Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I asked readers what they experience or observe personally that is most at odds with what they see portrayed in the media.

G. is a 77-year-old woman:

I’m not seeing the real me. I wish the entertainment media would tell the truth about people like me who are my age. I don’t wear (or own) an apron. I’m perfectly comfortable with technology. I taught my 20-year-old granddaughter how to populate a website.

Don’t let looks fool you. I am a sexual person. I love my family but value my privacy and independence. Managing that space is harder than you think. The never-ending display of face lifts and rejuvenation products is a mean-spirited denial of the real beauty of age.

G.Y. offers an analogy:

I am a southerner—from the deepest of the deep South. We southerners don’t hear our own accent, just as my New England friends don’t hear their accents. It takes an outsider to hear and point out the sonic nuances that we never notice in ourselves. And if the accent is to be portrayed—by a stage actor, for example—it requires a farcical overexaggerated caricature to portray the accent in a universally recognizable way.

This is the problem with our political discourse and how it is reported on by perfectly good and conscientious journalists. None of us are capable of hearing our own ideological accents, but they are glaringly obvious to the rest of the world. All of our assumptions are assumed and so we imagine them to be conventional wisdom. And you just can’t edit out your ideological accent when you are immersed in it any more than you could dry yourself off while swimming in a lake.

All of our [national] media outlets are located on the coast, as is the entertainment industry, as is our seat of federal governance, and so they are all immersed in one particular ideological accent. Not only do they not hear it, but they also can’t possibly hear it, nor should we expect them to. It can only be pointed out by an observant outsider and can only be illustrated or portrayed by outsiders with a sort of exaggerated vaudeville act—oversimplifying and overemphasizing small, nuanced tones and tenors.  Think, for example, the exaggerated and overheated Kabuki theater of political talk radio.

In the past, before the advent of internet and instant posting, the reporters lived in the same ideologically accented bubble, but if you wanted your story to be picked up off the wire in Topeka, or Racine, or Little Rock, or any town in Middle America, you had to get the attention of the local editor that was conversant in the local vernacular. If the local editor in Topeka did not pick up the story, it did not get read in Topeka. Now the newsrooms are populated by Ivy League–credentialed elites, just a younger version of the editors. And so again we miss the vital opportunity for writing in the vernacular of the nation rather than our own particular provincial perspective. After all, New York and Washington, D.C., are easily the two most provincial towns in America. The most obvious solution is to disperse our reporters to the hinterlands, but will any of them be willing to trade Manhattan for Racine?

Eric harkens back to pandemic coverage:

I take umbrage with the portrayal of essential workers by media organizations. As someone who has worked at grocery stores throughout the pandemic, I felt as if the media treated essential workers as a strange curiosity who do not consume media themselves. The use of the royal we in phrases like “We’ve all been at home the past few years” became so ubiquitous as to go unquestioned. Actually, many of us went out into the world on a daily basis. There were so many articles talking about the difficulties of isolation or cohabitating during the pandemic. But I could find none that addressed the struggle of an essential worker living with someone who never left the house.

Jaleelah sees a lot more hand-wringing about the unwillingness of young people to debate than she does real-world support for them to do it:

The biggest threat to debate on campus does come from administrators, but in an indirect manner: Debate clubs in Canada often receive little to no funding from their universities. Hundreds of curious students seek out my debate team, but since the university I attend started charging all clubs $100 per room booking (after 10 or so freebies), we don’t have the space for all of them to speak. Dozens of students who practice constructing and delivering arguments for weeks or months express interest in debating students from other schools. But since there’s some obscure rule against funding off-campus events, we can only send a handful of them to competitions. With so many prominent conservatives publicly lamenting the decline of debate, one might assume that sponsors are jumping to support the activity. That is sadly not the case.

Kimberly is glad that people who are obese are now portrayed in media and that fat-shaming is being challenged, but believes that almost all such portrayals are leaving out the health challenges of obesity:

I have three very good friends who are obese and they all suffer with diabetes and decreased mobility. All have had knee replacements and two have serious respiratory issues. On television, all that you see is fat and happy, with good health insinuated, whereas in reality that is often not the case.

Earl believes that “much of the media have a less-than-adult portrayal of religion in the lives of Americans.”

He writes:

The writer/reporter who admits to having been “raised Lutheran” or otherwise concluded their religious participation before finishing high school nevertheless will write or report on religion as if everyone has the same, often two-dimensional, perspective on a part of the human experience that has been around since humans were invented. When religious beliefs, dogma, and practices conflict with hot-topic issues in the secular, popular culture, the media usually make no effort to probe into the religious basis of such matters.

Media that pride themselves on accurate and in-depth reporting have knowledge of the U.S. political system and its history well beyond high-school courses. When writing and reporting on religious affairs, they need to educate themselves to a level commensurate with the topics at hand.

Leela opines on media portrayals of Asian Americans:

As a mixed-race Jewish teenage girl, I’ve never been able to find a piece of modern media that quite encapsulates my life. However, one of the biggest discrepancies between my life and the media is the current portrayal of “Asian stories.” I’m half South Asian, and nearly every time I see a movie or television show in the United States that claims to be capturing the “Asian experience,” it’s actually just about East Asians. Always Be My Maybe, Crazy Rich Asians, Fresh Off the Boat, Shang-Chi, Beef, Minari, and more films and shows that I’m encouraged to watch because they “capture what it’s like to be an Asian American” don’t have a single person who looks like me. I 100 percent believe that the stories told in these movies and television shows are important, and I don’t feel like South, Southeast, or Central Asians should have been randomly inserted into them. But just for once, I’d like to see a movie about the Asian experience that lives up to its marketing by actually including characters from more than one region of Asia.

Based on the majority of TV shows and movies that are promoted as “telling Asian stories,” you’d think Asia was only made up of China, Japan, Korea, and sometimes Vietnam. This impacts how Asian Americans like me, whose families don’t come from those countries, are treated. Even the action of casually referring to myself as Asian has led to me needing to open Google Maps to show others that India is in Asia, to “prove” why I can identify that way, and I have never felt comfortable joining organizations such as my school’s Asian Student Union because I feel as though I’m not the type of Asian that it was created for.

I also feel as though the media’s limited idea of who gets to be Asian American has impacted their reporting on hate crimes. When South Asians and Middle Eastern people (many of whom are also Asian) are targeted as “terrorists,” it should also be an issue that the Asian American community and their allies rally together and raise awareness about, just like we showed up to protest the attacks on East and Southeast Asians during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I can’t explain how amazing it was to watch Never Have I Ever and see it front and center on Netflix’s recommended shows during AAPI heritage month. Seeing characters who look like me and my family on a show that was included in a list of media about the “Asian experience,” a marketing tagline which used to only reaffirm my sense of not belonging in the Asian community, makes me smile every time I rewatch it. I hope that in the future, movies and television shows will start to get made that showcase the full range of diverse stories and experiences within the Asian diaspora.

Matthew opines on homeownership:

This will come as a very heterodox viewpoint to the narrative of my generation, but I disagree with the portrayal of home ownership as out of reach for most Americans. My partner and I were making less than $100K combined a year when we bought our home in Dallas. We had been renters our whole lives (mid-30s at the time) and lived in central Dallas in an affordable apartment in a VERY expensive area. Rents kept climbing but we knew we wanted to buy. We eventually looked at much more affordable homes in a slowly gentrifying area that was within five miles of downtown. We paid $225K for our home in 2016 and found our mortgage payment to be less than rent for many of our friends.

Our home needed lots of work. (Still does!!) It’s vintage 1969. No granite countertops, some really ugly carpet and wallpaper, but it’s our project. We’ve been doing bit by bit to make it better. When I hear so many people complain about the affordability of homes, I can’t help but think, “Of course you can’t afford to live where you rent right now!” The narrative that we’re being told is that you should be able to buy a house convenient to the best places in town. It’s not realistic! There are affordable houses available, they just aren’t where you want to live. You might have to sacrifice convenience, location, and amenities.

I realize that there are cities and places that are ABSOLUTELY too expensive and have terrible policies that have made homeownership a real struggle. I am really fortunate to have a good job and was able to afford the many surprise costs of buying a home. But, to constantly reinforce to a whole generation that they CANNOT afford to own a home doesn’t mesh with reality. That dream is possible with adjusting expectations and potentially looking outside your comfort zone.

John believes there is a negativity bias built into media:

The biggest difference between my personal observations and the media’s reported news is just how amazingly good everything really is in our country. Whether you are watching Fox News or reading The Washington Post, you might get the impression that things are very, very bad in America. They aren’t. While there are plenty of negative things to report on, unemployment is low, goods are plentiful, and people have discretionary money to spend.

Typical news quote: “Our country is divided as ever.” No, not really. And if the media wasn’t complicit in the politicians’ efforts to divide us into neat groups, we would be less divided. I have all types on my boat for fishing trips and all are welcome. Trump superfans to LGBTQ, we all have a lot in common, and in my experience, all you have to do to get along with most anyone is be polite and friendly (and maybe avoid political discussions).

But it really is more than that. Our country, somehow, is still behind some of the greatest innovations the world has seen. And our country keeps innovating, and it makes the world a better place. IT devices are reliable and capable in a way that even 10 years ago would’ve seemed impossible. Health care has advances that are simply amazing, helping people not just live longer, but live better lives. This list could just go on and on. What is often lacking, especially from TV media, is context. My spouse and I watch the evening news every day, and she often says, “I needed one more sentence.” Instead of getting that additional context, we get the next sensationalized outrage bait.

Dan and Vicky are curious about the explanation for a demographic shift:

What we see in the media that conflicts with our professional and personal experiences: The apparent frequency of transgenderism—i.e., individuals whose identities conflict with their biological sex. We are in our mid-70s. As children, one of us remembers Christine Jorgensen. That’s it in terms of individuals who are transgender. We had no knowledge of anyone in elementary school, high school, college, or graduate school who seemed to identify as a different gender than their biological sex.

In the ’70s one of us became a police officer, and spent her entire career in law enforcement. She was one of a group of five women who were admitted to the police academy in Seattle. She worked as a patrol officer, in corrections, setting up a marshals service for a county in Washington, as an advocate for abused women going through the court system, and as a juvenile probation counselor. The other one of us went to graduate school in the ’70s, earning a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Vanderbilt. Then he went to Illinois State University and taught for 30 years. His speciality was children and families. In that time he had a professional practice of psychology, he trained graduate-level counselors, and he was a psychological consultant for numerous community agencies.

Thus, in our professional careers we have seen or consulted for thousands of children and families. We also had children ourselves in the ’70s and ’80s and knew dozens and dozens of their friends, in addition to their schoolmates. In that time, we can, together, tentatively identify only ONE person who appeared to be transgender. One, in 70 years of knowing children and 40 years of working with children and in the community for both of us.    

One could argue that transgender people would have kept this to themselves in these decades, but that seems a stretch. We worked with children/adolescents/families on a very intimate basis … hundreds and hundreds of them. We also worked with students and co-workers who were virtually all kind and accepting people. Dozens and dozens and dozens of other professionals, all of whom would have been extremely open and compassionate with any child who would have expressed transgender ideas.

While neither of us denies the idea that there are people whose gender identity does not match their biological sex, the issue is that there seems to be a virtual explosion in numbers. To write this observation off as being due to people being unwilling or unable to communicate their gender confusion in the past does not seem possible given the extremely large number of children and adolescents we have known personally and professionally, and the number of other professionals who we knew well who consulted with us on their most challenging cases. Why? What explains the apparent explosion?

Gary remarks on demonization:

The most jarring thing for me is to see conservatives and liberals painted with such negative “brushes” by the media. I know several people from all viewpoints stretching from very conservative to very liberal. They are all decent people with the good of the nation at heart. Caring for and loving one another is not limited to one political viewpoint.  On one side you hear conservatives explained as uncaring Neanderthals who want a 1950s patriarchy. On the other side you hear liberals illustrated as crazy people whose minds are twisted like pretzels to reconcile all their conflicting ideological views. The media seems unable or unwilling to treat everyone with dignity and respect just for being a human being.

No one knows how the fire started. But in 2002, a train was set ablaze in a Muslim neighborhood in Gujarat. Those killed were Hindu nationalists, and the state’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, quickly deemed the fire a “preplanned” terrorist attack.

Modi’s government had the charred bodies brought to the state’s largest city, where they were displayed in public. His party called for a strike. The strike devolved into months of violence, and the Gujarati police did little to intervene, even as mobs killed more than 1,000 people—the majority Muslims—and destroyed tens of thousands of Muslim homes and businesses. Later, a top state official told investigators that Modi had directed the police to let the attacks play out. That official was shot dead in his car.

About three years after the riots, Modi applied for a diplomatic visa to come to the United States, where he was due to address the Asian American Hotel Owners Association. The U.S. government denied his application and revoked the regular visa he already had. No one had to speculate as to why: In a statement, the U.S. ambassador to India explained that Modi was liable for the Gujarati government’s handling of the pogrom, and U.S. law prohibited foreign officials responsible for “particularly severe violations of religious freedom” from visiting.

Today Modi has arrived in the United States under very different circumstances. He has come at Washington’s invitation, and while he’s here, he will deliver an address to a joint session of Congress. On June 22, President Joe Biden will host Modi at the White House for a state dinner, one of the highest honors a foreign leader can receive.

This year’s visit is typical of Modi’s reception in the United States since he became India’s prime minister in 2014. During one sojourn, he co-wrote a Washington Post op-ed with President Barack Obama, in which the leaders declared themselves “committed to democracy, liberty, diversity, and enterprise.” During another, he held a rally alongside President Donald Trump before 50,000 fans. And over the past two years, Biden and his officials have repeatedly praised both the prime minister and Indian democracy.  

[Read: The Hinduization of India is nearly complete]

“He is the most popular world leader for a reason,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in April, after returning from a trip to India. “He is unbelievable, visionary, and his level of commitment to the people of India is just indescribable and deep and passionate and real.”

Indians fighting for democracy beg to differ. Since Modi came to power, they note, the government has imprisoned journalists and arrested opposition leaders. It has stopped activists from traveling abroad. The country revoked the partial autonomy afforded to Jammu and Kashmir—India’s only Muslim-majority state—and cut off its access to the internet. New Delhi then split the state into two and downgraded the resulting enclaves from states into territories, giving the central government even more power over the region’s residents. Not long after, New Delhi passed a law that could strip citizenship from millions of Muslims all across India.

For the country’s dissidents, the lavish American rhetoric has prompted anger.

“It is a punch in our face,” Kavita Krishnan, an Indian feminist activist, told me. “It feels like a letdown for those of us in India who keep trying to somehow make everyone wake up to the fact that this is a dangerous government.”  

Sushant Singh, a journalist and senior fellow at India’s Centre for Policy Research, agrees. “The idea that he’s this massive global leader who everyone in the world looks up to helps with his nationalist agenda,” Singh told me. Modi, he said, uses U.S. admiration “to almost show, ‘I did whatever I did in Gujarat, and the Americans have [bent] before my will.’”

Washington has a reason, of course, for being so friendly. The United States is locked in competition with China, and it wants India’s assistance. India’s activists and journalists know—and largely accept—this reality. Almost no one I spoke with wanted Washington to stop cooperating with New Delhi over security issues. And they certainly didn’t want the United States to intervene in the internal affairs of their country.

But dissidents and journalists say there are ways for the United States to play a constructive role without being a bully or jeopardizing the two countries’ security partnership. A few activists, for example, suggested that the United States might sanction select Indian politicians who engage in widespread abuses. Others argued that Washington should steer clear of direct action but lead by example, making a point of fixing domestic problems that are common to both states.

Mostly, however, Indian activists had a simple request for U.S. officials: Stop praising Modi, and instead tell the truth.

In India, those fighting for democracy face hard times. The government has cowed the country’s once-independent judiciary. It uses economic threats to coerce major media companies into avoiding critical coverage, and where such measures fail, it detains and imprisons journalists. Multiple government agencies are investigating Harsh Mander, a prominent human-rights activist, and in 2021, police raided his home and offices. Less than a year later, Mohammed Zubair, a co-founder of a major fact-checking website, labeled as “hate-mongers” the Hindu religious leaders who were filmed threatening Muslims. He was arrested and later released on bail.

The government is even trying to jail major politicians. In 2019, Rahul Gandhi—the opposition’s most prominent leader—suggested that Modi was corrupt. A legislator in Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party sued Gandhi for defamation, and in March 2023, Gandhi was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison. He remains free as he appeals.

The U.S. government is certainly aware of India’s backsliding. The State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom routinely puts out reports that detail the country’s human-rights abuses and democratic failings. The world’s three main democracy rankings have all downgraded India over the past decade. And when they discuss deepening ties with New Delhi, U.S. officials are frequently questioned by journalists about India’s politics. But American leaders continue to praise New Delhi and downplay its shortcomings.

“India is a vibrant democracy,” the White House spokesperson John Kirby said on June 5, when a reporter asked whether Biden was concerned about the country’s trajectory. “Anybody that happens to go to New Delhi can see that for themselves.”

[Read: What Narendra Modi is taking from me]

For many Indian journalists and activists, comments like Kirby’s are, at best, ridiculous. “Unless they are blind, they can tell that there’s a huge difference in what a thriving democracy should be and what India is,” says Hartosh Singh Bal, the executive editor of The Caravan—one of the country’s few remaining independent national-news outlets (and where I worked from 2017 to 2018).

At worst, dissidents said the comments set back their work. “Modi uses [U.S. praise] to belittle the criticisms that are made and the fears that have been raised among India’s minorities and progressives,” Mander told me. Kirby’s remark, for example, was plastered across Indian media outlets as evidence that New Delhi’s critics were wrong. One anchor on a popular channel used it to say the White House had “hit back” against liberals. Another channel declared that the U.S. had “silence[d] concerns over India’s democracy.”

The prime minister’s supporters use Western praise to do more than run defense. They trot out U.S. acclaim to actively argue that Modi is great. After Biden joked that Modi is “too popular” at the G7 meeting in May, a prominent right-wing website published an article about how the prime minister “established himself as the biggest leader of the democratic world.” One of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s national secretaries tweeted that the prime minister was “the most revered leader” on Earth. Modi’s supporters now refer to the prime minister as Vishwaguru—or the “global teacher.”

U.S. criticism has the opposite effect: It makes the government insecure. As a result, Indian dissidents told me it could help their efforts.

“We know that international criticism and pressure bothers the government,” Puja Sen, The Caravan’s senior associate editor, told me. “Controlling the narrative is important to them, and so they care how it plays back home.” Some of the activists I spoke with thought that American expressions of disapproval, when they have come, have already been of assistance. During the 2020 presidential election, for instance, both Biden and Kamala Harris criticized Indian policies toward Kashmir. Trump said that Modi was “working very hard on religious freedom.” New Delhi ended the internet shutdown 16 days after the former two politicians took office.

“My speculation is that what was blocked for 17 months was lifted in less than 17 days because of what was felt to be a pressure coming in from the Democrats,” Aakar Patel, the chair of Amnesty International India, told me. He is no stranger to what rankles the government. In July 2022, India’s Enforcement Directorate fined Patel more than $1 million, allegedly for laundering foreign money through the organization. Three months earlier, he had been barred from leaving the country.

Patel told me that the U.S. could make more of its influence. For instance, the Commission on International Religious Freedom has issued reports suggesting that the U.S. sanction specific Indian politicians responsible for fostering violence against minorities. But other activists felt that singling out individual politicians would give the misguided impression that India’s failings were simply the fault of a few bad actors. And some dissidents were uncomfortable with the idea of Washington taking any kind of punitive action to shape India’s sovereign affairs.

Sudipto Mondal, the executive editor of The News Minute, told me that rather than focusing on criticizing New Delhi, America should try to help by setting a positive example. More than 5 million South Asians live in the United States, including people who belong to low castes. They can experience oppression that mirrors what low-caste people are subjected to in India. Large numbers of South Asian Americans belonging to Hinduism’s lowest caste, for example, have reported facing caste-based employment discrimination from high-caste South Asian Americans (who constitute most of the diaspora). So far, no U.S. state has added caste to the list of groups protected by antidiscrimination laws, but Seattle banned caste discrimination in employment, housing, and public spaces in February. California is moving forward with legislation that would do the same. If Congress followed suit, Mondal believes the effects could reverberate around the world.

“That would be a kind of moral pressure,” he said. Indian elites, he told me, “will be exposed.”

Shabnam Hashmi, an Indian human-rights campaigner, suggested that Washington could have a similarly positive effect by taking on Hindu nationalists in the U.S. The suggestion might seem strange, but the United States is home to groups with connections to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu paramilitary organization that founded Modi’s party and gave the prime minister his professional start. The RSS was inspired by European fascists and designed, according to one founder, to promote “the military regeneration of the Hindus.” Its longest-tenured leader cited Germany’s “purging” of the Jews as a way to deal with non-Hindus.

[Read: The end of the Indian idea]

These “fascist forces” within the United States should be of grave concern to Washington, Hashmi told me. “They are the biggest supporters of Modi.”

India has a well-practiced response to U.S. criticism: Accuse Americans of hypocrisy. When U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Washington was monitoring human-rights abuses in India, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar told journalists that he was calling out human-rights abuses in the United States. After Washington criticized India’s neutral stance on the war in Ukraine, Jaishankar said that he remembered “what happened in Afghanistan, where an entire civil society was thrown under the bus.” When Freedom House and V-Dem—organizations based in the U.S. and Sweden, respectively—both downgraded India’s democratic rating in March 2021, Jaishankar invoked colonialism, deriding the findings as intrusions by “the self-appointed custodians of the world.” He then went on to discuss the January 6 insurrection. At least in his country, he said, “nobody questions an election.”

Jaishankar’s parries appear to have had an effect. Aside from occasional oblique comments, the Biden administration has avoided calling out New Delhi for its repression. At times, it has even echoed the foreign minister’s suggestion that the United States had no right to remark on India’s affairs.

“Every democracy, starting with our own, is a work in progress,” Blinken said at a July 2021 press conference when asked about how Washington would address democratic backsliding in New Delhi. “No democracy, regardless of how large or how old, has it all figured out.”

India’s activists and journalists were far less sympathetic to Jaishankar’s logic. “Where am I going to find perfect countries or perfect human beings that can criticize anybody else?” Sushant Singh said. “The argument is disingenuous. It has no meaning.”

Singh and others I spoke with rejected the implication that the United States and India were equally blemished. “Every democracy is in some ways flawed,” Bal told me. “But there are degrees of being flawed, and at the moment, India is hugely more flawed.”

The dissidents I interviewed did not want Washington to try to fix India’s flaws or to coerce India into improving its human-rights record, especially given their country’s colonial past. They opposed, for example, sanctioning the Indian economy, conditioning assistance to the state, or even trying to finance prodemocracy groups. Such measures, they said, wouldn’t work anyway. “At the end of the day, the battle for democracy, the battle for various rights—human rights, democratic rights—has to be won within India,” Singh told me. “It will not be won outside.”

In the meantime, Indian critics of Modi were okay with deepening the partnership between Washington and New Delhi. There’s a difference, they said, between acting on shared interests and professing shared values. American analysts have made the same point. In Foreign Affairs, Daniel Markey, a former State Department official, recently argued that criticizing the Modi government may even be essential to creating a successful U.S.-Indian relationship. “If India and the United States are going to be strong partners, both sides need to learn how to navigate serious disagreements,” he wrote.

Patel, of Amnesty International India, told me he hoped that such honesty would become a feature of U.S.-Indian relations. Closer ties between the states might even allow American officials who want a pluralistic India to exert greater influence. But Patel knows that the nature of great-power politics is such that Washington will likely be sparing with its criticism. “The United States looks after its own interests, and at a point when it sees the South China Sea as the locus of its strategic problems, it will lean on countries like ours,” he told me. The realpolitik didn’t seem to bother him, or most of the people I spoke with. “That’s fine,” Patel said.

But what India’s democracy advocates do not want, what they cannot abide, is all the praise. They’ve had enough of it.

Everyone expected chaos. Since March 2020, the government had been turning away asylum seekers en masse without processing their claims under Title 42, a pandemic-era public-health policy. On May 11, the policy expired. President Joe Biden warned of coming disorder; Republican Representative Tom McClintock predicted that up to 700,000 illegal migrants would “bum-rush the border”; The New York Times dispatched correspondents to the Southwest in advance of an “anticipated surge.”

That surge never materialized. The Times reported “few signs of disorder” on May 12; “fear and confusion, but not chaos,” NPR wrote, noting that one prediction of more than 150,000 migrants waiting at the border “may have been overblown.” The following week, the Biden administration announced that unauthorized border crossings were down 50 percent.

The consensus prediction was chaos, and the consensus was wrong. About what, exactly? Narrowly, that Title 42 was responsible for holding back large numbers of migrants and that, once it ended, they would come en masse. But this mistake is a symptom of a broader misconception: that harsh border policies are what stand between the U.S. and a crush of migrants.

[Brian Elmore: The price of Title 42 is the battered bodies of my patients]

Let’s set aside humanitarian and economic objections to harsh deterrence policies, not because they are unimportant but because opposition is regularly dismissed as either the product of bleeding-heart leftism or a neoliberal attachment to the free movement of labor. Even without such considerations, these policies fail on their own terms. Deterrence policies have not succeeded at durably reducing unauthorized migration, nor have they produced order at the U.S. border.

Most people don’t want to leave their home countries, even when those countries are unstable and economic opportunity, or even safety, lies elsewhere. Migrants don’t take lightly the decision to abandon everything they know, only to put their lives at risk by crossing borders and, in many cases, contracting with smugglers. So why should we expect tweaks to U.S. border policy to affect whether people choose to make the journey?

People immigrate because of pushes and pulls. They may be pushed out of their home nation because of war, famine, persecution, economic devastation, or any number of natural disasters or political failures. They can also be pulled to other countries because of job opportunities or the desire to live with family members. For decades now, American policy makers have sought to reduce migration by making border-crossing less appealing. If the ordinary paths to enter the country are closed off, or if potential migrants hear hostile rhetoric, or if welfare policies are restricted only to citizens, then migration pressures at the border will abate—or so the thinking goes.

Prevention through deterrence has been a staple of U.S. border policy since the mid-1990s. Before that point, immigration control had largely been focused on catching unauthorized crossers after they’d reached the U.S. This new strategy was focused on changing migrants’ incentives before they ever left their homes.

Then-President Bill Clinton, concerned about reelection, pioneered a policy of blocking the main migration corridors in the Southwest, which the administration thought would “raise the difficulty, financial cost, and physical risk of illegal entry to such a level that deterrence would be achieved at points of origin in Mexico and other countries.” The 1994 Border Patrol Strategic Plan aimed to “control the borders of the United States between the ports of entry, restoring our Nation’s confidence in the integrity of the border. ” One assumption was that “alien apprehensions will decrease as Border Patrol increases control of the border.” The agency laid out what success would require: “The deterrent effect of apprehension does not become effective in stopping the flow until apprehensions approach 100 percent of those attempting entry … We believe we can achieve a rate of apprehensions sufficiently high to raise the risk of apprehension to the point that many will consider it futile to continue to attempt illegal entry.”

After the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security, folding in Customs and Border Protection and thus cementing the notion that U.S. immigration policy should fall under the banner of national security. The goal of deterring migrants has remained at the forefront of our border-control policy. The Secure Fence Act of 2006 (which passed the House 283–138 and the Senate 80–19) sought to achieve operational control of the border within 18 months, similarly defined as “the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States.”

Donald Trump was perhaps the most vigorous supporter of prevention by deterrence, through attempted control of the border itself (the wall) and by making life for crossers miserable through a policy of family separation.

[From the September 2022 issue: ‘We need to take away children’]

If Trump embraced deterrence, the Biden administration has treated it more like an intermittent dance partner. It has promoted legal pathways to migration through parole programs for migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti. Beginning in January 2023, applicants from all of these countries could be vetted before migrating. And in less than 30 days, people from these countries who were “apprehended, inadmissible, or expelled” declined by 75.8 percent. The administration also expanded the use of an app to allow migrants to make an appointment to seek asylum instead of having to present themselves to officials.

This administration has paired these expansions with several confusing and punitive measures for asylum seekers. Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies, told me these changes were “a low-calorie version” of Trump’s asylum rules, a viewpoint shared by immigration advocates. Comparisons to Trump policies of course make administration officials unhappy. But deterrence-oriented thinking has been present in the Biden administration since the beginning. A senior official told Politico that for Susan Rice, the former domestic-policy adviser, “it always comes back to punitive measures” to deter migrants. The Washington Post reported that Rice thought giving COVID vaccines to undocumented immigrants apprehended by border officials would encourage more migrants to cross the border. And The New York Times uncovered a memo in which Rice speculated that parents send their children across the border because of the U.S.’s “generosity” toward unaccompanied children.

For 30 years, politicians of all stripes have pursued prevention-by-deterrence. And yet migration flows have stubbornly resisted these policies. Attempts to undermine America’s pull factors have been unsuccessful. Restricting access to welfare benefits has failed to reduce border crossings because migrants are not coming from countries with generous and stable safety nets. They’re not giving up benefits, and they’re not expecting them. Cracking down on employers reliant on immigrant labor has failed to reduce migration as well because immigrants and employers largely get around these systems.

“Even in the face of family separation and children being ripped from the arms of their parents, you did not see a lowering of the number of people coming across the border to seek safety,” according to Shaw Drake, a Stanford Law lecturer and former ACLU immigration attorney. During the Trump administration, in February 2019, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported the highest monthly total of border apprehensions in almost a decade, and the following month, Trump’s own CBP commissioner said that the border was at a “breaking point.” At no time have border officials managed to apprehend the “sufficiently high” number of migrants necessary to reduce pressure once and for all.

Deterrence doesn’t work, because by deciding to cross borders, migrants have already accepted the tremendous risks that come along with that.  

An ocean away, people brave extreme conditions for a chance at residency in the West. The Central Mediterranean is “the deadliest known migration route in the world,” with more than 20,000 deaths recorded since 2014; about one in 20 who attempted to cross in 2019 died trying. Here’s what these migrants risk on their journey: “dehydration, starvation, lack of access to medical care, arbitrary detention, kidnapping, trafficking, sexual abuse … physical violence … unlawful killings, slavery and forced labour, torture and ill-treatment, gender-based violence … extortion, and other human rights violations and abuses.”

European nations have repeatedly tried to deter migrants by enhancing the pain of border crossing: In 2014, the United Kingdom announced that it would not engage in search-and-rescue operations to prevent people from drowning in the Mediterranean. Earlier this year, video footage revealed Greek Coast Guard members rounding up and abandoning 12 people, including small children, in the Mediterranean. But the Europeans have mostly outsourced their cruelty to Libyan authorities, providing funding, training, and equipment for migrant deterrence in an attempt to keep their hands clean. A 2021 United Nations report accused Libyan authorities of firing at or colliding with boats in distress, capsizing boats, other acts of physical violence against migrants, and impeding humanitarian organizations seeking to aid migrants in distress.

Despite all this, in 2022, more than 100,000 people arrived in Europe via this route, up from 67,000 in 2021, 35,000 in 2020, and 14,000 in 2019. Interviews with people who survive the journey are illuminating. One Sudanese man told UN authorities that it took him four tries to cross to Europe. After one unsuccessful attempt, he and 41 other survivors were placed in a Libyan detention center, where he says he was beaten and given food only once a day. During his escape, he broke his leg, and several fellow detainees were shot by guards. He then successfully crossed the Mediterranean after spending nearly 30 hours at sea. Despite the election of hard-right anti-immigration leaders in Europe, “asylum seekers keep coming,” as the Times has reported.

Closer to home, some Afghans left behind after the U.S. evacuation of their country were willing to travel to South America and make the long, dangerous trek all the way up to the U.S. border with Mexico. “If 10 times I am sent back,” one man told the Times, “10 times I will return.” He and his wife were robbed by Mexican police and sent back to the border with Guatemala. They tried again and were jailed in Mexico.

Since the 1990s, the U.S. has invested heavily in border militarization and physical barriers. There were nearly five times as many Border Patrol agents in 2019 as in 1992. The agency’s budget swelled from $326 million to $4.7 billion over the same time period.

[Caitlin Dickerson: America’s immigration amnesia]

These investments have not yielded operational control of the U.S. border. In a widely cited 2016 paper looking at the effect of border militarization on undocumented migration from Mexico, Princeton researchers argued that “U.S. authorities have little to show for billions spent on border enforcement between 1986 and 2010” and concluded that these measures had “virtually no effect on the ultimate likelihood of entry.”

Border security may work in the short term. But migrants quickly adapt by taking alternative, more dangerous routes.

When Title 42 and related policies allowed officials to turn asylum seekers away without processing their claims, migrants tried crossing the Rio Grande or trekking through dangerous desert terrain. Our refusal to process asylum claims at ports of entry in an orderly fashion thus threw the system into chaos. In 2022, nearly every Colombian (99.5 percent), Venezuelan (99.8 percent), Cuban (99.7 percent), and Nicaraguan (99.8 percent) migrant arrived in the country by crossing rivers and deserts between ports of entry.

Title 42 did not deter migrants from trying to cross; instead, it seems to have caused them to try crossing multiple times, because their claims were never successfully heard or processed. According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University—a research center that publicly shares and analyzes immigration statistics—of the roughly 1.2 million apprehensions at the border from March 20, 2020, through September 30, 2021, almost 60 percent were repeat attempts. Researchers found that 25 percent had been apprehended three or more times.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the policy director at the pro-immigration nonprofit American Immigration Council, told me that “deterrence policies often cause people to freeze in place for a few months while they assess their options.” He pointed me to a January 2022 Mexican policy change that created new visa restrictions for Venezuelans who had been flying into Mexico then heading north to seek asylum. “That did in fact cause a very significant drop in Venezuelan apprehensions … for about five months, which is how long it took for Venezuelans to instead start walking to the border via the Darién Gap.”

When deterrence advocates look for examples of success, they tend to point to the Consequence Delivery System, developed in the mid-2000s. Until that point, Border Patrol agents had simply returned most unauthorized crossers to Mexico. Under the new policy, agents imposed “consequences,” including expedited removal with formal charges, criminal prosecution, and jail time. A 2020 paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that migrants subjected to consequences were less likely to be re-apprehended after three months, though that effect diminished with time. A 2017 paper from the Cato Institute found that migrants were more likely to give up on attempting reentry in 2015 than in 2005, before the Consequence Delivery System had been implemented.

These modest successes hardly make the case for doubling down on deterrence, primarily because the system was developed in another age, when unauthorized migrants at our southern border were mostly coming from Mexico in search of work, and mostly moved among three states (Texas, Illinois, and California). These migrants regularly returned home. That is, until border-militarization efforts raised the costs of going home and turned what was once a circular, migratory population into a settled population.

In 2010, roughly 90 percent of migrants encountered between ports of entry were from Mexico. In recent years, that figure has cratered, hitting below 20 percent in 2019. The main drivers of this decline are widely acknowledged to have been the Great Recession and strengthening economic opportunities in Mexico relative to the U.S., as well as a demographic transition within Mexico resulting in an older population. (Migrating is generally a young person’s game.)

Migration pressure is no longer coming primarily from Mexican workers, but from people farther south seeking asylum, including large numbers of families and children. Regardless of whether they qualify for legal protection, most of these migrants are fleeing from devastating conditions, not simply shopping for economic opportunity, which suggests that “consequences” won’t make much of a difference.

In 2021, the Biden administration spent millions to fly more than 15,000 Haitian asylum seekers back to their country, where they faced the threat of gang violence and kidnapping following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Contemporaneous reporting revealed that the administration hoped that flybacks would deter other Haitiians from attempting the journey. They did result in a short-term reduction in border crossings. But in April 2023, CBP reported 17,771 encounters with Haitian nationals, almost back to the September 2021 total of 17,966.

It’s not that deterrence doesn’t raise the costs of migration; it’s that people willing to make the journey have already overcome the natural human urge to stay put, the physical dangers of crossing multiple countries, and all the aforementioned associated risks.

A 2004 retrospective analysis about a decade-long experiment in raising the “difficulty, financial cost, and physical risk of illegal entry” along the main corridors of San Diego, California; El Paso, Texas; central Arizona; and south Texas found that “there is no convincing evidence that [enforcement] has reduced either the stock or the flow of unauthorized migrants from Mexico.” The Department of Homeland Security has reported a steady rise in the average fees that migrants paid to smugglers: what once cost less than $500 in 1981 cost nearly $4,000 in 2015. It notes that although “relatively few illegal border crossers hired a smuggler prior to 2001,” in 2015, 80 to 95 percent of apprehended border crossers did. U.S. policy has thus enriched coyotes, who may force their customers to “participate in smuggling controlled substances or other illicit items across the border.”

As my colleague Caitlin Dickerson wrote, senior Trump-administration officials considered family-separation a deterrence policy. Dickerson pointed to an email between a Border Patrol agent and a U.S. attorney that read, “It is the hope that this separation will act as a deterrent to parents.” Yet a report by the Center for American Progress found that monthly totals of border apprehensions actually increased after the zero-tolerance pilot policy began, in July 2017. The immigration reporter Dara Lind similarly uncovered that family apprehensions increased while the family-separation policy was in place.

Doris Meissner was the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) under Bill Clinton. After 9/11, INS was discontinued, its responsibilities folded into the newly created Department of Homeland Security. Before that, the agency was responsible for border enforcement, and Meissner, now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, helped develop the prevention-by-deterrence strategy. I interviewed her by phone soon after Title 42 ended.

Meissner agrees that some deterrence policies have failed in practice. In testimony before a Senate committee in 2013, she recalled that the INS had not anticipated how readily migrants would adapt to border-security measures by finding new ways to cross. But she still believes in deterrence as a concept, and told me that she disagrees with those who “dismiss the notion of deterrence entirely and attribute [migration] to push factors completely.”

[From the May 2021 issue: America never wanted the tired, poor, huddled masses]

Meissner puts a lot of stock in what she calls “the most important deterrent”: adjudicating asylum claims quickly and then sending home those migrants who are not eligible under the narrow standards prescribed by the law. She believes that if people receive a fast and negative answer, that will dampen future waves.

Immigration restrictionists like Mark Krikorian believe Meissner’s proposed feedback loop can work. He additionally proposes restricting legal pathways to entry much more, so that would-be migrants come to believe that qualifying for asylum is virtually impossible: “It’s not that a specific press release is going to get a peasant in the western Guatemalan Highlands to change his migration decisions,” he told me. “But, if three-quarters of the people who left his village the previous year from that village all end up bused back, destitute because all the money they spent is now pissed away—because they failed—that will change people’s decisions.”

Both Krikorian’s and Meissner’s visions for border deterrence rely on achieving operational control of the border. Without that, we can’t send the message that entry is not going to happen. To underscore—again—how unreasonable this goal is, when she was DHS secretary in 2010, Janet Napolitano said the agency would never be able to “seal the border”; in 2015, she went so far as to call operational control an “absolutely unattainable standard.”

At any rate, survey data indicate that individual migration decisions are largely independent of U.S. policy. A 2021 paper based on surveys in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico found “no evidence” that making people aware of immigration enforcement policies changed their calculus about whether to migrate. Similarly, a 2018 paper also based on survey data—from interviews with more than 3,000 people in Honduras—found that “the overwhelming motivating factor for emigration” is direct experience with crime and the prevalence of local violence. Neither the likelihood of deportation nor the dangers of migration to the U.S. meaningfully affected respondents’ plans about whether to attempt the journey.

Why are so many people in government so determined to make deterrence work? In her 2015 comments, Napolitano also noted that operational control was “politically attractive.” And when I asked Meissner how the U.S. could realistically control migration flows, she similarly pointed to the politics of immigration. “If you’re in the government, you don’t get the luxury of saying this is hopeless … And especially with the way it’s being positioned now politically. It’s very clear that [in] the ’24 presidential election, this is going to be one of the major issues that impacts the next presidency, and so government does have to try to do whatever it can.”

Public opinion on immigration is complicated, to say the least, but these policies are actually making the political problem worse. By tightly restricting official ports of entry, we encourage migrants to take more dangerous routes. And when we turn them away, they try again. The Associated Press wrote last month that a 23-year-old man with his wife and newborn twin daughters reported being unable to use the Biden administration’s new asylum-application app and is therefore planning to cross the Rio Grande “like everybody else.”

These policies are also frankly inhumane. In just 10 years, deterrence policies claimed “10 times more lives than the Berlin Wall claimed during its 28-year existence,” according to the immigration researcher Wayne Cornelius. Last June, 53 people died in a trailer with no air-conditioning or water. Researchers have found that dehydration was a leading cause of death for migrants taking “random routes” between Nogales, Mexico, and Three Points, Arizona. The 2022 fiscal year was the worst on record for deaths of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, with 853 recorded deaths versus 568 in 2021.

For me, the most memorable death is that of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, who was prevented from legally requesting asylum in the U.S. by CBP officers in 2019. In desperation, he tried to swim across the Rio Grande with his 23-month-old daughter. Both were swept away by the current and died.

Deterrence policies have produced images of asylum seekers trying to enter between ports of entry, of Border Patrol agents on horseback chasing Haitian immigrants, and of children dead in the water, as well as reports of skyrocketing crossing attempts, all making Americans feel like the situation at the southwest border is out of control. It’s a vicious cycle: Americans register concern about border chaos, then the government institutes harsh deterrence policies. Rinse and repeat.

No one knows when the next crisis will hit, or what it will be. It could be a climate-related disaster that displaces millions, or a war that sends political refugees running. The U.S. government cannot prevent global catastrophes, and attempts to address the “root causes” of migration are Pollyannaish at best. But the government can at least avoid pushing migration flows to more remote routes, which enriches coyotes and human traffickers, and keep experimenting with the aforementioned parole system. (It is working quite well but is unfortunately under legal threat.) And although this Congress won’t, Congress could invest in processing immigration cases faster, ensuring that legal pathways aren’t so difficult to access that people resort almost by default to unauthorized entry.

The costs of deterrence—family separation, injury, death—have all been justified under the cold logic that they are necessary to secure the border, or to reduce political pressure. But deterrence doesn’t create stability at the border, and it doesn’t calm voter concerns about people circumventing the legal process. Anyone asserting that being cruel to asylum seekers is smart politics isn’t giving you a hard truth; they’re repeating an easy lie.