Food for Thought: Hector Tobar on “Avoiding the Trap of Immigration Porn”
Border pictures
Hector Tobar writes in the New York Times about “immigration porn,” which he says has long been a staple of mainstream journalism’s reporting on immigration. Here is the concept in a nutshell:
“See if you can ride along with some agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement rounding up Latino immigrants, the photo editor tells the photographer. Go capture a group of brown-skinned innocents being led away in cuffs. And if one of the ICE agents is also Latino, the editor adds, so much the better.
In the Trump era, such conversations are unfolding again and again in newsrooms across the United States. Our best “shooters” are sent out on a hunt for images of undocumented immigrants at perhaps the most vulnerable and degrading moment in their lives.
These images have been a staple of American journalism for as long as I’ve been in the business. Very often, they seem a kind of immigration porn.”
Tobar laments that the press is not offering the full picture of the undocumented immigrant: “[T]he humiliated and hunted people you see in coverage of the deported are not the whole person. Tenacity and stubbornness are the defining qualities of undocumented America. This is precisely what is absent in the media’s depiction of the more than 11 million people who live there.”
Hat tip to Carrie Rosenbaum.
KJ