"The Surge:" The problem with immigration rhetoric

I am focusing on a section from Valeria Luiselli’s Tell me how it ends. I decided to look at the first two paragraphs of the section that begins on page 83 and is continued on page 84. In the passage, Luiselli calls our attention to the way that the media has constructed our view of borders and immigration. In the first paragraph, she notes that, instead of focusing on the complicity of the United States in creating the mass exodus of people from Central and South America, the US government and media always makes sure to “locate the dividing line between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarity’ just below the Rio Grande” (83). In other words, because borders themselves are human constructions and not “natural” entities, the media helps to create the border through the language that it uses to describe immigrants from Central and South America.

    

Young people by the southern border in 2014

         Luiselli goes on to provide an example of this harmful, divisive language by citing a brief New York Times article from 2014, which I decided to look up on the internet I could get a better understanding of her point. Luiselli writes that the article reads like “something from an openly racist nineteenth-century magazine or a reactionary anti-immigration serial, not the Times,” and indeed, the rhetoric used to describe the children (literal children!) at the border is accusatory, dehumanizing, and also, as Luiselli points out, inaccurate (84). The article is very brief, but it took me a good ten minutes to get through because I kept having refrain from throwing my laptop against the wall. For example, the article describes the increase of unaccompanied children at the border as a “surge,” and reassures its readers that they that they will be vaccinated and given a health screening upon arrival. This kind of language reinforces the narrative of an immigration “crisis,” or the idea that the Southern border is vulnerable and the children at the border somehow pose a threat to our national security. Luiselli, in this passage and throughout her book, is trying to get us to see and question the language that determines who we think is “allowed” to be an immigrate to America—language that we might use and read every day without thinking about it.

What language does Luiselle use in her essay use to counter the harmful rhetoric used by the media to describe the children at the border?

How might literature and storytelling help to change the way our culture thinks about immigration?