The Dehumanization of Immigrants
The author reveals the ugly side of anti-immigration reportage (or propaganda, depending upon one’s perspective) through powerful use of metaphor which highlights the effective methodology of dehumanization in such accounts:
“In varying degrees, some papers and webpages announce the arrival of undocumented children like a biblical plague. Beware the locusts!”
The "Joy" of Immigration
It is an inescapable fact that many people who are most opposed to immigration are so disposed because they think it is so easy for those attempting it. The reality is exactly the opposite, as the author reveals through a potent metaphorical reading of the cold hard facts:
“The area surrounding the border between Mexico and the United States is a big common grave, and the migrants who die in this portion of our continent become no more than `bones in the desert.’”
Child Detention Centers
In 2018, the world was made privy to conditions previously known only to those interested enough to do the checking. Amazing enough, the metaphorical description might be almost as horrific as the news footage of kids kept in cages that most Americans saw for the first time when the scandal became front page news:
"The icebox derives its name from the fact that the children in it are under ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) custody. The name also points out the fact that the detention centers along the border are a kind of enormous refrigerator for people, constantly blasted with gelid air as if to ensure that the foreign meat doesn’t go bad too quickly—naturally, it must be harboring all sorts of deadly germs."
The Beast
The Beast (in Spanish La Bestia) is the metaphorical nickname given to the freight trains crisscrossing Mexico on top of which perhaps as many as 500,000 immigrants making their way up from Central American hop a ride.
"Some compare La Bestia to a demon, others to a kind of vacuum that sucks distracted riders down into its metal entrails."
Why Immigrate?
The question is asked and then answered by the author in one of the more elliptical uses of metaphorical imagery. The brutality of the process of leaving one’s home to come to America is eventually stored away in the memory, but not by itself:
“…once you stay here long enough, you begin to remember the place where you originally came from the way a backyard might look from a high window in the deep of winter: a skeleton of the world, a tract of abandonment, objects dead and obsolete.”
