What was your reaction when you saw the photograph of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter Valeria tangled in death? I have no idea, as I write these words, whether you, the reader, are conservative or liberal, white or Hispanic, a supporter or an opponent of tighter immigration controls. But I think I am on pretty safe grounds in predicting how you responded when you saw the image of Óscar with his little girl wrapped in his shirt, the two Salvadorans clinging together as they drowned.
You flinched. You thought of your own children when they were toddlers, or of other kids close to you. If you have a child of similar age to Valeria (trust me on this) you hugged that child a lot tighter than usual. If you’re religious, you probably prayed.
And then what? Here is where it gets complicated. Logically, those two heart-breaking deaths should have no affect on the debate about immigration. The United States, like every country in the world, exercises some control over who crosses its frontiers. As long as there are border checks, and almost no one is seriously proposing that all checks be lifted, there is a possibility that people might seek to get around them. As long as people seek to cross borders illicitly, there is the possibility that some will perish in the attempt. All of these things were true last year, and all of them will be true next year. The fact that two tragic drownings happened to be caught on camera changes nothing.
Yet, at the same time, it changes everything. Human beings are not always rational. A photograph can force us to ponder uncomfortable truths that we recognized intellectually but never properly confronted. By the same token, it can make us behave in illogical and self-destructive ways.
In September 2015, a three-year-old boy named Alan Kurdi was washed up on a Turkish beach after an overloaded inflatable boat that had been carrying his family and others across the Aegean capsized. He was photographed on the sands, and the image went viral.
Of course it did: Alan looked just like your kid or mine in his little shorts and his red T-shirt. In some vague and inchoate way, arguing for tougher immigration controls suddenly became an act of disrespect. The previous week, Angela Merkel had announced a significant loosening of Germany’s border controls. In normal times, she might have expected significant resistance, both domestically and in neighboring countries. But, after Alan’s death, criticism was muted.
In consequence, Germany admitted a million immigrants, a disproportionate number of whom were young men. Some were refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Many were economic migrants. It is too early to say what impact this mass movement of people will have, but let’s at least be honest about one thing. If you want to make it impossible for anyone to drown while crossing the Rio Grande, then, logically, you are calling for an American equivalent of the Merkel policy. You are saying, in effect, let’s drop the checks and allow anyone in if they just physically reach the frontier.
Inevitably, U.S. politicians have dragged the deaths into their domestic quarrels. “Trump is responsible for these deaths,” says Beto O’Rourke. “It could stop immediately if the Democrats change the law,” says Trump. It is human nature to seize on such events as proof of whatever it was you already believed. It is also human nature to situate yourself at the center of the universe, to make everything about you.
In truth, though, Americans are not responsible for these deaths. Nor are they responsible for the poverty of neighboring lands. Nor are they responsible for the hardships suffered by people from those lands when they seek to reach the U.S. It’s not always about you.
For what it’s worth, I am broadly in favor of Hispanic immigration. If you want to take workers from somewhere, you could do a lot worse than Latin America. Almost all the first-generation Latino immigrants I have met in the U.S. are grateful to be there and determined to make a success of it. Indeed, come to think of it, I am technically a Latino myself, born and raised in Lima, Peru.
But are we seriously going to argue that anyone who passes the Darwinian test of making it to the U.S. border should be allowed in automatically?
No politician ever wants to say: “Terrible things sometimes happen, they are not anyone’s fault, and even the best system cannot always prevent them.” But there are times when it is true.
