Monsters. Animals. Aliens. These are some of the terms that members of the Trump administration have used to describe immigrants in recent years. This dehumanization has real-world consequences. It provides cover for inhumane, often extra-legal treatment of migrants and refugees by portraying them as less than people.
No matter your political party or beliefs, you should be concerned. As citizens we have an obligation to treat others in ways that, as President Russell M. Nelson put it recently, “(afford) others the human dignity that all of God’s children deserve.”
This begins at the level of the language we use. A recent example from the news illustrates the point. After the detention of Utah resident John Shin, a Department of Homeland Security official issued a press release saying, “Our message is clear: Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the United States.” It’s hard to disagree with a statement like that. “Criminal illegal alien” sounds so menacing.
Yet Shin is hardly a menacing figure. A violinist who has performed with the Utah Symphony and Ballet West, Shin’s friends describe him as a “great musician and great father.” He has made mistakes, including a 2019 misdemeanor conviction for driving while impaired, but do those mistakes mean that his entire existence can be reduced to the phrase “criminal illegal alien”? Do they mean that he should be punished with permanent exile from the nation and separation from his wife and children?
The department’s newsroom web page is filled with headlines about “criminal illegal aliens” taken in custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement:
- “ICE Arrests More Worst of the Worst Including Criminal Illegal Aliens Convicted of Murder, Sexual Assault, and Robbery”
- “While Americans Were Enjoying Their Labor Day Weekend, ICE Arrested More Worst of the Worst Criminal Illegal Aliens”
- “DHS Announces New Reimbursement Opportunities for State and Local Law Enforcement Partnering with ICE to Arrest the Worst of the Worst Criminal Illegal Aliens.”
The idea seems to be that you don’t need to know anything more about the people that DHS is sweeping up in one of the most aggressive deportation campaigns in U.S. history. In fact, they are barely people at all. Criminal. Illegal. Alien. Repeated over and over, those words can convince us that immigrants are something less than human — and legitimately undeserving of rights or dignity afforded to Americans.
Shin was recently released from detention, due in no small part to the pressure brought to bear by people reading about his story. This shows both the challenge that faces us in today’s media environment and a possible way forward.
The challenge is that social media amplifies this same language problem. This is true in at least two ways.
First, social media tends to reward reductive thinking — bad-faith responses to political opponents, snarky one-liners and name-calling. At its most extreme, this dehumanizing meme-ification can contribute to horrific political violence, such as the murders of Melissa Hortman in Minnesota earlier this year and Charlie Kirk last week in Utah.
Second, social media fractures our attention. We’re constantly toggling among distractions, unable to sustain attention long enough to deal with complexity, whether that has to do with policy or people.
But humans are complex. Humans are embedded in relationships with family, friends and communities. They make mistakes, change their minds, learn and grow. Sometimes they’re also caught up in world events — war, famine, trafficking, political and religious repression — over which they have no control.
In 2016, Linda K. Burton, then president of the Relief Society of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, gave a talk entitled “I Was a Stranger,” in which she invited members of the church to be active in welcoming and serving refugees around the world. In the talk, Sister Burton describes getting to know refugee sisters from war-torn countries and asking herself, “What if their story were my story?”
Treating others with dignity requires more than just abandoning dehumanizing epithets, though of course that’s an important beginning. It requires us to pay attention long enough to learn their stories. I don’t believe it’s just coincidence that we’re experiencing an unprecedented political polarization at the same time that fewer Americans are reading for pleasure than ever before. The digital world is making us all vulnerable to manipulation and reductive representations of other people.
As an English professor, of course, I believe that literature provides an important antidote to dehumanization.
For those seeking to understand the experience of undocumented people, I recommend three books to start with. Oscar Cásares’s masterful novel "Where We Come From" is set in Brownsville, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, among a Mexican American community fractured by very different political views. It depicts the friendship between two adolescent boys — one a U.S. citizen, the other an undocumented migrant — and reminds readers that in life, there is no such thing as a minor character.
Edwidge Danticat’s memoir "Brother, I’m Dying" tells the story of the author’s migration from Haiti and her complicated relationships with a father and uncle, including her uncle’s tragic death in a Florida detention center. At a time when politicians are gleefully creating newer and more inhumane detention centers to score political points, Danticat’s memoir asks us to remember that the individuals detained are people with families and dreams of their own.
Finally, Javier Zamora’s harrowing memoir "Solito" relates the author’s experience traveling to the United States from El Salvador by himself as an undocumented, 9-year-old child. Zamora finds beauty and humor in the voyage, but there is no disguising the trauma that such a journey inflicts on a child. His book not only reminds us of the price many migrants are willing to pay to enjoy the security and opportunity many of us take for granted, but it also serves as a cautionary tale at a moment when DHS is targeting students and young people for deportation.
Each of these books insists that migrants are not aliens, not monsters, and not animals. They are humans — complex, messy, beautiful, deserving of dignity.
What if their story was your story?