Humans As Ends

Migrant Buses, Salvadoran Spectacles, Invisible Children

A lot is bad and wrong about the governors of Texas, Arizona, and Florida busing and flying migrants to DC, New York City, or Martha’s Vineyard.

Authorities lied to migrants about where they were going and how they would be received once they arrived, conditions aboard the busses have been miserable, even dangerous, and infants as young as a few days old were shipped out in these busses.

As two migrants recently told THE CITY, passengers

were given only one small sandwich and a bag of potato chips apiece for the 43-hour bus trip, and after a few hours on the road many started to suffer from increasingly intense hunger. In addition, they said several young children vomited and one suffered an epileptic seizure, with no medical treatment available. 

That’s atrocious, and is only a small window into the conditions on these buses. I won’t enumerate all that’s wrong and duplicitous with the political stunt, but I would like to discuss what’s wrong with the practice in principle.

A number of commentators have said that the migrants are being used as “pawns.” In other words, they are being used as means instead of ends.

The idea I’m leaning on here derives from philosopher Immanuel Kant’s famous “categorical imperative,” a part of which is known as the Formula of the End in Itself. Sometimes it’s also known as the Humanity Formula (which also sounds like it could be a new flavor of Vitamin Water).

Here’s Kant: “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.”

(Quick aside: one of my closest friends, John Granger — who is also a grammar genius, longtime mentor, and one of the best people I know — has frequently cautioned me against “philosophizing.” Very few people can think clearly from point A to point B and then articulate that journey. I’m definitely not one of those people — though I’ve studied hard to be able to describe point A or B decently enough. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading philosophy, leaning on or learning from philosophers.)

What does Kant mean about treating people not as means but as ends? That humans should be treated as people, not as mere instruments. People can be instrumental to others, but that shouldn’t be all they are.

Example, and a quick primer on why you shouldn’t eat your neighbor: Cannibalism would be using a human being as a means and nothing else — a means of nutrition.

A rutabaga can serve as a means and only means. (A chicken — or a cow, pig, lamb, or cuy — well, that’s debatable.) Despite the obvious difference between rutabagas and people, there’s some nuance to this. A waiter may bring you that rutabaga, which makes the waiter sorta seem like an instrument or means to your nutrition, but that’s not all they are. If you were to take a bit out of your waiter’s arm, however, then you would be reducing them to nothing but a means.

Pertinent to us: you can hire someone as a messenger, but you can’t turn them into a message, especially not by force or by fraud.

Digging into Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, here’s more from Kant: every human, “and in general every rational being, exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means for arbitrary use by this or that will…”

Busing migrants to distant cities in order to “call attention” to the problem at the border is using migrants as a means and only as a means. The governors may very well be right that more attention should be paid to the border, but there are ways of directing that attention that doesn’t turn human beings into bullhorns or billboards.

People as Politics

I recently reported a story with The Intercept’s Ryan Devereaux, another friend of mine and one of the best long-form investigative journalists working today. The article was a follow up to a piece Ryan did a year ago about a Salvadoran migrant, Walter Cruz-Zavala, who got sucked into a gang in San Francisco, where a paid government informant tattooed giant gang letters onto his chest. After leaving and decrying the gang, Walter struggled to fight his deportation for years, saying that if he were to be sent back to El Salvador he’d be targeted by both the gangs and the government.

And that is — precisely — what happened. About a year after his deportation, the increasingly authoritarian president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, torched the rule of law, ditched due process, and launched an unprecedented crackdown, rounding up tens of thousands of young men, slapping gang-related charges against them, and cramming them into dungeon-like prisons where they are occasionally stripped to their underwear, handcuffed, and paraded like Roman prisoners before cameras.

The warden of one of the miserable hellholes where Walter was locked up for a few months published a TikTok video in which Walter appears shirtless and forced into a human chain.

Bukele has repeatedly boasted of forcing such conditions onto prisoners to send a message. He’s using their suffering, making a spectacle out of it, for both political and personal gain. He’s using them as means.

Kids as Cudgels

One more example: I’m reporting out a long investigative piece about family separations, which are continuing under the Biden administration. Kids aren’t currently being taken away in the numbers we saw under Trump — not even close — but they are still being ripped out of their parents arms for no good reason. I’ll have a lot more to say about that when I publish in a couple of months, but it’s worth remembering that the Trump-era policy was explicitly designed to use kids, along with their parents, as a means. The Trump administration wanted to make these children and their parents suffer enough that other parents considering migrating would be scared to do so. That strategy didn’t work, which says a lot about the root causes of migration.

Treating humans as means instead of ends is the foundational principle behind Prevention Through Deterrence, a U.S. immigration policy practiced since the 1990s, the idea being that weaponizing the landscape and forcing migrants to suffer or die will deter others from coming. With nearly three decades of evidence, we know that while such policies do not stop migration, they do inflict suffering and, every year, kill hundreds of people.

The pattern here is that people in power, those who want to stay in or rise up in power, are using people as means, as pawns. Bukele wants to, unconstitutionally, win another presidential term. Abbot wants to stay in the governor’s mansion. DeSantis wants the White House. They’re all using people to score political points towards winning their ends, and that is fundamentally wrong.

Children without Childhood

A strong recommendation for Invisible Child, by Andrea Elliot, a gorgeous and heartbreaking book about a girl raised without a home in New York City. For eight years Elliot followed young Dasani — precocious, defiant, and born within a system that seems to deliberately keep her down — as she matured into a teenager, superseded incredible odds, escaped the vortex of NYC’s streets, and then eventually got sucked back in.

Though the focus is tightly on Dasani, Elliott also provides portraits of her family, the warped and dehumanizing child welfare program of New York City, and the neighborhoods and schools where Dasani grows up.

Here’s one of the hundred or so eye-opening sentences I underlined:

More than a century after President Theodore Roosevelt’s landmark conference concluded that America’s homes ‘should not be broken up for reasons of poverty,’ the federal government is giving ten times as much money to programs that separate them (most of them poor) as to programs that might preserve them.

Invisible Child an inspiring feat of reportage, capturing deeply intimate moments without exploiting or reducing Dasani and her parents and siblings to unidimensional characters, or a means for her own ideological opining.

I gifted this book to my in-laws last Christmas after reading an excerpt. They read it, my wife read it, and, as you can see, it’s been well-loved and well-read.

Among the many invaluable lessons my Spouter-Inn bosom buddy and mentor, John Granger (mentioned above), has taught me, besides wariness of philosophizing, is to watch out for mountain lions, who will, without violating any ethical or moral principle, take a bite out of your arm.