a result of US illegal interference in the people’s countries. If you want to do something, change America’s inhumane interfering policies. Call your Congress member. Beau of the Fifth Columns talks about Caravans on Facebook. Check it out.
Patty – I’m with you on this! Why not put US power to humanitarian use and go in and support leaders who WANT to stabilize the country. Then people can stay home, where they WANT TO BE. Stop selling arms everywhere, for gods sake!!! Make America Smart Again!
There are serious conversations to be had about the responsibility for refugees, but they won’t happen in the febrile political environment created by Republican primitives and outright racists. All religions contain imperatives to welcome and care for strangers. And secular morality about the intrinsic value of empathy and compassion offer the same guidance. Americans who think that they don’t bear historical responsibility for the mess in Central America are ignorant. The challenge there is to replicate the success of Costa Rica which stands as a beacon and a magnet retaining its own population.
I don’t have the answers to practical questions of how to treat refugees or even the homeless. I do believe, however, that these are problems capable of being solved by people of good will, pragmatic toughness, and flexible intelligence. I do know two things: compassion is the base line and pandering to prejudice and selfishness will in the end corrupt our society far worse than the effort needed to assimilate the “tired, poor, and huddled masses”.
I agree with George Santayana’s trenchant observation. “American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.” Despite contemporary evidence to the contrary regarding the depth and breadth of the commitment to good will and optimism, to believe otherwise is to invite cynicism and despair.
Mexico just offered asylum to the caravan. While 1700 accepted it. Most turned it down. Mexico offered jobs identification and housing in return for settling in the two most southern states of Mexico. Most of those who are seeking “asylum” have turned it down. They want to immigrate to the USA hoping that their sheer numbers will allow them in. If they want to immigrate they need to return home and apply. Like thousands of others have done. Do our laws need reform? Yes. But these are the laws we have. Are they afraid of returning home? Stay in Mexico as they have offered asylum. Then apply for migration to the USA in time.
The AFSC apparently was referring to a lengthy article by Miriam Jordan in the NYT that included the following sentence: “…in defiance of the Mexican and American governments, more than 7,000 Central American undocumented migrants have been en route to the United States for more than a week.”
The article goes on to explain the context andrationale for the caravans: “Crowds of migrants often make the journey over land together in large numbers to protect themselves against drug traffickers, muggers and rapists who stalk the trail. The largest caravans tend to take place during the Easter season.”
And the article states that “Eric Fish, who represented several migrants in their criminal prosecutions in federal court, said that they were typically mothers, children and young men who had fled violence in their home countries at the hands of gangs or intimate partners. ‘It was shocking to me that they were being prosecuted when they were coming here to seek protection from horrific violence,’ said Mr. Fish, a trial lawyer at the Federal Defenders of San Diego.”
The NYT article actually is very supportive of the caravans and a good read. Whether “defiance” is a good or bad thing depends on what is being defied and why.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/23/us/migrant-caravan-border.html