Immigration Policy and Media Narratives are not a Blood Sport

If immigrant advocates want politicians and the media to handle “immigration” differently, we need to change our approach, too.

Tina Vásquez, a respected journalist at Prism, wrote “we’ve all played a role in the rightward shift on immigration.” One of Vásquez’ central points is that the “mainstream media ecosystem … has never had the range, the nuance, or the know-how to report on immigration accurately.” I’d add the financial crisis that traditional media is in, which leads media companies to prioritize click-bait headlines, and to corrupt stories well-intentioned journalists are trying to report with integrity.

Vásquez writes: “The deeply partisan divide on immigration — one that frames Democrats as the party of open borders and Republicans as the nation’s hard line of defense against the invasion, swarm, influx, [insert your preferred racist language here] of migrants at the border — isn’t merely the creation of pundits and politicos. This rhetoric is also a media fabrication, solidified over decades of irresponsible coverage.”

Yes, and I’m not here to hold myself or others blameless. The media both shape and reflect who we are and our priorities. If we don’t seek out more truth, and demand more depth from the media we watch, listen to, and read, we receive a narrower viewpoint — like we have for decades about Israel and Palestine.

Narrower, and uninformed.

We failed to realize the national treasure that is an independent media, and let corporations take over. The responsibility lies with us, as well as the media, to recognize what we have lost and rebuild it.

But that means we, as advocates working with the media to share information and advance causes, need to actually understand what we’re not getting and why it matters. I’ve thought and read about this a lot and here is what I’ve concluded:

1. There has been a long-standing belief among many pro-immigration organizations that appearing in local media should be less of a priority than national media. This despite the fact that breaking down national issues into local and community stories is the best way to “make politics personal” and ensure an empathetic response.
2. As the media landscape became more polarized through changes to the industry and in politics, advocates continued to focus on getting quoted in high profile outlets, without enough concern about the nature of the stories we were participating in.
3. We primarily responded to the agenda set by Trump and the Republicans by talking about what we are against, not what we are for. We continue to do this with Biden and Harris.
4. We failed to understand the impact of images on the media narrative. Reporters had free reign to run down to the southern border or into Mexico and take pictures of human misery. We didn’t provide enough visual alternatives, consistently, that show the humanity, heroism, dignity, intelligence, and bravery that exists among people who have been forced to move. For more on this, see “The Most Powerful, Least Used Narrative Tool: Humanizing Photos of Immigrants.”

5. And, most importantly: we failed to understand and make use of years of scientific research we have access to. It shows people think they know more about immigration policy than they actually do, but that opinions are not changed by receiving more or better information, even though it’s accurate. The way to disrupt flawed mental templates some people hold about immigrants, and open their hearts to a new understanding, is to articulate values we share and provide examples of human connection.

What are we leaving out of our media narratives? Humanity and the truth about migration.

In many cases, someone’s need to migrate actually starts with us. And the U.S. fails to provide tools for safe migration. Policymakers, the media, and even many advocates ignore these fundamental truths, in favor of an argument over where and how to draw our borders. This will always be inadequate, and always lead to a truncated policy discussion with limited options — open up or crack down.

The U.S. immigration narrative is that “immigration” starts at the U.S. border — or maybe a few countries deeper, if you are talking about people who have had to cross countries by land or sea, rather than airplane. But in so many cases, the need to move out of the country in which you were born starts with colonialism or imperialism. Wealthy nations’ interventions in other countries. Stolen land and resources. Genocides backed or supported by U.S. political interests, like the assault on Palestine.

As I describe in another Medium piece, Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe coined a concept called “necropolitics,” which is the “racialized political exclusion by the United States and other countries of the Global North through decades of policies that limit, block, or expel those arriving at borders and result in violence, ill health, trauma, and death” after colonial or imperialistic interventions.

“Necropolitics” is literally the politics and policies of death. It’s like a real-life Squid Game: Migration. Not recognizing migrants’ inherent human dignity and creating safe channels for movement, but a choice to make people born in poorer countries run a gauntlet. Rather than having the option of safe migration, we have a “survival of the fittest” procedure that lets many die.

But you wouldn’t know this, to read most immigration stories reported in U.S. media. They center our own borders, and what is perceived to be our own interests, as the place the migration conversations starts and ends. Immigrant advocates, and the media sources that quote us, primarily focus on problems rather than laying out healthy alternatives to what is being proposed.

There are some notable exceptions, particularly among organizations led by people who have been forced to move. Groups like the Mauritanian Network for Human Rights in US. They talk about root causes of migration in the same sentence as the need for policies that welcome migrants, because it’s all part of the same life story. And, like MNHRUS’ General Secretary Houleye Thiam often says, “Telling your story is the secret to survival.”

Who is listening?

The way we participate in the media furthers the narrative’s decline.

Since Donald Trump first became a viable candidate for president, he has essentially served as the assignment editor in every newsroom. He’s dictated what is covered, set the terms, and distracted level heads. The most honest thing Trump ever said was, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” The media covered his subsequent attempts to “shoot up Fifth Avenue,” metaphorically speaking, 24/7.

Immigrant advocates played the game. We helped chronicle Trump’s excess through our opposition. For a while, it seemed to work. The outpouring of anger against the Muslim ban — with lawyers running to the airports to try to assist — was the best of the United States in action. But we didn’t realize what we are losing by engaging in national political stories, alone.

By the time Biden took over, the national media narrative had been firmly set that there are two sides to immigration, one “humanitarian” and one “hardline.” Any policy announcement would automatically mean one side is winning and the other side losing. Politicians treat human lives and futures like a basketball game, and many media outlets do, too.

National media skips over contextual reporting, jumping straight to U.S. politics.

In June 2022, more than 50 people were found dead in San Antonio, trapped in a truck without water or air conditioning. The people who died were migrants smuggled into the United States, because they had no other, safe option. After establishing the basic facts of what was known, NPR’s Rachel Martin quickly switched into political analysis. “It’s just worth noting the politics of this, right? I mean, this happened in the state of Texas in an election year. No doubt it’s going to become a political talking point.”

@tramontela

While Texas Governor Greg Abbott and President Joe Biden’s responses to this tragedy are important news, the immediate framing of this incident as a political one was jarring. Far more thoughtful coverage was offered by the Texas Tribune. Their article included reactions from the Governor and President, without drawing a direct line to politics. Readers were left to form their own conclusions.

What the Tribune also did, and NPR did not, was highlight the humanity of the individuals who died and the people responding to this horror. The Tribune quoted San Antonio Fire Chief Charles Hood, who said: “We’re not supposed to open up a truck and see stacks of bodies in there. None of us come to work imagining that.”

The reason why the “who’s winning/who’s losing” immigration coverage is a problem is that it locates immigration policy solely in a political frame, and provides no room for alternatives or solutions.

It is a problem that NPR focuses on this type of coverage, because NPR is where people in the center and center-left used to get good information about what was going on on immigration, information that could then be shared at dinner tables and social gatherings. That is how you build a narrative. Instead, like other media, NPR began covering immigration like it was a blood sport. And advocates participated, seeking that coveted interview, instead of holding them accountable to reporting a different story — the type many NPR podcasts and local affiliates tell quite fluently.

NPR’s current immigration correspondent, Jasmine Garsd, does take a more nuanced approach. It’s worth noting she comes out of the organization’s longer-form storytelling. But others still report immigration stories from a politics-only lens.

Sometimes, everyone just loses.

With the business model for journalism in crisis, other major national publications kept looking for the “clickiest” headlines. When the Associated Press published a story, “Thousands more Mauritanians are making their way to the US, thanks to a route spread on social media,” it sensationalized — rather than humanized — the narrative.

The story of Black Mauritanian migration is one with a deep history in apartheid, genocide, language and cultural erasure, denial of citizenship, land-grabbing, police violence, and more. The AP diminished the many decades of oppression that lead Black Mauritanians to leave, making it a social media phenomenon story. This furthered congressional calls for a crackdown on people migrating to save their own lives.

The AP’s reporting did include strong elements of community connection and heroism, but they were wrapped in a “Tik Tok is taking over” and “they keep coming” frame.

What’s really behind the fear of leading on immigration?

As Vásquez explains, stunted media coverage is just one reason that Democrats have shied away from pro-human policy. Two sides thinking is actually the way most Democratic politicians view the issue. Witness the many “grand bargains” they have attempted to negotiate with Republicans over the years.

“[I]t’s mostly a mythology that Democrats alone usher in more humane immigration policies. I came to more fully understand this when I first reported on immigration full time under President Barack Obama. I covered the administration’s full-fledged assault on Central American asylum-seekers in the form of fast-track mass deportations, the return — and expansion — of family detention, and enforcement operations targeting young people on their way to school. This was deeply unpopular work at the time, and readers often pushed back on the reporting. After all, how could a president who represented progress and adopted the English equivalent of ‘sí se puede’ — a term ‘rooted in the struggle of working-class Latinos’ — so seamlessly become the deporter-in-chief who brought back ‘baby jails’? To better understand Obama’s trajectory and the frightening machinery he wielded over immigrant communities, you have to revisit former President Bill Clinton’s 1996 laws,” wrote Vásquez.

Among many Democrats, and even some immigrant advocates, there is a core belief that if a law does something positive for immigrants, it must be “balanced” with something harmful to them or another, later group.

What if, instead, Democrats and advocates realized that migration is a basic part of being human?

Most Democrats have not been approaching this issue from a holistic lens throughout my three decades of engagement. But there has been another tack right on immigration by the Democrats since Trump. Biden started his presidency attempting to dramatically reshape immigration enforcement priorities. And while that vision largely held in the interior, at least where I live, when it comes to the border and asylum, it has fallen apart.

Vásquez says this is “a consequence of letting extremists set the terms of the debate.” She continues, “I only wish that Democrats would shift the narrative instead of embracing the same dangerous rhetoric.” Immigrant advocates can and must play a role in making that happen through our narrative approach.

Wonder: Strategies for Good and Goodwin Simon Strategic Research developed a “heartwired” framework to explain how individual “emotions, identity, values, beliefs and lived experiences shape our decisions on complex social issues — and use that knowledge to … create social change.”

Their case study on culture shift in support of marriage equality is an illuminating example about how narrative strategy changed public opinion and policy for the better, in our lifetime. When are immigrant advocates going to articulate our own vision where love wins for immigrants, too?

Here are some things common to both people born in other countries, who immigrate here, and people lucky enough to have been born in the United States. These are the shared values we should lean on:

1. The need to live in a safe place.

2. Access to work and the ability to earn a living.

3. The chance to be who you are, and love who you love, without risking violence from individuals or the government.

4. Self-determination, and the right to not have to move.

5. The ability to move safely, with dignity, when you do.

6. The drive to do whatever it takes to survive, thrive, and take care of your family.

7. The fact that migration is as old as time, and as basic as breathing.

These are shared values relevant to immigration narratives that we should articulate with every breath. They can begin, imbue, and book-end every immigration communication.

The other thing we can and should say is this. Immigrants are regular people. Said Yanira Oldaker, the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Dr. Mahendra Amin, who performed unwanted or unnecessary gynecological procedures on women in the Irwin County (GA) immigration jail: “We’re no less women than the regular people in the free world and we still deserve to have the same respect and proper medical attention.” The lawsuit was brought by the National Immigration Project (NIPNLG), Project South, and partners.

Immigrants are regular people, and they are also heroes, again like many who were born here. Brave and resourceful survivors and change-makers who are family and community-oriented.

We all want a place to belong and we actually do have the room — in our hearts and in our communities.

I’m Lynn Tramonte, a communications strategist and nonprofit director — progressive values with midwestern roots. Follow me on Medium, Threads, and Bluesky. #antiracism #abolition #dignity #love #liberation