According to Nickelsberg, there are people in the White House who seem to understand that not addressing immigration will lead to populist authoritarianism. I’m wondering why then, this issue which has been present since the 80s according to Nickelsberg, is going unaddressed. Is it because the political payoff of fear mongering is high and Democrats have no way of responding to it so they align themselves with more punitive immigration policies? Trying to think through this question reminded me of a study that I saw by the Vera Institute that showed how politicians can win local government elections against tough-on-crime candidates without themselves adopting tough-on-crime positions. I’m curious to know whether a similar study exists for anti-immigrant sentiment.

I also want to ask Nickelsberg what he thinks will happen in the event of a Trump win vs. a Harris win (and more specifically if he thinks that a Harris win will just be kicking the problem of immigration down the road). Will we reach a point where Democrat and Republican positions on immigration converge? From the New York Times review of his book, it seems that he believes the Trump administration will be more coordinated and effective when it comes to implementing the kind of policies that they did last term (like the Consequence Delivery System). There’s a quote from Miller in the book where he says, “We need to be smarter if we want to implement something on this scale again.”

The scene about the men exchanging photos of they took at the prison commissary was compelling to me. I’m curious why they were willing to pay the $3 to get the photo taken when I would imagine they don’t have much if any cash with them to begin with. Did documenting their arrival or incarceration at the detention center serve as some sort of a strategic tactic? Or was it a point of pride that they wanted to document?

I’m also just curious in general, as someone who worked as a photographer for Time magazine for thirty years, whether there were moments where Nickelberg had to think through ethical dilemmas of photographing migrants (whether publishing photographs of them might put them in danger, whether he decided to intervene in life-and-death situations, etc.).

For the New Yorker piece, I was most curious about how the reporter gained access to the scene that they used to write the hook where the Border Patrol agents are in helicopters and are talking about “bodies.” This scene further illustrates this broader idea we’ve been talking about, that dehumanization of immigrants is a requisite step in rationalizing American immigration policy. I think that photographers like Nickelsberg literally force us to see these people as people (because it is very difficult to maintain this idea of an amorphous group that has been discursively constructed by politicians, when we are confronted by pictures of real people).

The Atlantic piece about the Darién Gap reinforced a point that we have been discussing throughout the semester: that the people arriving at the Southern border will do anything and everything to get to the U.S.—regardless of how dangerous it is. I feel like I still can’t quite wrap my head around why politicians (particularly Democrats) haven’t realized this; or if they have and they think it’s a politically unappealing message compared to what the Republican (or perhaps more accurately Trump) narrative has been on immigration.