The two migrants had set off from Iraq. Most likely relatives accompanied them, although I cannot be sure. Whether those relatives reached their destination, I also do not know. I do know that these two migrants ended their journey not far from where I stand, atop a hill on the Greek island of Lesbos, overlooking the shimmering blue Aegean Sea.
I’m in the corner of a local church cemetery, where the island’s residents mark the graves of their dead in dense rows of monuments and etched marble slabs. Slinky cats lounge on the stone structures in various states of torpor. Some months earlier the migrants’ bodies washed up on one of the island’s beaches below. Locals carried them up the island’s steep, bougainvillea-lined lanes to hand over to the gravedigger here, a wiry gray-haired man named Christos.
He’d received many such bodies by then.1 They had initially posed a dilemma for him, because the cemetery was reserved for the island’s Christians, and while he did not know much about the migrants, he knew they were most likely Muslim. His solution had been to establish a kind of ghetto within the graveyard. He buried them in the cemetery’s scruffy perimeter, where cemetery workers dump the graveyard’s assorted debris into a rough pile and the grass grows wild.
The migrant graves were fresh when I visited, the spots where their bodies rested marked with a couple of shards of marble. No one knew the migrants’ names, so the gravedigger had hand-painted what he assumed to be their ages on the shards with a bit of black paint. Some sympathetic locals who’d stopped by after paying respects to the statelier graves of their relatives and friends had left behind a bouquet of plastic pink flowers and two stuffed animals of the kind you might find in a pharmacy’s gift aisle. The toys rested on a marble shard, its smudged painted inscription half-submerged in the mud.
The boy had been about five. His companion, about seven. The two children had made it over one thousand miles, across violent borders, and through countries ravaged by war. But barred from official ports of entry, they’d been killed by less than twenty miles of Mediterranean sea.
Another migrant left from somewhere south of the United States, donning a blue-and-white American Eagle polo shirt for the journey north. He made it across the Rio Grande, the wide and shallow river that meanders along the border between Texas and Mexico. It was the desert beyond that felled him. Unlike the mesquite and cacti, his body could not manage its dehydrating heat.
The remains of migrants who die in the desert2 are easy to lose. Over 90 percent of the borderlands in Texas consist of private ranches, some of which are so large that vast swaths go unvisited for years. The biggest one is the size of the state of Rhode Island. And the desert rapidly metabolizes human flesh. Within a day, a dead migrant’s body in the desert is visually unrecognizable. Coyotes strip away the flesh; vultures peck out the eyeballs. The bones that remain, bleached white by the desert sun, are incorporated into prickly stands of cacti or dragged into rats’ nests, where the calcium hones the rodents’ incisors.
Against the odds, someone found3 the young man’s polo-shirted body before the desert digested it. A local official ferried the body to the morgue. State law requires that unidentified bodies such as his be sampled for DNA, and the FBI called to help with identification. But the remote South Texas county where he’d ended up, the fifth poorest in the United States, had little budget or political will for all that. Migrants die in South Texas regularly. The U.S. Border Patrol has counted over fifteen hundred migrant deaths in the Rio Grande valley since 1998. There are too many for local authorities to manage. At the morgue, a pathologist removed the young man’s clothes and sliced open his chest to check for signs of foul play. Then the pathologist sewed his body back up, stuffed his clothes into a small biohazard bag, and zipped both into a black body bag.
The official who runs the morgue drove the zippered-up black bag down some dusty dirt roads on the edge of town to his family’s sprawling cotton farm. He drove past the ramshackle ranch house, draped with Christmas lights, where a distant cousin sat drinking his daily quart of whiskey. He drove past the rickety fence that encircled the ranch house next door, abandoned by its owners to smugglers who used it as temporary housing for the migrants and drugs they pirated across the border. Finally he pulled up next to a lone tree casting a dainty shadow on a clearing.
His family had been burying their dead here for generations, surrounded by acres of cotton fields, marking their graves with engraved granite arranged in rows. For years, he’d been digging holes in between the marked graves and dumping the nameless dead who passed through his morgue there too: homeless people, unidentified hospital patients still wearing their flimsy hospital gowns and tethered to medical tubing, migrants who’d died in the desert or drowned in the river. Some he’d put in Styrofoam containers, some in leftover caskets from the local funeral home. Others, like the blue-and-white-polo-shirted migrant, got stashed in their black body bags. Sometimes he’d mark the grave with a paper tag reading “Jane Doe” or “John Doe,” which the landscapers who mowed the grass would then knock over. He had no other option. There’s no public cemetery, and customers at private cemeteries didn’t like their loved ones being buried near unidentified bodies.
Ten years passed between then and the day I saw the polo-shirted migrant. The sky was cloudless with a strong, steady breeze. A forensic anthropologist had raised funds to bring a team of student volunteers to excavate the unidentified graves at the cemetery in the cotton fields and identify the remains. They carried pickaxes and shovels and looked for shallow depressions in the ground that might indicate a body surreptitiously hidden underneath. The morgue official had kept no records or map. When the anthropologists found one, they called over the backhoe and driver they’d hired, who carefully dug into the earth, until the tip of the shovel scraped a coffin or a bag. Over the course of a week, the team had exhumed nearly two dozen unmarked bodies.
As they lifted the black plastic bag encasing the young man’s body out of its grave, I could see the shape of his rib cage. The plastic had gone brittle and clung to his body, which was flattened and dehydrated. They carried the bag to the prickly dry grass and laid it gently down in the shade of the tree. There a few donned masks and gloves to slice open the bag with a knife. It would take months if not years for them to identify the remains. They’d have to extract DNA from the bones, analyze it, upload the sequence to a public database, and then wait for the family of the missing to find it.
The first thing they’d do was try to identify4 the gender and age of the body. If they could do that, they could get a decent sense of whether the body was that of an abandoned hospital patient or a forgotten homeless person or a migrant lost in the desert or drowned in the river. But even that could take hours. Many of the bodies were lifted out of their unmarked graves in half-liquid, half-solid form.
A knot of us stood upwind, avoiding the stench. The backhoe hummed steadily in the background, probing the ground behind us.
The lead anthropologist gingerly examined the contents of the bag. Scraps of grungy fabric and decomposing tissue clung to the skeleton, cushioned in a bed of dark black soil. He pulled out a plastic biohazard bag nestled in the crook of the skeleton’s neck. It must be the corpse’s interior organs, he muttered, extracted during his autopsy.
But the plastic biohazard bag nestled in the crook of the young man’s neck did not contain the remains of his kidneys or his heart. Instead, it contained the dead man’s clothes: the polo shirt and a single white tube sock. The clothes were enough to determine who he was, at least in outline: a young man who’d hoped to start a new life across the border. He’d made it as far as a cotton field in South Texas, thirty miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border.
On about 3.6 percent of the planet’s surface, geographic barriers prevent wild species from migrating as effectively5 as the desert borderlands barred the polo-shirted young man. Take, for example, the mosaic-tailed rat, which lived on tiny Bramble Cay, an uninhabited island on the northern edge of the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia. Increasingly violent storm surges steadily wiped out the island’s plant life. But like other terrestrial creatures living on remote islands, or at the top of mountains, the mosaic-tailed rat had nowhere to go. The rodents’ numbers diminished. By 2002 there were only ten mosaic-tailed rats left on the island. A fisherman spotted one in 2009, but when scientists returned in 2016 to survey the island, they couldn’t find even one.
In 2019, with 97 percent of the vegetation on the island destroyed, officials in Australia declared Melomys rubicola, the Bramble Cay mosaic-tailed rat, officially extinct. It was the first mammal we know of to be wiped out by climate change. Experts agreed it would not be the last.
The more potent barrier to wild species’ movement is us. So far, our cities, towns, farms, and sprawling industrial infrastructure have swallowed up over half the planet’s land surface. We transformed another 22 percent of the earth’s habitable land in just the last decades, mostly by cutting down forests and turning them into farms, as a recent analysis of satellite images from 1992 to 2015 showed. Our massive footprint6 makes life impossible for so many wild species that an estimated 150 go extinct every day, speeding up the background rate of extinction by a factor of one thousand.
Species that have not lost their habitats7 entirely must move through a landscape disfigured by human developments. Black bears in the hardwood swamps of Louisiana must cross a highway to reach others in their population. Instead of striking out across the highway to find new mates, they’ve started to mate with those in their own cut-off group, becoming increasingly inbred. Cougars living in the mountains around Los Angeles must cross two freeways, including one with eight lanes of speeding traffic, to meet others of their kind. None of the cougars that scientists fitted with GPS collars could do it. Four died attempting the crossing, five turned back, and one was shot by police. Birds on the wing smash into industrial structures, each building regularly racking up corpses, like the half-dozen or so birds felled every week by the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary building in Washington, D.C. Migrating butterflies, lured off course by electric lighting, perish and flutter to the ground.
A 2018 paper in Science analyzed the movements of fifty-seven different mammal species outfitted with GPS devices over landscapes rated according to a “human footprint index,” which incorporated data on human population density, the extent of built land, roads, nighttime lighting, and the like. New York City garners a score of 50, while the vast and wild tropical wetlands of the Brazilian Pantanal scores 0. The bigger the human footprint, the researchers found, the more constrained animal movements became.8 In places with the largest footprints, animals managed to cover as little as a third of the distance of those in places with little or no human impact.
Besides the inadvertent obstacles of geography and industrial development, the next great migration must overcome purposeful barriers.
Before 2001 fewer than twenty of the invisible boundaries that define nearly two hundred nation-states were physically marked by fences or walls. Animals, winds, currents, and waves could freely travel9 across their imaginary lines.
In 2015 an unprecedented surge in construction of new border walls began. By 2019 newly built walls, fences, and gates had risen over sixty international boundaries, blockading the movements of over 4 billion people around the world. More borders are fortified by walls and fences today than at any time in history.
Tunisia has built a wall of sandbanks and water-filled trenches along its border with Libya. India and Myanmar have fenced their borders with Bangladesh. Israel has enclosed itself with razor wire, touch sensors, infrared cameras, and motion detectors. Hungary’s fence along its border with Croatia, built by prisoners, delivers electric shocks to any migrant foolhardy enough to touch it. Security officials patrol the barrier, tear gas canisters in hand.
Austria has built a fence along its border with Slovenia. Britain plans another one along the channel separating it from France. Norway has fortified its border with Russia. In the United States, the hundreds of miles of sixteen-foot-high concrete and steel walls marking the southern border would be extended with even taller, longer, more impregnable walls, U.S. president Trump insisted, perhaps even the entire length of the two-thousand-mile border.
Walls don’t necessarily function10 as the impregnable barricades they’re meant to. In one study, for example, researchers set up camera traps along the U.S.-Mexico border, tracking the movement of people and wild species across open stretches and comparing their movement across stretches blocked by border walls. The walls effectively deterred the pumas and coatis. According to conservation biologists, the extended walls proposed for the U.S.-Mexico border, for which the government has waived scores of environmental regulations, will endanger the life-saving movements of most of the ninety-three species that live on either side of it. But in the study comparing open and walled stretches of the border, the walls had no effect on people’s movements. Whether crossing the border means scaling a wall or not, people keep moving, regardless.
If border obstructions fail to stifle movements, they do effectively deflect them. People on the move take more circuitous routes than they otherwise would in order to circumvent barriers, moving like water around a boulder in a stream. Attempting to bar migration, a European border official said, “is very much like squeezing a balloon.11 When one route closes, the flows increase on another.”
But not all migrant routes are the same. People on the move choose the safest and most direct routes first. As those close off, people get diverted into more exposed territory. They are more likely to walk deeper into the desert, launch their boats into rougher waters, and climb higher into the mountains. They are more likely to hire smugglers. Migration continues, but in a deadlier form.12
Between 2015 and 2018, European officials erected a wide array of barriers to prevent people from migrating across the Mediterranean Sea to seek refuge in Europe. The number of people who crossed fell from over 1 million to less than 150,000. But the deadliness of the migrant route skyrocketed. Migrants ventured out into rougher waters under the thumb of more brutal smugglers. Fewer rescue operations were available to aid them. In 2015 one migrant died on the sea route to Europe for every 269 who arrived. In 2018 one migrant died for every fifty-one who arrived.13
Crackdowns on land routes into Europe have had a similar effect. In 2016 European Union officials targeted migrants from West Africa who crossed from northern Niger into Libya to reach Europe. Smugglers were arrested; their vehicles confiscated; over two thousand migrants who reached the Niger-Libya border were deported. The flow of migrants traveling across Niger into Libya dropped precipitously. European Union officials gloated over the stellar results.
But the flow of people had simply shifted,14 westward out to sea and eastward into the desert. Every month an estimated six thousand people continued to head from West Africa toward Europe by land, but they crossed instead from Niger into Chad. The new route exposed them to more remote areas of the Sahara Desert. Their vehicles broke down in the 110-degree-Fahrenheit heat. Fearful of encountering police officers or soldiers, smugglers abandoned migrants to die of thirst. In the first eight months of 2017, smugglers ditched more than a thousand migrants in the Sahara. And that’s just the number of stranded migrants found alive. Aid workers presumed that the number of abandoned migrants who died of thirst in the desert “likely exceeds the number of those rescued.” Migrants from West Africa headed west, farther out to sea, as well. Migrants arriving on the black-and white-sand beaches of Spain’s Canary Islands quadrupled between 2017 and 2018. To make the journey, some had undertaken the thousand-mile open-ocean crossing in wooden boats loaded with dozens of passengers.
Overall, between 1993 and 2017, over 33,000 people died trying to migrate15 into Europe. Between 1998 and 2018, as many as 22,000 may have died trying to cross16 the U.S.-Mexico border into the United States.
The true figures are probably much higher.17 “I would say for every one we find, we’re probably missing five,” one law enforcement official in South Texas said.
Ghulam Haqyar, who had left Herat province in Afghanistan with his wife and four children after one of Haqyar’s colleagues was murdered, finally did reach Europe. He was even able to salvage one of the German-language textbooks the family had carefully carried with them over the mountains and the sea, in preparation for the new lives they’d start in Germany.
Ahead of them, to the north and west, lay 1.6 million square miles of the European continent, comprising over two dozen countries that had maintained open borders since 1985. Streams of migrants like Haqyar who landed in the southern border countries such as Greece or Italy continued their journeys north unbothered by border authorities at checkpoints demanding papers, heading into the more prosperous parts of the continent, where they could apply for asylum and find jobs, housing, and social connections.
But by the time Haqyar’s family made it over the Mediterranean, the borders had closed. Facing hundreds of thousands of newcomers, the governments of Europe changed their minds18 about their open-borders agreement. By 2016, officials had erected border checkpoints around Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, and Sweden. The European Union paid its bordering countries—Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Turkey, and Egypt—to intercept and turn back migrants before they could reach Europe.
The border closures trapped tens of thousands of migrants in Europe’s southern countries. Thousands camped out at Greek ports and in the mud and rain along Greece’s northern boundary, hoping the border might crack open enough to let them pass. As the weeks dragged into months, reporters captured images of desperate migrants threatening to throw their own babies into the sea. Others hung themselves.19 Finally, after weeks of increasingly disturbing headlines, the Greek military razed migrants’ ad hoc encampments on the borders and at the ports. Soldiers rounded up the migrants on buses and deposited them in hastily built military-run camps, where they’d be out of the public eye while European policy makers figured out what to do with them.
Haqyar and his family, along with eight hundred others, ended up in a military-run camp built on an old gravel parking lot in one of the hottest, driest parts of the country, about a three-hour drive from Athens. The soldiers provided them with a canvas tent, one visited nightly by snakes and scorpions, then made themselves scarce. They spent most of their days there ensconced inside their own tents, air-conditioned unlike the others. Outside, the soldiers’ confused and traumatized charges wilted in the sun. No one told Haqyar or anyone else trapped in the camp how to apply for asylum. No one told them how long they’d be held there. Volunteer doctors watched as suicide rates20 and episodes of acute psychiatric illness spiked.
“I can’t name one person here who isn’t losing their mind,” muttered one of Haqyar’s fellow camp residents, a journalist who had fled Kabul with his wife and four children. “Even my small girl says, ‘Daddy, Afghanistan is better than here,’ ” Haqyar added.
Some migrants have escaped the military-run camps. In Athens, a group of activists turned an abandoned schoolhouse into an ad hoc group home, where families from Syria and Afghanistan stuck in Greece could sleep on classroom floors, using blankets wedged between old student desks as walls. Conditions there weren’t much better than in the camps. A local psychiatrist volunteered to visit twice a week to dispense medical advice from a first-floor classroom at the end of the hall equipped with a few dented desks and chairs. His well-meaning medical advice was no match for the array of ailments the migrants suffered. The evening I stopped by, a continuous stream of men, women, and children wandered in and out, complaining of heart palpitations, asthma, and strange and worrying rashes, their faces spotted with angry red lesions from an ongoing chickenpox outbreak. The psychiatrist had little besides a small supply of donated medicines to offer. He was easily rattled, at one point bellowing so angrily at one of the other volunteers that she rushed out of the room in tears.
At the military-run camp, Haqyar set up a makeshift school in one of the tents, where the dozens of children living in the camp could at least go through the motions of education. Their parents, exhausted from staying up all night beating snakes away from their sleeping babies, rested fitfully in their stifling tents in the shadeless sun, battling paralyzing feelings of abandonment and neglect, the scent of leaky Porta Potties wafting through the still air. The children, meanwhile, took turns paging through their sole book, the German textbook that Haqyar had ferried hundreds of miles across mountains and seas in hopes of a different future.21
It is possible to argue that Greece had relatively few resources to provide for the humanitarian needs of migrants inadvertently stranded within its borders. Greece had been mired in a crippling economic crisis since 2008. Public hospitals lacked adequate supplies even for longtime residents, let alone a sudden stream of newcomers. Conditions in the country’s immigration detention camps were so dire that the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2011 that they amounted to torture.22
Deprivation is also, for some political leaders, a matter of policy.
Their crude logic23 is that their societies’ generous public services act as attractants. There’s plenty of evidence that that isn’t true. If it were, people from poor countries would steadily empty into rich countries to which they have access. They don’t. People from Niger, for example, can freely move to Nigeria, which is six times richer. People from Romania can freely move to Sweden, which is six times richer, too. Neither Niger nor Romania has depopulated as a result. In fact, most of the world’s migrants move from one developing country to another, that is, between countries where the range of available public services varies little.
Still, on the theory that withholding society’s riches will deter people from migrating, many countries in Europe exclude people without official documents from services24 that are freely available to locals. In six European Union countries, undocumented migrants are entitled only to emergency health care. In twelve other countries, they are excluded from primary and secondary care. Migrant children without official documents are not offered even rudimentary protective measures, such as vaccinations.
As a results the health of migrants, which starts off superior to those in the host societies they enter, steadily erodes.25 One survey of people who’d fled Iraq and ended up in the Netherlands found that the rate of psychiatric disorders and chronic physical ailments grew in direct relation to the length of time they’d been in the Netherlands, waiting for papers.
By 2019 in the United States, the Trump administration’s deterrence policies went beyond deprivation to the purposeful infliction of trauma.26 A policy dubbed “zero tolerance,” for example, implemented in the spring of 2018, required that migrants entitled to apply for asylum be prosecuted for the misdemeanor crime of crossing the border irregularly first. These prosecutions, in turn, meant that the children whom migrants had brought with them in their flight from poverty and violence were detained separately, while the adults made their way through court. Immigration officials herded over 2,300 children into camps encircled with chain-link fencing, where even the breastfeeding infants and toddlers in diapers among them would have to fend for themselves.
The United States is not alone in jailing children for violating immigration rules. More than one hundred other countries do it, too. But few have ever implemented the separation of families and the detention of children so carelessly. In immigrant detention centers, authorities physically tore children from their parents’ arms. Women waiting to file their claims were tricked into briefly leaving their children to have their photographs taken, only to find upon their return that their children had vanished. If they made it through court without being deported—a feat, given that they rarely had legal representation or even anyone speaking their language during court proceedings—the government could not guarantee that they’d be reunited with their children. Some had been sent hundreds of miles away. Some were deported. Others were farmed out to relatives. Government officials admitted, in leaked emails, that they did not keep track of the children’s whereabouts in any systematic fashion. “No, we do not have any linkages from parents to [children],” one official wrote to another. “We have a list of parent alien numbers but no way to link them to children.”
Critics, noting the unsanitary and overcrowded conditions27 in the detention centers and the unwashed, sickened, and traumatized children within them, complained that the policy amounted to state-sponsored kidnapping and child abuse. But President Trump claimed that separating parents from their children would deter migrants. “If they feel there will be separation,” he explained, “they don’t come.” The government’s own data suggest otherwise. Before it was implemented across the U.S.-Mexico border, the “zero tolerance” policy had been rolled out along the border near El Paso, Texas. Between July 2017 when it began and November 2017 when it ended, the number of families caught trying to cross the border did not decline. On the contrary, it rose by 64 percent.
Jean-Pierre’s death-defying journey through more than a half-dozen countries and the wilds of the Darién Gap could have ended in Orlando, Florida. Thanks to a backlog28 of hundreds of thousands of cases in immigration courts, and the government’s refusal to hire the judges and others needed to handle them, the asylum hearing he’d been promised would probably not be held for years. But before he and his family could start to settle, a low rumble of portents suggested that it was time to leave once more.
The Trump administration enacted policies to stymie migrants’ right to claim asylum.29 Along the country’s southern border, a policy known as “expedited removal” empowered border officials to decide for themselves whether people seeking refuge deserved to have their cases heard by a judge, allowing them to summarily deport those deemed fraudulent or deceptive. Under another policy known as “metering,” border officials arbitrarily restricted the number of asylum applications they’d accept, forcing migrants to wait for weeks to even submit an application. A policy known as the “migration protection protocols” required that migrants await their asylum hearings, sometimes for years, in Mexico rather than in the United States. Bilateral agreements, forged under the threat that the United States would cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid, would allow the United States to reject asylum claims from anyone who had traveled through El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras, and hadn’t applied there first.
Other policies targeted immigrants already settled30 in the country. Migrants who’d been living in the United States for far longer than Jean-Pierre started disappearing. In Ohio, immigration officials scooped up a businessman and deported him to Jordan. He had been living in the United States for nearly forty years and had raised four daughters. He left the country with nothing more than the clothes on his back and a few hundred dollars in his pocket. In Connecticut, they picked up a couple and deported them to China. They’d lived in the United States for nearly two decades and had been running a local nail salon. They had to leave their five-year-old and fifteen-year-old sons behind. In Iowa, a teenager who’d lived there since the age of three was deported to Mexico. He was murdered shortly after arriving.
While previous administrations had captured and deported migrants living in the interior of the country before, they’d primarily targeted those who’d been convicted of crimes. In a single year, the number of migrants living in the interior who’d been arrested shot up by 40 percent. The majority had no criminal convictions at all. Their sole violation consisted of a lack of valid immigration documents.
Even legal immigrants and those who had become citizens fell prey. Under a new “public charge” rule, the Trump administration announced it would penalize legal immigrants for using public services such as food stamps and housing assistance by denying their applications for permanent legal status. Citizens would be subject to denaturalization31 if their papers were found to be faulty.
People from Haiti were subject to particular scrutiny. Officials in the White House watched approvingly32 as the Dominican Republic ousted hundreds of thousands of Haitians. In 2013 a government tribunal in the Dominican Republic had ruled that anyone who could not prove that at the time of their birth their parents were citizens would henceforth be considered foreigners and be subject to deportation. With one stroke, they’d abruptly rescinded jus soli, or birthright citizenship—the right to citizenship in the country of one’s birth—from hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom hailed from the country’s next-door neighbor, Haiti. One of President Trump’s top immigration officials praised the “clarity” of the new policy. The Trump administration hopes to end birthright citizenship, too. Trump promised as much on the campaign trail.
The Dominican Republic started expelling Haitians en masse in 2015. By 2018 it had kicked out eighty thousand, many of whom ended up living in filthy makeshift camps along the border.
Even before the Trump administration rescinded Haitians’ immigration status, Haitian neighborhoods emptied.33 Haitian churches were abandoned. Two hundred people used to attend the Haitian Methodist Ministry service in San Diego, but by the summer of 2017, only thirty or so remained. Community workers who helped drive Haitians to doctors’ appointments arrived at their houses to find them abandoned. Later they’d get a text from Canada.
The migrants streamed north.34 Between the spring of 2017 and the spring of 2018, more than twenty thousand fled the United States to seek refuge in Canada. They didn’t get far. At the official border crossings, Canadian authorities often handed them over to the U.S. immigration officials they’d fled. If they hadn’t first applied for asylum in the United States—regardless of how patently fruitless that endeavor had become—Canada would not hear their claims. Once back in the custody of U.S. immigration authorities, the fleeing migrants were split up, imprisoned, and deported. U.S. officials sent the father of one Haitian family who’d attempted to claim asylum in Canada to the local county jail. They sent his pregnant wife and their small children to a run-down hotel used for people newly released from prison. “They didn’t have transportation, they don’t have money, and they are paying to stay at this hotel, not knowing what to do,” a local woman who tried to help the distraught family noted. The marooned kids had only two pairs of thin socks each to make do in chilly upstate New York.
To avoid their fate, other fearful asylum seekers set off into the snow-covered woods that blanketed many of the unguarded portions of the border. One man who’d been turned away at the official border crossing into Canada spent nine hours wandering in the woods between the United States and Canada, during which the temperature plunged to negative 15 degrees. Police found him, barely conscious, the next morning. He had fallen through a thin layer of ice into a freezing-cold river. His feet were swollen and covered in blisters. They took him to the hospital, where they handcuffed him to the bed, and then, when he recovered, whisked him off to a detention center. He still dreams about the forest, he says. In the dream, not unlike in his waking life, “I’m screaming and no one is around for my rescue,”35 he said.
Jean-Pierre and his family abandoned their attempt to secure asylum in the United States and boarded a bus to Plattsburgh, New York. From there, they caught a cab to Roxham Road, a sleepy residential lane in Champlain, New York. You wouldn’t know it from looking at it, but the Canadian border bisects this road. About a mile down, past the clumps of spotted horses listlessly eating hay and a couple of run-down farms, the road ends, as if at a dead end. Beyond lie a few boulders, a five-foot-wide ditch, and a small grassy clearing, which is all that lies between the United States and Canada. The country road it interrupts doesn’t make a big deal about it. After the grassy clearing, it picks back up, the same as before, continuing nonchalantly through several more miles of farmland.
During the summer of 2017, taxicabs arrived in a steady stream, disgorging carloads of asylum seekers and their hastily packed luggage, turning the quiet country road into something more like a scene outside JFK Airport. Crossing the international border here is technically illegal. But unlike at official entry points, Canadian officals would adjudicate the claims of those who entered the country from Roxham Road. As the number of border crossers grew, Canadian border officials set up white tents in the grassy clearing to process the newcomers. Once they stepped over the border, they’d be beholden to the bureaucracy that would have to hear their claims, which could take weeks or months. They wouldn’t be able to backtrack, not even the few steps back to the road. One family, in their haste to escape the United States, had left their luggage a few steps away, beside the taxicab that had brought them to Roxham Road. They had to leave it behind, entering their new life with nothing except the clothes on their backs.36
Jean-Pierre and his family were among them.37 They spent twenty-four hours getting processed in a tent on Roxham Road, then Canadian officials bused them to a makeshift shelter at an old Olympic stadium in Montreal. They stayed there for two weeks. When I met him, he’d found a single-room flat in the basement of a dilapidated apartment building on the edge of Montreal, where his family of three awaited a hearing with a judge, who would decide their fate.
A pilly brown blanket had been tacked across the single window, high up on the wall, to obscure its thin light. The family’s single bed occupied much of the dim space, leaving room for just a small table with a couple of folding chairs, from which Jean-Pierre growled answers to my questions.
His journey is still not over. The local volunteer who is helping him with his asylum case tells me later that the judge is unlikely to grant him permission to stay in Canada. Refugee status is reserved not just for those who are most deserving of refuge but for those who appreciate the country’s magnanimity as well. Jean-Pierre, after all he’s been through, will not perform the role of a grateful refugee. He is too angry and depressed.
As the myth of a sedentary past evaporates,38 a previously obscured question emerges: not why people migrate but why their movements inspire terror.
Xenophobia is not a uniform response to migration. It does not surge wherever unfamiliar populations collide, social science researchers have found. It is not more common in places in which there’s a high proportion of newcomers. Nor does it emanate from the economically distressed, who may feel most threatened by the presence of newcomers. (The people who voted for Donald Trump, for example, whose most coherent position is his unapologetic opposition to foreigners, earn wages that are on average $16,000 above the median in the states in which they live.)
One study suggests that xenophobic outbursts39 are associated with a society’s specific geopolitical history. Another proposes that it’s the nature of settlement patterns that inflames fears of foreigners, specifically the relative size of differentiated populations and their level of segregation. Yet another speculates that xenophobic eruptions derive from the diminishment of restraints on hatred of foreigners, such as corporations’ rising and falling demands for immigrant labor. When powerful actors need immigrant labor, xenophobia diminishes; when they don’t, it flourishes.
One telling study analyzed the counties and states40 that voted for Donald Trump in 2016 by a measure called the “diversity index,” that is, the probability that any two randomly chosen people differ by race or national origin. The researchers found that the antimigrant politician found his greatest support among people living in places experiencing a rapid influx of people who’d been born elsewhere. The states that Trump won were not especially diverse. The diversity indexes in those states were lower than the national average, ranking in the bottom twenty of the fifty states. But in the counties that Trump won, the low diversity index is changing rapidly, rising nearly twice as fast as the national average.
Why would relatively homogenous but newly diversifying counties be especially receptive to xenophobic rhetoric? One possible explanation is their awareness of the burden exacted by the novel influx of newcomers.41 The early days of any transition are usually the most challenging. And newcomers, especially if they are unexpected or arrive in large numbers, might overwhelm a community’s absorptive capacity, pitting the interests of migrants against those of the locals. But in most places, such effects are likely to be temporary. Most communities can and do expand to accommodate newcomers. In plenty of others, there are enough vacant houses and unfilled jobs to absorb newcomers straight away. Between 2007 and 2017, 80 percent of all counties in the United States lost working-age adults.
Another possible explanation has to do with the optics42 of particular immigrant settlement patterns. An influx of newcomers is more conspicuous in a relatively homogenous place than in a more diverse one. It’s even more noticeable if its pace is quicker than elsewhere.
Conspicuousness satisfies a fundamental condition for antimigrant sentiment. For xenophobia to flourish, natives must be distinguishable from migrants. In social psychology experiments, subjects made aware of a border between insiders and outsiders will rapidly bond with those on their own side and reject those outside it. They’ll judge insiders to be fairer than outsiders. They’ll describe insiders as having broadly positive traits, and outsiders as possessing broadly negative ones. They’ll notice variations between insiders but not among outsiders.
The line between outsider and insider does not have to accurately correspond with shared interests or meaningful characteristics between people on one side and those on the other. Awareness of a border triggers biases regardless. In social psychology experiments, researchers have divided subjects into groups based on arbitrary grounds such as a coin toss, or the color of the T-shirts they are wearing, or their preferred ice cream flavor. It makes no difference. Subjects will exhibit bias toward those on their side and discriminate against those on the other side.
Unless policies and circumstances conspire to make it otherwise, the border between natives and migrants can be nebulous.43 Newcomers arrive and quietly melt into local populations, even as social panics about them rise and fall. Nativeness and migrantness are not permanent states of being: they pass over us like bands of light and shadow. All of us who live outside sub-Saharan Africa—and many of those who live there as well—share a migratory history on some timescale or another. In the United States, nearly a third of us are less than one generation removed from an act of international migration. Every year 14 percent of us move from one part of the country to another, crossing borders into states with different laws, different customs, and different dialects, some of them as distant from each other as New York City and Casablanca or Cartagena.
Only occasionally does the fact of our continuous movement rise into public consciousness, which may be why xenophobia erupts only sporadically. In the counties that Trump won, a peculiar settlement pattern happened to turn migrants into the visual equivalent of the bright purple flowers atop tall stands of purple loosestrife. It raised people’s awareness of migrants in distinction to natives, elevating the line between insider and outsider. The spectacle of border walls and the brutality of deprivation policies against migrants have the same effect. The images of migrant children locked up in cages, or migrants camping in the mud along the border or crammed inside abandoned Olympic stadiums, paint a wide, bright line, marking the difference between the natives and the foreigners for all to see. Without such spectacles elevating the distinction between migrants and residents, migration happens underneath our notice, like the circulation of blood through our veins. The distinction between natives and migrants that might alert us to it fades to the point of invisibility.
If the xenophobic policies and practices barring the next great migration arise from demographic vagaries and spectacles that happen to inflame our biases against outsiders, yet more questions arise. Why are we so alert to group distinctions and so ready to shun outsiders?
According to one theory, this tendency may have evolved as an immune response.44 Outsiders may not steal our jobs or commit more crimes or even be readily distinguishable from us, but in the era before modern medicine, they did pose a potential biological risk: they carried novel pathogens.
History is littered with examples of what happens when people introduce pathogens to which they are accustomed into new populations that have never encountered them before. In the fifteenth century, Europeans started introducing the smallpox and measles viruses they’d been living with for centuries into Native American populations. Over the following decades, Native American populations nearly collapsed. Ancient Rome’s malaria posed such a mortal threat to outsiders that the Romans coined a saying: “When unable to defend herself by means of the sword, Rome could defend herself by means of the fever.”
Suggestively, ethnocentrist and xenophobic tendencies do seem to correlate45 with the presence of pathogens in our environment and our awareness of them. In places where pathogens abound, such as in the tropics, people have formed more ethnic groups than they have in cool and temperate places, where the pathogen load is lighter. People who feel more vulnerable to infectious diseases express more xenophobic and ethnocentrist attitudes than people who feel less so. In experimental studies, simply heightening subjects’ awareness of pathogens, by providing information about new strains of influenza, activates the xenophobic impulse. After being so informed, subjects express more xenophobic and ethnocentric sentiments.
But if xenophobia evolved as a kind of immune defense, it’s a crude one. Fever is an ancient,46 primitive, and nonspecific immune defense that we share with almost every other vertebrate and even some invertebrates. In some cases it helps reduce the replication of microbial intruders. The body detects the presence of a microbial outsider, and blood rushes to its core, kicking the immune system into action and creating a hostile, scorching hot atmosphere for the intruder. But at the same time the heat stress destroys the body’s own tissues. Sometimes, what began as an immune defense turns into a self-destructive reaction, leading to seizures, delirium, and collapse. Xenophobic reactions are similarly primitive, nonspecific, and potentially self-destructive.
One way people express their xenophobic fears about other groups is by exaggerating their numbers and appetites. A 2018 study found that people in nineteen of twenty-eight countries in the European Union overestimated the proportion of immigrants in their countries47 by a factor of two or more. People in Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania, which have disproportionately fewer immigrants than other European countries, overestimated the number of immigrants in their countries by a factor of more than eight. In another study, pollsters asked people how much government support immigrants receive compared to native residents. Almost 25 percent of people in France, nearly 20 percent of those in Sweden, and 14 percent of people in the United States estimated that immigrants receive twice as much government support as natives—which isn’t true in any of those countries.
As with an out-of-control fever, these inflamed perceptions are unrelated to the nature of the supposed threat. They continue regardless of facts.48 Providing accurate information about the size of immigrant populations to those who overestimate them, a 2019 paper reported, “does little to affect attitudes toward immigration.” The number of immigrants who arrive and local communities’ capacity to absorb them play little role in the scale of people’s negative response to immigrants, once it is triggered. “Just making people think about immigrants,” one pollster commented, “generates a strongly negative reaction in terms of redistribution.”
If the fever of xenophobia evolved as a kind of immune defense, perhaps it once helped protect us. It is no longer useful for that purpose. Modern medicine provides us with the insights and technology we need to protect ourselves from pathogens, whether we shun strangers or not. Still, the vestigial impulse to suspect outsiders lingers, lodged deep in our psyches. Politicians can harness its heat simply by pointing to a border between “us” and “them.”