Migration has been an important part of human history from our very beginnings. But the forced displacements in our own time have reached unprecedented levels. These numbers have many causes: discrimination and exile, violence and war, climate change, corporate resource management which results in habitat, food, and economic insecurities affecting the most vulnerable.
This three-part series, “The Hardest Journey,” was impelled in particular by recent and ongoing events at the Mexico-U.S. border, practices which contradict the traditional American promise of refuge and freedom, enshrined in Emma Lazarus’s poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Emma Lazarus
your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free,
the wretched refuse
of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless,
the tempest-tossed, to me.
I lift my lamp
beside the golden door.