The language describing the Southern Border crisis in the United States presents it as one inextricably tied to the preservation of American democracy; meanwhile for the migrants themselves it has become a sullied label of their personal journey that\u2019s marked with overcoming intense hardship\u2014from their path to the U.S. to their preexisting troubles in their home countries.<\/p>\n
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Jonathan Blitzer in his novel Everyone Who Has Gone Here <\/em>describes immigration as the pressing issue to the shaping of how we govern as a nation, stating that immigration is a “democracy issue” that may fuel the rise of populist authoritarianism. However, for such a pervasive topic in recent political history, he reveals that the last major immigration reform happened in 1990. In the New York Times book review of Blitzer\u2019s novel, it summarizes his work as illustrating \u201cthe American immigration system as a victim of its own dysfunction.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As for the description of immigrants, Blitzer says that migrants\u2019 immigration status had become a \u201cdefining, immutable fact of who they now were.\u201d Further, migrants and how they were labelled became a xenophobic mechanism in the immigration dialogue that painted them in a way to deter the average American resident. Michael Bennet, a Democratic senator from Colorado, described this strategy as portraying immigrants as \u201cshadowy, isis-controlled, Ebola-carrying people disguised as Central American children flooding across the border\u201d and being \u201ceffective\u201d in deterring politicians from further progressing immigration reform and increased legalization efforts.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We notice through the retelling of migrants\u2019 narratives how they function as chess pieces serving the convenience of the U.S. immigration system, in how government authorities choose to move people around to various locations as well as the ease at which they are thrown out of the country deported. See, for example, the decision of California cops and immigration authorities collaborating to \u201cclean out\u201d city and state jails because \u201cit was much easier to deport someone than it was to convict him of a crime.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The decision around doing what best serves the interests of the immigrants and what they can provide to America whilst assuaging the interests of Americans manifests in what is described as a \u201cmoral imperative\u201d in the New Yorker piece. Most pervasive on the Democratic side of the immigration debate, and the Biden administration\u2019s tackling of asylum, is the struggle around towing the line between controlling the influx of migrants at the border and the ethical\/moral boundary that government officials were or weren\u2019t willing to tow. Trump\u2019s separation of migrant families at the border served as the most glaring example of this morally shaky effort, one that proved to work in deterring migrants at the border to some capacity, but more so became cemented as a sensationalist representation of aggressive and ethically ambiguous border policy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The article on the Darien Gap presents a harshly realistic perspective into the tumultuous journey of migrants. As Americans, we see so much extensive coverage at the Southern border and this fearmongering effort both photographically and anecdotally of an overflow, an invasion. However, the jarring reality of the unrest of their hometowns and the journey they take to get to the U.S. slips out of the conversation. When the Biden administration has been taking such deliberate efforts to improve the Latin American countries that are homes of those migrating, how has this story of the path to the U.S. and immigration reform targeted at the source point fell so far out from the national conversation around resolving the border dilemma?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The language describing the Southern Border crisis in the United States presents it as one inextricably tied to the preservation of American democracy; meanwhile for the migrants themselves it has become a sullied label of their personal journey that\u2019s marked with overcoming intense hardship\u2014from their path to the U.S. to their preexisting troubles in their<\/p>\n