The word migrant has become a largely inaccurate umbrella term for this complex story.
It is not hundreds of people who drown when a boat goes down in the Mediterranean, nor even hundreds of refugees. It is hundreds of migrants. It is not a person – like you, filled with thoughts and history and hopes – who is on the tracks delaying a train. It is a migrant . A nuisance.
It already feels like we are putting a value on the word. Migrant deaths are not worth as much to the media as the deaths of others – which means that their lives are not. Drowning disasters drop further and further down news bulletins. We rarely talk about the dead as individuals anymore. They are numbers.
When we in the media do this, when we apply reductive terminology to people, we help to create an environment in which a British foreign minister can refer to ” marauding migrants ,” and in which hate speech and thinly veiled racism can fester.
We become the enablers of governments who have political reasons for not calling those drowning in the Mediterranean what the majority of them are: refugees.