Joe Biden is sending troops to the southern border.
This is a logistical move, his administration says. They’re heading south to help with the various tasks that will need to be done as the United States braces for what the media is calling a “surge of migrants” as Covid immigration restrictions come to an end.
The troops are just part of Biden’s strategy. As the AP reports, the administration is imposing “new policies crack down on illegal crossings while also setting up legal pathways for migrants who apply online, seek a sponsor and undergo background checks.” “Migrants” — I put this word in quotation marks purposefully, because the word “migrant” divorces their movement from the circumstances that have forced them to flee — will now “face being barred from entering the U.S. for five years and possible criminal prosecution.”
On Wednesday, Homeland Security announced a rule to make it extremely difficult for anyone who travels through another country, like Mexico, to qualify for asylum. It also introduced curfews with GPS tracking for families released in the U.S. before initial asylum screenings.
To be fair, Biden also “has introduced expansive new legal pathways into the U.S.”
Up to 30,000 people a month from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela can enter if they apply online with a financial sponsor and enter through an airport. Processing centers are opening in Guatemala, Colombia and elsewhere. Up to 1,000 can enter daily though land crossings with Mexico if they snag an appointment on an online app.”
Taken as a whole, the administration’s new plans for the border continue a punitive model that sees “migrants” as threats, an argument reinforced by the media’s coverage. The New York Times reports “Border Expected to Be ‘Chaotic’ as U.S. Ends Covid Policy.” The Washington Post: “Amid expected surge of border crossings, a costly predicament for D.C.” The Los Angeles Times: “Border towns brace for Title 42 expiration as migrant arrivals push capacity limits.” The language in each case seeks a neutral tone, but buys into the larger media narrative that has been pressed by Republicans and anti-immigration groups. Putting “chaotic” in quote marks may get the Times off the hook, but it still sends a message — as do words and phrases like “surge,” “costly predicament,” “town brace,” and “capacity limits.”
Even reports that attempt to take a different perspective — such as this MSNBC interview with U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Democrat from Texas who serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in which the Congressman tells Andrea Mitchell that this is a “humanitarian crisis” created by a “backlog of people who've been in Mexico and who have been subjected to the violence of very dangerous cartels there and often been the victims of crime because they've not been allowed to be in the United States while they wait to have their asylum claims heard in court.”
The story chyron — or caption on the screen — subtly distorts Castro’s remarks, turning a “humanitarian crisis” imposed on “migrants” into a “migrant crisis,” a phrase that in the public consciousness has grown to mean “dangerous influx.”
Basically, the word choice signals threat, a breached border, echoing Trump-era attacks, but in a more sanitized and clinical way. Trump was overt — describing “migrants” as dirty invaders, proclaiming that secures borders were necessary for us to even have a country.
Trump’s rhetorical assault on “migrants” had real-world effects beyond border enforcement, playing into Antisemitic conspiracies involving George Soros and the Great Replacement Theory, and a massacre of 11 at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Trump did not cause the massacre, but there is a through line linking his words to the actions taken by the shooter.
Language matters in these cases. The words chosen by reporters and editors have a clinical feel, but they carry underlying meanings — the kind of problematic language I’ve been pushing my journalism students to avoid. The language being used to describe the current wave of migration from Central and South America has a punitive caste and both borrows from rightwing, anti-immigrant narratives and underscores them, pushing them into the mainstream.
Charles Blow makes this point today in The New York Times (in a column about Biden’s age): “Headlines and polls don’t just measure and reflect public sentiment;” he writes, “they also influence it. The persistence of a theme elevates and validates that theme.”
It’s not just a one-way relationship, of course. The coverage is both influenced by the public and politicians and influences them, going round and round and round.
What gets lost in this kind of coverage are contrary narratives, the voices of the “migrants,” and just what drives people from their homes.