The “nice white girl victim” stories are topping reportage of ICE nightmares but they miss the point. It’s not just about keeping people out. It’s about keeping YOU in.
Today, I woke up to a horrific story in the Guardian about young British citizen Rebecca Burke, a graphic artist who simply wanted to travel around the United States, sometimes work at brief simple chore jobs to pay her way, and who wound up getting tossed into a prison by ICE agents. It’s harrowing stuff, made worse by the fact that I learned my own government border guards are complicit in her ordeal.
In the story, Jenny Kleeman writes that “the Canadian officials told Becky they’d determined she needed a work visa. She could apply for one from the US and come back, they said. Two officers escorted her to the American side of the border. They talked to the US officials.”
After that, Rebecca Burke’s long nightmare began. And I have to ask, are our border and customs people completely stupid? Are they automatons who never switch on the news and must shove people back despite the fact that all Ms. Burke needed to do was fill out a form, which she could have done right there? Are policy makers in Ottawa completely in a coma that they can’t adjust?
If Ms. Burke flew into Toronto’s Pearson Airport from say, Paris, because she happened to have visited France first, I am very sure the authorities would not put her into a truck and drive her out to the French consulate at Bloor and Yonge and say, “Here you go! All yours!”
So why do we do this with land crossings? Especially given the current political atmosphere in which our supposedly “good buddy” of the United States is turning into an enemy?
The CBC reports this: “Immigration lawyers are urging people who need visa renewals to opt to go to airports, where they can be processed on Canadian soil, with no risk of getting detained if they are deemed ineligible.”
The last thing Canadians should want is for our border guards and custom officials to treat things like “business as usual” right now.
But what I realize now because duh, I’m a white male so gimme a minute, is that Western media is doing the same bullshit that it’s done for decades with crime stories. The white, blonde teenage girl goes missing — get the TV crews out, put her at the front of the first section in the paper. Oh, a Black kid’s gone missing? Nnnnnnaw, our readers aren’t interested in that.
Last month, CNN reported on a young, blonde German tattoo artist who got detained by ICE, and their agents might have presumed that she intended to work illegally while visiting the States. Canada has its own ICE martyr in Jasmine Mooney. Mooney is a former actor who pushes health food drinks and who was trying to sincerely follow the rules in renewing a work visa at the Mexican border. She wound up spending 11 days in cement cells, an involuntary guest of ICE’s hellish hospitality.
I am not making light of the appalling traumas that these women faced, and I don’t want to go on a rant about privilege, white or otherwise.
No, what is far more interesting to me is that their cases are presented — and to be fair, accurately — as “I did nothing wrong, I tried to follow the rules.” And yes, they did. But when will journalists get it?
By all means, keep reporting these horror stories, but I for one would really appreciate it if the journalists figured out that your stupid angle just reinforces the inherent bias that some people — the nice people who conveniently look like us — are entitled to come and go as they please while others are not.
But Jeff, you might bark, if people apply legally, blah, blah, blah. Oh, you want to die on that hill? I invite you to go back and check the details in the linked stories of how the respective women each earn their income. Each has work that if an African person or an Arab person or a South American person listed as their profession or tried to “do on the side,” they would find themselves either blocked right at the gate or their apartment would get raided.
The stories of the nice white women getting pulled out of the line are cautionary tales for other white people, but I guarantee you that brown people have already figured out how the hammer will hit even harder. Mainly because it’s so hard for brown people to get into the United States (and Canada and Britain and Europe) in the first place.
I wait quietly for reporters to tell the stories of Amhara people I know fleeing persecution in Ethiopia. And I wait. And wait.
So, it would be a boon to coverage if reporters focused on how the new rules don’t simply expose the Trump administration’s cruelty but demonstrate how the border control system was always vindictive and humiliating to begin with. And you won’t get that with more Tales of the Persecuted Middle Class Travelers.
I am also waiting for the fog to lift for commentators and journalists over another point. Because I haven’t seen anyone else make it.
If you impose a ruthless system to keep people out — if you can round up even those legally entitled to be in the country and drop them into a foreign penitentiary (El Salvador) — you have essentially made your whole nation into a prison.
Because you are telling citizens now that when they return from any trip, they must prove themselves worthy to be let back in. During Trump’s first term in office, Canadians and Europeans felt anxiety over their social media posts on their phone, which airport border guards could demand on the spot to inspect. Biden’s term made those moments a distant memory. Well, not anymore. Just wait for how these renewed tactics will go down again with American citizens landing at La Guardia after a long-ass flight from Prague or Melbourne. But by then it might be too late.
Over the past decade, we have seen in news coverage a term evolve into an epithet; the wording used to be illegal immigrant then illegal migrant and then just migrant. As if the “illegal” is implied. But all kinds of people are law-abiding migrants, whether they are students, diplomats, or even if you want to get technical, tourists.
Unfortunately, the migrant has been smeared as the ultimate criminal of our age.
It will not be only Trump’s administration that does this. Others will in time borrow from this playbook, even if they are the supposedly benign “democratic” governments of Britain or continental Europe. In time, you’ll run the risk of becoming stateless on the spot, whether because a border guard doesn’t like that meme you posted on Facebook or simply because you’re the wrong color, even though you were born in the city where you’ve arrived.
Expect to see a sinister chill spread across the United States in a matter of months. While it’s true that many Americans still don’t own passports or travel beyond Mexico and Canada, a good portion of highly educated Americans do, and — funny, that — a good number of them turn out to be left-of-center in their politics. How easy do you think it will be, for instance, once Timothy Snyder gets settled in at the University of Toronto for the Trump administration to find a pretext to bar him from visiting home?
I watched a television interview recently with Snyder’s wife and fellow professor, Marci Shore, who made an oblique reference to a point that’s been on my mind for a while about some folks rushing to get out of 1933 Germany while they could.
That year, Leo Szilard — who is not as well known a physicist as Albert Einstein but who damn well should be — put all that he owned into two suitcases as the Nazis tightened their stranglehold on Germany and moved into a modest room at a university faculty club in the suburbs of Berlin. After Paul von Hindenburg caved to pressure and let Hitler be chancellor, Szilard picked up his suitcases and left Berlin for good. “Hitler and his Nazis are going to take over Europe,” he told members of his family. “Get out now. Leave Europe — before it’s too late!”
Szilard figured it out early. He became a migrant and in effect turned himself into a political refugee. He ended up being one of the most important scientists to work on the Manhattan Project.
So maybe the news coverage should turn more to the brave individuals who are eager to leave and will continue the fight abroad than just profiling the nice, attractive white folks — happily oblivious to what’s going on — who keep trying to get in.
