Aug 27, 2018
Do Europeans see themselves providing a haven from war or are they hoping the refugee problem will some day go away?
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Do Europeans see themselves providing a haven from war or are they hoping the refugee problem will some day go away?
Via @nytimes
The trail had been cold for years. I first walked it in 2009 when I made my initial fieldwork trip to Arizona. During that visit, the area was a debris field of Red Bull cans, potato chip bags, dusty blue jeans, and various other items that people fleeing Border Patrol had either intentionally discarded or accidentally lost along the way. It was an active landscape then. The fresh footprints of agents and the people they were chasing were clearly visible in the dirt and sand. A mosaic of heavy and imposing military-style boot prints mixed with the light impressions left by sneakers. Sometimes you would see fragments of shirts caught in the trees or freshly broken branches signaling where someone had recently tried to bushwhack. Walking through that part of the desert, you knew you were in the middle of something but couldn’t quite see it. Movement was happening, but it was in your blind spot.
One of the first migrant sites that I visited on that trail, later designated BK-3, felt fresh and overwhelming. There were mountains of backpacks, arroyos swollen with tangled clothes. The items left behind were shiny and new. Food containers were still sealed or their contents only half eaten. Animals and insects had not had time to finish off the perishables. Bottles still had water in them. It was like entering into some strange village where the sound of the anthropologist’s footsteps had sent everyone running mid-meal. During the initial summer we worked on that trail, I was constantly worried that we would accidentally walk up on some unsuspecting group of people resting in the shadows. Although we didn’t see anyone out there that year, it was clear we weren’t alone.
The disturbing reality is that right now corpses lie rotting on the desert floor and there aren’t enough witnesses