Immigration is a topic worth continuing to discuss in these blog posts because now with the preparation for the upcoming presidential election, the candidates are talking about ways to solve immigration as a social problem, convincing the United States population to vote for them. In my honors Global Awareness class, we had to watch Ai Wei Wei’s documentary called “Human Flow.” It was an eye-opening piece of art for me since it bore witness to many of the immigrants’ journey of immigrating to a new country. It mainly focused on refugees, meaning these are immigrants who do not desire to leave their country but flee it for political or economic reasons and purposes such as war, oppression, and other forms of persecution. 

He uses specific artistic techniques to make it such a moving production. Ai Wei Wei shoots with a drone to emphasize the motifs of masses and also of there being no way out. However, he secondly gets intimate and shoots closely to the immigrants, pausing for periods of time so that the audience can take the time to look at them. This technique compensates for the lack of individuality created by the first technique through filming on ground-level. The film opens and closes with aerial shots. The beginning opens with a bird flying over the ocean, which is a symbol that also appears throughout the film, one instance being the scene of an origami bird trapped in a wired fence at 0:58:38. This reminds me of Maya Angelou’s “Caged Bird” that echoes the value of human dignity through the depiction of the struggles and anger of the oppressed in contrast to the blissfulness of the free. In the beginning of the film the ocean fills the entire frame and the bird is minuscule compared to the vastness of the ocean, underscoring the immensity and omnipotence of nature, and how indifferent it is to creatures and human beings. 43 seconds later, a boat of immigrants comes into view. The boat is tiny and is kept to one side of the frame, again placing emphasis on the vastness of the ocean and of nature in general, which can sometimes pose as a trap, especially to the immigrants who have been declined a refuge. Other examples of aerial shots include 0:05:06 where their tents look ant-sized, almost looking as if it was edited using a cloning effect, and at 0:15:54 where the immigrants were entering the ship in masses of people, all of them appearing as one group; they are not individualized in this sense but through the second tactic the artist uses, he becomes more personal. One instance is from 0:07:30-0:08:38 where people of different ages and genders are filmed standing still, centered in the frame. I believe this back and forth between showing large masses of immigrants and their tents and then seeing them on a face-to-face level is to break stereotypes of all sorts that we may have against immigrants. We tend to see them as a large, invasive group entering a country, but Ai Wei Wei wants us to look at them as human beings and to stop categorizing and generalizing them.

When borders are closed, the immigrants feel like there is no way out; they dread returning home because the time they could spend at a camp can vary between months and years, causing them to have to restart their lives once they are deported back to their place of origin. Connections have been lost, and what was once familiar has become foreign. The Pakistani immigrants fleeing to Europe, for example, protested with signs and chanting in Arabic at 1:04:47, pleading to not be sent back. Some signs said “Are we not human beings? We mercy for stay please. EU-Don’t send us back to Hell.” In my research, I discovered that Cuban refugees did not want to leave either; they loved Cuba and had national pride. However, in order to find peace again, they needed to flee for a better life, and most of them did not ever wind up returning to Cuba once in the United States.

Racism and discrimination on college campuses has become a known issue in the world. There is not a campus today that can claim that they have never encountered an issue that involved some kind of racism or discrimination. Incidents are taking forms in many ways and are being expressed in a multitude of ways. Whether it be expressed through posters, hate crimes, images, or even notes left on dorm room doors, it is still happening. Addressing Racial Trauma and Hate Crimes on College Campuses, is an article that address how racism and discrimination has been on the rise over the years. The article states, “The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) defines a hate crime as a “criminal offense which is motivated, in whole or in part, by an offender’s bias(es) against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.” Between 2011 and 2016, the NCES documented a 40 percent increase in campus hate crimes. (see Figure 1) In 2016, more than 1,000 hate crimes were committed on college campuses across the country. For years, racial bias has been the most common motivation for committing such crimes.”

The article goes on to talk about how colleges are becoming unsafe for students due to campus bias. The article states, “Therefore, hate crimes statistics cannot fully capture the pervasiveness of this dangerous ideology on college campuses. Campus bias incidents—which can include any “conduct that discriminates, stereotypes, excludes, harasses or harms anyone in [the university] community based on their identity”—are also on the rise. Between 2016 and 2018, the Anti-Defamation League documented at least 346 incidents of white supremacist propaganda on college campuses. Since 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented 434 incidents of white supremacist flyering on college campuses. Perhaps as a result, students of color are far less likely than white students to describe their campus as inclusive, and Black students in particular are more than twice as likely as white students to say the racial climate on their campus is poor.” Along with the rise of this issue, according to the article students are not able to report the issue without remaining anonymous.  The article states, “But 1 in 5 state flagship universities do not have an online bias reporting mechanism.* In other words, at least 216,000 students are currently denied the option to report these potentially traumatic experiences online with a guarantee of anonymity.” The article goes far enough to point out that while campuses are doing their best, the limited resources that they have and can provide are proving to be not enough. Campuses are unable to properly help their students because of a number of factors. The article states, “While university counseling centers are serving more students each year, many students do not utilize these resources for a variety of reasons, including long wait times, additional fees for service, and insufficient staff diversity. Universities with larger student-to-mental-health-provider ratios can often have longer waiting periods for access to non emergency mental health care. Longer waiting periods can be a significant barrier to care, especially for students of color, who are less likely to seek care in the first place. According to a new CAP analysis, the average student-to-counselor ratio among state flagship universities is approximately 1,300 to 1. The Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors (AUCCCD) reported an average student-to-counselor ratio of 1 to 1,411 from July 2017 to June 2018. While center utilization rates and counselor bandwidth may vary from institution to institution, many would benefit from additional resources and support to ensure that wait times are not a barrier to care for any student.”