For most of my childhood, the policies and practices that threatened global peace and security had little to do with people moving across borders. They revolved almost entirely around the decades-long power struggle between Washington, D.C., and the Kremlin in Moscow.
Around the time I graduated from college, the entire edifice of the Cold War abruptly dissolved into nothingness. In late 1989 Soviet-aligned officials1 in East Germany announced that the Berlin Wall—an eighty-seven-mile-long wall encircling West Berlin and one of the most potent symbols of the Cold War—would be torn down. We watched on television, the night the news came out, as thousands of ecstatic young people stormed the wall en masse for an impromptu, all-night dance party atop it. A few months later there was dancing in the streets again when the president of South Africa released the revolutionary leader Nelson Mandela from a twenty-seven-year imprisonment, ushering in the end of the harsh system of racial segregation known as apartheid.
New graduates like me felt a deep sense of relief. The world seemed immeasurably safer without two superpowers loudly threatening nuclear holocaust. But soon a new global bogeyman2 emerged, one even more chaotic and disruptive than nuclear missiles.
The national security expert Robert D. Kaplan described it in a 1994 Atlantic magazine article called “The Coming Anarchy.”
The magnetic poles of the United States and the Soviet Union, he explained, had held a number of destabilizing forces in suspension. Nobody had noticed, because we’d been so preoccupied with the stockpiles of missiles and the creepy binational taunting. Now, with those two poles deactivated, suppressed elements would be unleashed. Instead of improving the prospects for peace and security, the end of the Cold War would do just the opposite.
The problem: people would start to move.
As deserts spread and forests were felled, Kaplan wrote, masses of desperate, impoverished people would be forced to migrate into overburdened cities. With no great power regimes to prop up weak states, the tumult caused by migrants would result in social breakdown and “criminal anarchy.” There’d be bloody conflicts. Deadly diseases would rage. Already, across West Africa, he said, young men moved in “hordes,” like “loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid” on the verge of ignition. Others would soon follow. A new era of migration, he wrote, would create “the core foreign-policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate.”
The idea of migrants as a national security threat,3 rushing over the land like a tsunami, captured the imagination. Kaplan’s article “became required reading among senior staff in the Clinton administration,” writes the geographer Robert McLeman.
National security and foreign policy experts started issuing their own reports and white papers on the threat posed by newly liberated climate-driven migrants. There’d likely be 50 million on the move by 2020, experts at the United Nations University projected. Two hundred million by 2050, the environmental security analyst Norman Myers announced. One billion!4 the NGO Christian Aid projected. People moving around, in their telling, was an exceptional and future threat, “one of the foremost human crises5 of our times,” as Myers put it.
In fact, as any migration expert could have shown, migration was just the opposite: an unexceptional ongoing reality. And while environmental changes shaped its dynamics, they didn’t do so in a predictably simple way.
Migration experts had teased apart complex and counterintuitive relationships between movement and climate. They’d found that dissipating water supplies6 could sometimes lead not to conflict but to cross-border cooperation, which in turn could lead to less migration. During the second half of the twentieth century, for example, water scarcity had led to nearly three hundred international water agreements to cooperatively manage water sources, including between perennial enemies India and Pakistan, their agreement surviving three wars.
They’d found that the converse of the presumption that deforestation displaced people did not hold true. In the Dominican Republic, for example, restoration of forests had triggered a migrant flow, as the regreened landscape expanded the tourism industry and attracted flocks of new workers. They’d also found that sea-level rise would not automatically displace people who lived along the coast at any easy-to-calculate scale or pace. Quickly rising and receding floods might lead only to brief, short-distance migrations. Permanent and long-distance migrations would more likely follow from gradual climatic changes.
The national security experts sounding alarms about a future army of migrants took little of this nuance into consideration. They presumed that migration proceeded in response to climate stresses as a “simple stimulus-response process,”7 as McLeman put it, “where one unit of climate change … triggers a corresponding additional unit of migration.” They presumed that climate-driven migration would occur en masse, and with disruptive and uncontrollable effects. Water scarcity would arise, followed by conflict, which would be followed by migration. By multiplying the number of people living in those places where environmental disruptions were predicted to occur, they calculated the size of the chaotic migrations to come. The number of people who’d become migrants due to deforestation equaled the number of people who lived in places where forests were cut down. The number of people who’d migrate due to sea-level rise8 equaled the number of people who lived in areas predicted to be inundated by the waves. The political context, personal choices, geographic quirks, and technological possibilities that would determine such outcomes played little role.
The idea of migration as a national security threat seeped into the public’s attention and incorporated itself into the world’s foremost international security organizations. In 2009 the television journalist Bob Woodruff hosted a two-hour prime-time special on ABC. The special, Earth 2100, depicted a future world in which climate change triggers a deadly plague, which kills half the human population, and then a wave of border crossers from Mexico, which leads to the collapse of civilization. Nearly 4 million viewers tuned in9 to watch.
Meanwhile, in the cavernous halls of the UN Security Council,10 where officials debated the use of armed forces to secure the international order from threats such as drug trafficking, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction, attention turned instead to the dangers posed by climate-driven migrants. By 2011 officials at the council had held two open debates on the subject.
At the time, the specter of mass migration had been an abstraction, like the hordes of zombies featured on hit television programs. Then political and geographical circumstances conspired to create a spectacle, one in which migrants materialized in conspicuous masses, just as Kaplan and the others had warned, on Europe’s southern shores.
One day in early March 2011,11 a few bored teenagers in Daraa, a dusty Syrian town decimated by years of drought and neglect, found a can of red paint.
The boys could have used the red paint to scrawl their names somewhere, or those of their sweethearts. But images of revolution dominated their television screens. Uprisings and protests against oppressive, autocratic leaders had erupted across the region. In just a handful of weeks, mass demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt had overthrown a government and forced a dictator to resign.
Little of the revolutionary fervor of what would come to be called the Arab Spring had reached sleepy Daraa or anywhere else in Syria yet. A Facebook-organized “Day of Rage” against the Syrian leader Dr. Bashar al-Assad had fizzled, failing to draw much of a crowd. Inspired by what I imagine must have been a combination of frustration, boredom, and cheek, the teenagers carried the can of red paint to the local school and brushed its contents into a three-word warning dripping from the wall: “Your turn, doctor.”
It may have seemed harmless enough at the time.
Unexpectedly, the enraged Assad regime detained and tortured the teens. As the news seeped out, demonstrations erupted across the country, drawing yet more brutality from Assad. Soon Syria descended into a bloody civil war. In time hundreds of thousands would perish.
The boys’ small act of resistance ended up sparking one of the most brutal civil wars in recent history.
The war in Syria unleashed a mass exodus.12 People streamed out of the country in all directions, like water from a sieve. Hundreds of thousands sought refuge in Iraq and Jordan. Over a million ended up in nearby Lebanon. Nearly 2 million headed toward Turkey, en route to Europe.
At the same time, the Arab Spring opened another valve for migration into Europe. While Libya’s autocratic leader Muammar Gaddafi had been in power, few migrants had been able to successfully migrate through the country to get to Europe. But during the Arab Spring, a U.S.-led military alliance helped topple and murder that leader, and with him, the security infrastructure that had once prevented migrants from passing through the country. As migrants from all over sub-Saharan Africa started to converge in Libya to make the passage to Europe, a lucrative smuggling trade sprang up to help them.
The flow of migrants from Syria into Europe,13 joined by the second flow of migrants newly able to pass through Libya, soon turned into an international spectacle, dominating headlines in Europe and North America. It wasn’t necessarily the scale of the migration that captivated. More migrants moved between different countries within Africa and Asia than into Europe. But the migrations into Europe, unlike those across jungles and mountains elsewhere, converged from various directions in a single high-profile and especially picturesque choke point: the Mediterranean Sea.
Named after the Latin for “middle,” medius, and “land,” terra, the Mediterranean Sea is squeezed in between land masses, with Europe to its north, Africa to its south, and Asia to its east. It’s a peculiarly accessible body of water, thousands of miles long but just a few miles wide at its narrowest point. Nearly twenty different countries claim a bit of its coastline. When, over the course of 2015, over a million people pushed into its waters aboard overcrowded, rickety vessels—more than 850,000 from the coast of Turkey and another 180,000 from the coast of Libya14—the bedraggled armada couldn’t help but capture attention.
Photographers shot images of their wide-bellied wooden boats and flimsy rafts, some caught in the midst of capsizing, their passengers clinging helplessly to gunwales or splashing in the sparkling sea. They captured pictures of the lifeless bodies of the drowned, washed up on the beaches of Greek islands. Filmmakers, artists, and celebrities of all ilk15 descended on the Greek islands where the migrants’ boats landed, recording video of themselves helping unload cold frightened migrants off boats and warming them up with cups of tea, including the actors Susan Sarandon and Angelina Jolie, the activist artist Ai Weiwei, and Pope Francis, the head of the Catholic Church. Thousands of new migrants arrived every day, fanning out into the rest of Europe any way they could, on foot, by bus, and by train.
Press reports immediately dubbed16 the arrival of the newcomers a “migrant crisis,” describing a “migrant invasion” in which migrants “stormed” ports and ferries, taking whole cities “hostage.” According to one analysis of press coverage in Europe at the time, nearly two-thirds of articles “strongly emphasized” the various negative consequences the migrants would effect—even in the early days when no such impacts had actually yet occurred—and the same proportion could think of no positive consequences of their arrival, neither real nor projected. Reporters described the newcomers themselves in only the most cursory way, rarely referring to them as full individuals with names, ages, genders, and professions. Most mentioned only one characteristic: their foreign nationality.
The possibility that Europe, with its total population of over 500 million, could absorb another million people went mostly unexplored. In fact, countries such as Greece and Hungary had plenty17 of accommodations and jobs to offer newcomers. In Athens, three hundred thousand residential properties stood vacant. In Hungary, a critical labor shortage meant employers couldn’t find sufficient workers to fill vacant posts.
But for many observers, the newly conspicuous spectacle of mass migration appeared ominous. They saw an army of robotic migrants, full of disruptive and destructive potential.
By 2015 over a million people from Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere had found their way into Europe, primarily Germany but also Sweden and elsewhere.18 In their wake, a wave of politicians promising harsh new measures against migrants swept into power across Europe and the United States. U.S. voters elected Donald Trump, an unlikely populist who derided people from Mexico as rapists and criminals and led crowds in chants to “build the wall” that would stymie their movements. The people of Britain voted to leave the European Union and its open borders altogether. Political parties that vowed to fight the invasion of foreigners, refuse entry to even a single refugee, and intern refugees in camps won unprecedented numbers of seats in European parliaments, capturing the majority of seats in Poland, their first parliamentary seats in Germany, and joining the governing coalition in Austria. A politician who refused to admit any refugees whatsoever became prime minister in the Czech Republic. Another, whose party proposed expelling all migrants, became prime minister of Italy.
Government agencies once dedicated to welcoming19 immigrants repurposed themselves as defenders against them. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which had described its purpose as fulfilling “America’s promise as a nation of immigrants,” revised its mission statement in early 2018, excising those words. Its new commitment would be toward “securing the homeland.” The message from inside the newly fortified borders of Europe was equally clear. The European Union head Donald Tusk, whose organization had been founded on the principle of open borders, spoke plainly. “Wherever you are from,” he said, “do not come to Europe.”
As antimigrant politicians climbed into power, reinforcing the urgency and necessity of the antimigrant policies they touted became a political necessity. Like any regime, they and their supporters would have to continuously justify their political stances. Emphasizing the mayhem caused by migrants would be key to that project.
The effects that experts predicted—crime waves, epidemics, and economic catastrophe—were not subtle. Given the scale of the influx of newcomers, showcasing evidence of the chaos they caused should have been easy.
During the first days of January 2016, scores of women showed up at police stations20 in cities across Germany to file complaints about what had happened on New Year’s Eve. As they’d been making their way to trains and homes after the New Year celebrations, they said, they’d been surrounded, groped, robbed, and sexually assaulted. The attackers, from what the women could tell from their clothes and accents, had been newly arrived migrants from Arab and North African countries.
Media outlets featured stories suggesting21 the newcomers had a special appetite for raping local women. In Germany, a magazine cover story featured an image of a white female body covered in muddy handprints. “Women complain of sex attacks by migrants,” the caption read. “Are we tolerant or are we blind?” Another ran an interview with a psychologist about the “mentality” of Arab men, illustrated with an image of a black hand reaching between a pair of white legs. In the Netherlands, a newspaper printed a reproduction of a painting called The Slave Market, in which Arab men disrobed white women before selling them as sex slaves. In Poland, a magazine ran a cover story on “The Islamic Rape of Europe,” featuring an image of black and brown hands tearing a European-flag-printed dress off of a blond woman’s body.
That spring the German Interior Ministry released a report22 showing that the country had experienced 402,000 excess crimes since admitting its latest wave of migrants, a breathtaking statistic featured prominently in newspaper reports around the world. In one particularly inflammatory episode, a mob of migrants had been captured on video chanting and celebrating after setting one of Germany’s oldest churches on fire.
News of the migrant-driven crime wave23 in Germany swept across the Atlantic. In the United States, popular right-wing news outlets such as Breitbart ran stories on the “New Year Rape Horror” committed by “rape-fugees.” “Crime in Germany is way up,” Trump tweeted to his millions of followers. “Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!”
News from Sweden a few months later24 appeared to suggest that the criminal anarchy taking hold in Germany had ignited there, too. Sweden had accepted more migrants per capita than any other country in Europe. A documentary filmmaker from Los Angeles named Ami Horowitz visited Sweden to report on the situation.25 He found that reports of rape in the country had skyrocketed. Sweden, once known for stylish furniture and saunas, “is now the rape capital of Europe,” he reported.
Entire neighborhoods had been subsumed by the new migrants. A leafy suburb of Stockholm called Rinkeby had become a “completely Islamic area,” Horowitz said. Local police officers told him that Rinkeby, like many of Sweden’s new migrant-dominated neighborhoods, had become so lawless that they feared to enter. They called it a “no-go” zone.26 Gunshots rang out daily. Armed twelve-year-olds roamed the streets. A band of young migrants surrounded and attacked a 60 Minutes film crew from Australia that had attempted to film in Rinkeby. Horowitz had seen the harrowing footage they’d shot himself.
Horowitz’s documentary on the migrant crisis in Sweden,27 Stockholm Syndrome, aired on Fox News’s website in the fall of 2016. A few months later the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson interviewed Horowitz on his prime-time current affairs show, watched by nearly 3 million viewers. Sweden, Horowitz explained, was under assault “because of the open door policy to Islamic immigration.” The next day newly elected president Donald Trump mentioned Horowitz’s findings to nine thousand fans at a rally in Melbourne, Florida. “Look at what’s happening last night in Sweden,” he called out to the raucous crowd. “Sweden, who would believe this?”
Within days, right-wing media outlets broadcast28ed news about the crime wave in Sweden across the nation. Commentators such as the right-wing journalist Bill O’Reilly, whose show reached over 2 million viewers every night, featured interviews with experts such as a Swedish defense and national security adviser who confirmed Horowitz’s alarming findings.
While government reports and flashy news stories depicting migrants as criminal piled up, an equal volume of critiques poking holes in their underlying logic accumulated alongside, like a ghostly doppelgänger.
In the summer of 2017, an NPR reporter examined the reports of rising crime in Germany. The attacks on New Year’s Eve had transpired, he found, but may not have been exceptional. Sexual violence in Germany, as elsewhere, constituted an ongoing crisis, with over seven thousand rapes and sexual assaults reported every year, affecting more than a third of women in the country. Many more assaults, experts said, went unreported. And the country’s annual New Year’s Eve celebrations provided ample cover for all manner of criminality, as one BBC correspondent explained, turning the streets of German cities into a cross between a wild drunken party and a riot. “The drunkenness on the streets is of a level I don’t think you’d really see in the States,” he told an NPR reporter. The difference in 2015 may have been that the perpetrators weren’t the familiar29 sexual predators long known to be roaming the country.
There hadn’t been any concomitant crime wave. The 402,000 “excess” crimes consisted entirely of the “crime” of crossing the border without prior permission, a transgression that by definition could have been committed only by newly arrived migrants, as a closer reading of German government reports stated. Extracting those violations from the data revealed that crime rates in Germany had remained pretty much the same the year after thousands of migrants had arrived as the year before. By 2018 crime in Germany reached its lowest rate30 in thirty years.
That same NPR reporter found no evidence that the newly arrived migrants intended to destroy German institutions either. Migrants hadn’t set any churches afire. The Christian church that had supposedly been burned down by gleeful Syrian migrants had not been purposely set on fire, as the inflammatory video captured of the conflagration suggested. What had happened was considerably more mundane, as law enforcement officials and local newspaper reporters clarified. Syrian refugees had been celebrating a cease-fire in Syria. During the celebration, one of their fireworks had briefly ignited some netting on the scaffolding of the church. The video clip of the flames31 had been taken out of its context.
There hadn’t been any crime wave in Sweden.32 When journalists followed up on Horowitz’s claims, they found no evidence for any of them. The Swedish expert interviewed on Fox News, who’d been presented as a “national security adviser” in the country, had in fact “not lived in Sweden for a very long time,” a professor at Swedish Defence University told the Washington Post. “And no-one within the Swedish security community … seems to know him.”
Stockholm was no “rape capital.”33 According to the Swedish crime survey, 0.06 percent of the population reported having been raped in 2015. That compared favorably to England and Wales, for example, where 0.17 percent of the population did, reporters from Vice found. The so-called “no-go” zones didn’t exist. Two of the police officers34 interviewed by Horowitz in his documentary said their words had been taken out of context. “He has edited the answers,” one told a reporter from Dagens Nyheter, one of Sweden’s largest daily newspapers. “We were answering completely different questions in the interview.”
Important context had been left out35 of Horowitz’s description of the migrant attack on the Australian film crew as well. There had been a scuffle between young migrants in Rinkeby and the film crew, local police officials told a reporter from Sweden’s public radio service, but the crew had not been the neutral observers that Horowitz’s presentation implied. They’d been working with a website called Avpixlat, which international and local media described as a racist, anti-immigrant hate site. There’d been no damages or injuries, and the police ended up dropping their investigation into the brouhaha.
In meadows and forests, one can sometimes find an unusual species of mushroom called Calvatia gigantea. Calvatia don’t have the typical umbrella-shaped form of other mushrooms, with stalks topped by drooping spore-lined caps. Instead, they grow into massive white spheres, as large as soccer balls. Their spores build up invisibly inside them. At maturity, so-called “puffball” mushrooms like Calvatia become so intensely packed with spores that any minor impact—even a drop of rain—can puncture their exterior. If you poke one with a stick, or give it a little kick, a smoky cloud of spores will explode from the interior, leaving behind nothing but an empty, crinkled shell.
The narratives used to justify antimigrant policies turned out to be similarly bloated and hollow. With even the lightest scratch to their surfaces, they dematerialized into a cloud of smoke.
Although the number of unauthorized immigrants36 entering and living in the United States had been falling since 2007, government reports and antimigrant politicians portrayed the criminality of migrants in the United States and along its borders as similarly emboldened, as if strengthened by some invisible current from across the Atlantic. Along the U.S.-Mexico border, government reports under President Donald Trump showed that attacks on Border Patrol agents spiked, increasing by 20 percent in 2016, then by over 70 percent in 2017. The men and women who guarded the border suffered the highest rate of assaults of any group of federal law officers, the chief of the U.S. Border Patrol told lawmakers in testimony to Congress. And it was getting worse. “Year-to-date we’re seeing an increase in assaults up to 200 percent from the previous year to date,” he said.
In the fall of 2017, the bloodied bodies of two Border Patrol agents37 were discovered at the bottom of an eight-foot concrete culvert along the border in West Texas. “There’s a high likelihood this was an assault on the agents,” a Border Patrol officer told reporters. That assault, a Fox News television host added, had been “most gruesome.” The poor officers had been “brutally beaten,” President Trump informed his Twitter followers. In fact, figuring out what had happened had required some sleuthing: one of the agents died soon after being rushed to the hospital, and the other suffered a brain injury that resulted in confusion and memory loss, so neither officer could tell anyone what had happened to them. But since the survivor had suffered a blunt force trauma to the head, and he and his partner had been found surrounded by rocks, Border Patrol agents surmised that there must have been some kind of ambush. A gang of migrants had surrounded the agents and pounded their heads in with the telltale rocks. Such a scenario neatly explained the available evidence, Border Patrol officials said.
The Texas governor, presuming the scenario to be true, offered a reward to anyone who could help authorities catch and punish the culprits who had committed such a barbarous attack. The assault epitomized the threat the nation faced from an “unsecure border” that allowed migrants with criminal intents to pour in from the south, the Texas senator Ted Cruz explained.
New analyses purported to reveal the security threat38 that migrants posed even when they resided well inside the nation’s borders. The Department of Homeland Security issued a report in early 2018 showing that three-quarters of defendants convicted on international terrorism charges between 2011 and 2016 had been born outside the United States. The report, the attorney general claimed in a statement announcing it, “reveals an indisputable sobering reality—our immigration system has undermined our national security and public safety.” Migrant crime had become such a crisis that the president created a special government office entirely dedicated to serving the victims of crimes committed by migrants.
Politicians and right-wing news media highlighted39 case after case in which migrants committed acts of brutality. In one notorious case near my own neighborhood outside Baltimore, two undocumented migrants reportedly gang-raped a fourteen-year-old girl in a high school bathroom. Rather than attributing such crimes to the ongoing epidemic of violence against women and girls, politicians argued that allowing migrants into the country was the problem. “We need to know who is within our borders and who does not belong,” one local councilman wrote to his constituents in response to the crime. “Immigration pays its toll on our people if it’s not done legally,” explained a White House spokesman, referencing the rape. “This is another example.”
As social panic about migrant-driven criminal anarchy spread, experts and officials started to conflate migrants with criminals,40 whether they’d violated criminal laws or not. Administration officials described efforts to rid the country of unwanted migrants as tantamount to fighting crime itself. The attorney general scolded a northern California mayor who had thwarted federal immigration officials’ efforts to root out undocumented migrants for allowing “wanted criminals” to roam “at large.” The special adviser to the director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said that ridding the country of criminal gangs required targeting all migrants more generally, because migrants and criminal gangs were one and the same thing. ICE officers classified migrants as gang members, whether or not any evidence suggested they were. One ICE officer brought a reporter along on a raid in which he officially marked a captured migrant as a gang member, despite having no evidence on which to base that assessment. “The purpose of classifying him as a gang member or a gang associate,” he explained, was not to accurately reflect any evidence collected against him. It was “because once he goes in front of an immigration judge, we don’t want him to get bail.”
As in Europe, the case for the migrant crime wave in the United States had been manufactured.
There was no spike in attacks against Border Patrol agents on the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2015 the Border Patrol had changed its method of counting assaults on officers. Instead of counting the number of agents assaulted, as most other experts did and as they had done in the past, officials started counting the number of agents assaulted, multiplied by the number of attackers, multiplied by the number of objects the attackers used in the assault. If a few migrants threw a couple of rocks or sticks at some Border Patrol agents, each rock and each stick thrown by each migrant counted as a separate incident.
On February 14, 2017, for example, six people threw rocks, bottles, and sticks at a group of seven Border Patrol agents. Border Patrol officials generously logged that single incident as 126 separate assaults. Their unusual new method entirely accounted for the elevated numbers of assaults on Border Patrol agents they had reported, as an investigation by the immigration reporter Debbie Nathan revealed.
Using more traditional methods of tallying assaults, the statistics showed that Border Patrol agents did not experience the highest assault rate among law enforcement officers. They experienced the lowest. The death rate among Border Patrol agents was about one-third that of the nation’s law enforcement officers who policed residents.
The Border Patrol agents who had been found bloodied at the bottom of the culvert in West Texas hadn’t been ambushed by migrants,41 FBI officials and the local sheriff told the Washington Post. After more than two months of investigation, the FBI found no evidence of any “gruesome” beating or of any attack whatsoever. The officers had not discharged their weapons. No evidence suggested that anyone had attempted to take their weapons, either. The officers had been patrolling a difficult patch of terrain on a dark moonless night, and their bodies had been found at the bottom of the eight-foot culvert. They’d fallen down. The surviving officer, before his brain injury jumbled his memory, had even said that the two had “ran into a culvert” when he first called for help.
The Department of Justice report42 finding that three out of four people convicted of international terrorism had been born outside the country was accurate, as far as it went, but it didn’t support the attorney general’s statement, while announcing the results, that immigration “undermined our national security and public safety.” That’s because international terrorism accounted for only a fraction of all terrorism attacks, which included both international and domestic charges, as the investigative reporter Trevor Aaronson pointed out. Whether foreign-born people composed the majority of people convicted on all terrorism charges was unclear: the Justice Department maintained a list only of those convicted on international terrorism charges. They had no such list of people prosecuted for domestic terrorism.
The most gruesome and widely commented43 on anecdotes about crimes committed by undocumented migrants turned out to be similarly spectral. Investigators dropped charges against the undocumented migrants who’d been accused of gang rape in a high school bathroom, when the alleged victim’s story fell apart. Neither the White House nor local politicians in Maryland, who’d held up the crime as evidence of migrants’ generally suspicious proclivities, issued any corrections to the constituents they’d misled by the thousands.
Historians of disease have never found any systematic association between infectious disease and modern migration. But the suspicion that migrants might cause epidemics persisted nonetheless, based on what seemed to be faultless logic. Vaccination programs in the countries many of the migrants had fled were either nonexistent or had broken down. In theory, that meant that newcomers could harbor pathogens that had been controlled in the countries they’d entered, sparking deadly epidemics.
Public health researchers in Europe44 started examining migrant bodies in more detail to find out. They found that tuberculosis rates in Germany spiked by 30 percent in 2015, when migrants streamed into the country. In Britain, foreign-born people composed just 13 percent of the population but more than 70 percent of the tuberculosis cases and more than 60 percent of malaria cases, public health researchers reported. In Italy, researchers discovered a strange cast of microbes lurking inside the bodies of Syrian refugees, including “unusual species of bacteria and fungi rarely circulating in Italy or in other developed countries,” including some that “could represent a potential dangerous pathogen … that could spread.” In Germany, doctors discovered refugees infected with salmonella and shigella. In Switzerland, they discovered refugees with rates of antibiotic-resistant bacteria five times higher than in the resident population.
Fears of a migrant-driven epidemic flared.45 In Bulgaria, a 2013 study of articles about migrants found that the two most commonly appearing words were threat and disease. “Send home killer bug migrants,” newspaper headlines in Britain blared. “Migrants with TB should be sent home.” In Greece, right-wing vigilantes aiming to root out sickly migrants marched into hospitals and demanded that patients and doctors provide them with their residency papers. Although no outbreaks caused by migrants had yet occurred, “there are already signs of the emergence of very dangerous diseases which haven’t been seen in Europe for a long time,” an antimigrant politician in Poland said. “Cholera on Greek islands; dysentery in Vienna; various types of parasites, protozoans, which aren’t dangerous in the organisms of these people but which could be dangerous here.” Donald Trump proclaimed that migrants would ferry contagion into the country. In his unique locution, migrants turned into pathogenic germs themselves. “Tremendous infectious disease,”46 he said, “is pouring across the border.”
But the presence of microbes in migrants’ bodies did not by itself signify that they posed any more or less of a health risk to others than anyone else. Scrutinizing any human body for microbes is likely to reveal a long laundry list of suspicious-sounding characters. Public health researchers exposed their presence in refugees’ bodies by taking intrusive rectal swabs, but they hadn’t subjected residents’ bodies to the same surveillance. “If you did that to people in UK,”47 noted one public health specialist who worked with migrants, “they would have it too.”
In fact, certain high-profile groups of migrants, such as refugees who entered the United States, were among the most rigorously health-screened48 and vaccinated residents in the country. Their bodies likely posed less risk to others than those of the resident population. And after more than a million migrants entered Europe, the continent had seen little other than a few outbreaks of minor ailments, all of which had been quickly detected and controlled.
Economists had long struggled to detect any negative economic effect migrants imposed on locals. That changed in 2015, when the Harvard economist George Borjas claimed to uncover49 evidence that migrants exacted a costly economic burden. Borjas analyzed the effects of a rapid influx of migrants on the labor market in Miami, finding that their arrival had had a “dramatic” and “substantial” effect on high school dropouts, whose wages declined by as much as 30 percent.
Borjas’s results overturned decades of analyses by other economists. They’d used the same data—from what was known as the “Mariel boatlift,” an episode during which over one hundred thousand people had boarded vessels at the port of Mariel in Cuba and fled to Miami—but had found no effect either on wages nor on employment, compared to other cities that hadn’t experienced any migrant surge.
Borjas had ferreted out migrants’ burden on the economy by isolating their economic impact on high school dropouts. By doing so, he had “nuked”50 the Mariel example as a case study of the strangely negligible economic impact of migrants, the conservative commentator Ann Coulter proclaimed to her six hundred thousand Facebook followers.
Trump’s attorney general Jeff Sessions considered Borjas “the world’s perhaps most effective51 and knowledgeable scholar” on migrants’ impact on the economy. His conclusions that migrants depressed wages “deeply influenced” Sessions, the New York Times reported. Citing his study, the White House adviser Stephen Miller argued that the United States should slash the number of migrants allowed into the country by half.
New government analyses detailed other economic damages supposedly wreaked by migrants. The Department of Health and Human Services reported in 2017 that refugees required more costly social services per capita than the typical U.S. resident did. Between 2011 and 2013 they had cost the U.S. economy over $55 billion, the National Academy of Sciences found. “Refugees with few skills coming from war-torn countries,” a White House spokesman explained, “take more government benefits … and are not a net benefit to the U.S. economy.”
“Immigrants,” the president proclaimed in his 2017 address to Congress, cost the United States “billions.”52
In fact, Borjas had left out a potentially confounding factor.53 During the period in Miami he’d studied, the Census Bureau had changed how it counted high school dropouts, in a way that led to many more being counted in Miami than in other cities that Borjas had used for comparison, the migration expert Michael Clemens pointed out. Borjas had attributed the decrease in high school dropouts’ wages to migrants, but the Census Bureau’s changed methodology could have accounted for the apparent decline entirely. And the economic benefits contributed54 by refugees more than offset the costs they incurred in government benefits. Over the past decade, refugees in the United States had brought in $63 billion more than they’d cost, the New York Times and other news outlets reported. The National Academy of Sciences report had found that immigrants cost the U.S. economy $57.4 billion between 2011 and 2013, but that same report found that the children of those immigrants added a net benefit to the economy of $30.5 billion, and their grandchildren added a whopping $223.8 billion.
“Many people are being killed!” a local immigration expert informed a small crowd assembled in the fluorescent-lit banquet hall of the American Legion building. The expert, Jonathan Hanen, a paunchy man with a receding hairline and childlike rosy cheeks, delivered his presentation gripping the podium in both hands, his tall stooped frame lurching at a forty-five-degree angle. He’d been invited by the Republican club in my hometown to “take a muddy issue and make it clear,” as the club’s president put it in his introduction. And he did, distributing a dense, fourteen-page handout crammed with tables and charts, showing how “illegal aliens” committed a disproportionate number of crimes, plunging the nation into crisis. “One day after graduating, a 4.0 GPA student was run over by an illegal alien,” he told the crowd. “You have these stories all over the country.”
It was true that undocumented migrants were overrepresented in federal crime statistics,55 as Hanen’s handout prominently mentioned. But that didn’t support Hanen’s claim that migrants committed more crimes than residents. Federal crimes represent only a fraction of crimes committed in the country, 90 percent of which appear in state and local crime statistics. While no nationwide data tracked offenders by their immigration status, social scientists had found that neither places with higher proportions of immigrants nor those with new influxes of immigrants suffered higher crime rates. Between 1990 and 2013, the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States tripled, but the rate of violent crime in the country nearly halved.
Hanen did not mention it. Like many of the immigration experts disseminating faulty data about migrants as educational fare, he was a bit of a puffball mushroom himself. He was neither an educator nor even much of an immigration expert. He had a PhD in ancient Greek philosophy and practiced what the ancients might have called “sophistry,” working as a propagandist for ideological think tanks, political campaigns, and antimigrant lobby groups.
Immigration wasn’t an especially pressing issue for most of the attendees that cold January evening. Early in his talk, Hanen had peered at the small crowd through his thick black-framed glasses. “Who here knows who Emma Lazarus was?” he asked, referring to the poet who’d written the famous words inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty welcoming the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” The attendees squirmed, furtively glancing at one another. Most of the middle-aged professionals there had arrived straight from their offices, still wearing their sensible shoes and rumpled suits. They were more interested in chatting about a new Young Republicans club at the local high school and enjoying a cold Yuengling and a slice of pizza than in revisiting milestones in U.S. history. The journeys of their fellow human beings, across sea, desert, jungle, and mountains were as distant as a Komodo dragon in that fluorescent-lit suburban hall, with its practical low-pile wall-to-wall carpeting. No one raised a hand.
Still, the gathered club members nodded through Hanen’s talk. When he proclaimed, triumphantly, that “Emma Lazarus was not elected to Congress!” to justify closing the borders, they tittered, though many presumably still did not know who she was. After the talk, they clapped politely and asked Hanen a few general questions. But even though the migrant crisis he described hadn’t especially gripped them, some would no doubt take him up on his offer to deliver his presentation to other groups they belonged to, and use the handout he’d provided to make their own three-minute statements on immigration at public meetings and to their elected officials. Even if they didn’t, they’d at least remember a few details, or some general impressions, which they’d take home to share with their kids and neighbors. They’d bubble up in casual remarks at the soccer field and around sports bars and family barbecues.
Seemingly neutral nuggets of information about the criminality and sickness of migrants infiltrated the cultural conversation56 and spread far and wide. By 2017 even residents in Homer, a town of around six thousand souls at the end of the U.S. road system in Alaska, had heard the news about the migrant crisis in Europe and prepared to gird themselves against an onslaught. “You bring in illegals, OK, by definition, they’re criminals,” one resident explained heatedly at a Homer city council meeting, in response to an ill-fated proposal to welcome any immigrants who might find their way to Homer. None ever had, and few were likely to, given the town’s remote location. “OK, they live in the underworld. They don’t have a stake in the game as we do. About the first time somebody gets raped or killed, I hope they come straight after the Homer City Council and sue!”
Scenes such as these replayed in communities across the United States and Europe. And as they did, a picture of migrants as a global threat57 lodged itself in the public mind. Its size ballooned. Americans and Europeans alike vastly overestimated the proportion of immigrants among them. Americans, in one study, overestimated the proportion of immigrants in the country by 200 percent. Half or more people in a range of European countries believed that newly arrived refugees made terror attacks more likely. Forty-five percent of Americans believed that immigrants worsened crime.
The president described a 2018 caravan58 of migrants two thousand miles from the U.S. border as an “invasion of our country,” with “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners” mixed in. He sent troops to the border to repel them. The migrants, a woman in Sparta, Illinois, said at one of the president’s rallies, were “a plot to destroy America, and to bring us to our knees … I’m not going to take it—not going to go down without a fight.” Their arrival, a radio host said, would spell “the end of America as we know it.”
The corrections and clarifications punctured the puffball, revealing the hollowness of its interior, but could not destroy it. The spores lifted into the air and were carried in the breeze to other locales, where they settled, took root, and sent out new shoots.
In early 2018 the U.S. president gathered a few lawmakers together for a private meeting in the Oval Office to discuss the country’s immigration policies. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries59 come here?” he demanded of them, in comments that leaked to the press. His attention turned to one group of migrants in particular. “Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out.” People from Haiti “all have AIDS,” he’d grumbled some months earlier.
People had fled Haiti en masse after a devastating earthquake hit the island in 2010. The U.S. government allowed about sixty thousand Haitians to stay in the country under a program known as “temporary protective status” (TPS), which granted eighteen months of legal status to people from countries that suffered natural disasters or protracted unrest. Haitian earthquake survivors arrived in the United States on airlifts still covered in the dust from the rubble from which they’d been extracted.
But the welcome did not last. A few months after the quake, U.S. officials sent Air Force cargo planes to Haiti to broadcast the message that anyone who dared try to come to the United States would be arrested and turned back. Thousands of Haitian quake survivors, shut out of the United States, migrated to Brazil and elsewhere instead.
Then the Brazilian economy tanked.60 The Haitian quake survivors who had settled there, such as Jean-Pierre and his family, were set into motion once more. By late 2015 thousands had amassed on the U.S.-Mexico border, hoping to gain admission and join the earlier wave of quake survivors settled in the United States. But this time White House officials were not in a welcoming mood.
For years U.S. immigration officials had regularly renewed Haitian immigrants’ temporary protective status every eighteen months. The crisis that had precipitated their need for refuge, after all, continued. Abruptly, in November 2017 the director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services L. Francis Cissna proclaimed that he’d found that Haiti had “made significant progress”61 in recovering from the 2010 earthquake. That meant that the country “no longer continues to meet the conditions for [TPS] designation.”
The Haitians waiting on the southern border to enter the country would be summarily deported back to Haiti. Families who’d established homes and businesses62—nearly half of people with TPS owned homes, and more than 80 percent participated in the labor market, compared to just over 60 percent for the rest of the U.S. population—would have to leave the country voluntarily or face deportation.
Emmanuel Louis, a lawyer from Port-au-Prince63 who’d arrived after the earthquake, heard the news while working as the night shift as a nusing assistant. “You laugh and you are happy and then someone says, you have to go see the office manager,” he remembered. “You are happy, you think you are going to get a raise! And they say, you know what, your work permit is about to expire.” His friends stopped going to work and kept their kids home from school. “They are afraid of everything,” he said. “Everyone says to each other, be careful, be careful!”
Community workers across the country64 started advising their frightened Haitian clients to memorize the phone numbers of people they’d need to call when immigration officials collected them for deportation. Their phones would likely be confiscated. The homes and businesses owned by people like Emmanuel Louis would be lost, too, unless they started the process of transferring titles to others now. So would their tens of thousands of U.S.-born children, who’d become wards of the state when their parents were deported. Shell-shocked parents had to start preparing to transfer custody of their children to others, community workers advised.
Jean-Pierre’s family barely escaped summary deportation.65 Although they’d been held in detention after crossing into the United States—his seven-year-old son, still having nightmares about the snakes in the Darién jungle, had even been handcuffed—they’d been allowed to leave after a week, pending a later court date to hear their claim for asylum.
Jean-Pierre had made it to Orlando when he heard that one of his friends had been deported, after being held in detention for a year. Jean-Pierre had experienced more than his share of soul-crushing trauma. He’d survived an earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands, gang violence in Haiti in which his and his relatives’ lives had been threatened, and a death-defying journey to seek refuge that had required, among other things, that he drink his own urine to survive. Not to mention that he worked at Disney World, which for a committed socialist was likely a kind of agony, too. But it was the news about the deportation of his friend that broke him. He said he felt like killing himself.
If migrants were as sickly, criminal, and economically disastrous as antimigrant politicians claimed, it would have been easy for the administration to build its argument for Haitians’ eviction.66 In fact, it struggled to concoct its case. According to emails leaked to the Associated Press, Trump administration officials had had to actively hunt for data on the number of Haitians and other immigrants with TPS who had been accused of crimes or had illicitly collected public benefits. “Find any reports of criminal activity by any individual with TPS,” one immigration official had instructed her staff. “We need more than ‘Haiti is really poor’ stories” that supported their continued need for refuge in the United States.
In claiming that Haiti had made “significant progress,” Cissna, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, had ignored the findings67 not only of agencies such as the State Department but also of his own staff. In an internal report, staffers at USCIS had found that the difficult conditions that led people to migrate from Haiti continued to persist. Food was scarce, cholera was rampant, and repeated natural disasters “severely worsened the pre-existing humanitarian situation.”
According to a State Department travel advisory,68 political violence was rampant. “Protests, including tire burning and road blockages, are frequent and often spontaneous,” the State Department warned. “Kidnapping and ransom can affect anyone,” and “Haitian authorities’ ability to respond to emergencies is limited and in some areas nonexistent.” State Department officials had judged the security situation in Haiti to be so bad that they didn’t allow embassy employees to travel there except with special permission. Even then, the State Department said, they should have plans for “quickly exiting the country if necessary.”
Darrell Skinner, a heavyset Texan wearing a stiff baseball hat and oversized tinted sunglasses, hunched in his red-vinyl-upholstered seat at Dinks Cafe, a roadside diner in Del Rio, Texas, about twenty miles from the border between the United States and Mexico.
“If we don’t do something about the border69 immediately,” Skinner declared, “this country won’t be in existence in fifty years.” The café owner, Cheryl Howard, whose blond bob was held back from her face by reading glasses perched atop her head, agreed. “We need to keep them over there,” she said conspiratorially, glancing around to make sure none of her Mexican customers could hear.
Even as the hollow core of the case against migrants lay exposed, certainty about the existential threat they posed persisted. It bubbled up from a deeper sense of violation. The idea that certain people and species belong in certain fixed places has had a long history in Western culture. Under its logic, migration is by necessity a catastrophe, because it violates the natural order.
That order had been defined hundreds of years earlier, by a sex-crazed Swedish taxonomist. Its foundational principle can be summed up simply.
We belong here.
They belong there.