Migrant | No Mercy / No Malice
Early on a Monday morning, 51 people assemble at a safe house in northern Mexico. A semi truck pulls up, and the man they’ve paid to shepherd them to America directs them into the trailer. Hours later, they are found dead of exposure, still in that trailer, on the outskirts of San Antonio.
Six hundred and fifty migrants died crossing into the U.S. in 2021. This happens all over the world. Fifty-eight Chinese immigrants were found dead in a trailer in Dover, England, in 2020, and 39 Vietnamese perished in a truck in Essex the year before. Last month, 76 Libyans hoping to get to Italy died when their boat sank. Six hundred other migrants have perished this year attempting to cross the Mediterranean.
They keep coming. Fleeing war and criminal violence, abandoning farms devastated by climate change, seeking more tolerant societies … looking for a better home. Thousands of migrants cross the U.S.-Mexico border every day. Last year 150,000 unaccompanied children made the journey. Think about that. Kids crossing borders into different countries, alone. In my house, it felt bold to let our kids walk into town with their friends. In Europe, 5 million Ukrainians have left their homeland since the Russian invasion, two-thirds of whom are not expected to return.
Migration is at the core of the human experience. Our ancestors were nomads. Their wandering led them out of the Rift Valley, across the Sinai, and eventually … everywhere. Eight thousand years after the first people reached Tierra del Fuego, another cohort “discovered” a New World populated by their distant cousins, and 2.5 million of them migrated across the Atlantic — with devastating consequences to those who’d gotten there first. In the middle of the 19th century, the discovery of gold in a mountain stream inspired 300,000 people — many of them prosperous at home, doctors and lawyers, landowners — to move to California in less than a decade.
