Photos and videos of masked ICE agents dragging away undocumented immigrants are chilling on multiple levels. They at once inspire fear of uncontrolled government coercion and sorrow for the hapless victims taken down in a court house or doctor’s office.
Outrage over the images is understandable and may even be responsible for a shift in public opinion in favor of immigrants. But the reaction from the liberal political/intellectual class has, at times, been both undisciplined and irresponsible. Their raw rhetoric may be emotionally satisfying, but it just reinforces the racial hierarchy that led to the enactment of this kind of policy in the first place.
I’ve heard liberals compare ICE agents to the Gestapo. That must feel good, but it betrays a stunning ignorance of the horrors of the mass murder of millions of Jews, Sinti, and Roma. I would recommend they read historian Christopher Browning’s account of how a group of Hamburg policemen became desensitized to shooting children in the back of the head.
Then last month, a venerable voice of America’s labor-left, Harold Meyerson, penned a piece in the Financial Times in which he compared the City of Los Angeles’ resistance to enforcing federal immigration laws to the northern states’ refusal to abide by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which legally compelled northerners to cooperate with slave hunters and federal authorities. “America has been here before,” he intoned.1
So why the moral hyperbole? Why compare the tragic consequences of decades of woeful immigration policy to even greater historical evils?
Because it is easy and politically expedient. Distribute disturbing images of round ups and compare U.S. immigration enforcement agents to Nazis and slave hunters and the public will become so revolted that they’ll refuse to have these acts done in their name.
But there’s also something else at play here that’s become so characteristic of American progressive politics. It’s the deployment of the self-serving politics of pity.
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It wasn’t until the French Revolution that the concern for distant others entered the realm of politics in the West.
The Jacobins injected the idea of virtue into the political realm, and virtue to them meant subduing one’s individual political desires to those of the will of the people. The people, however, meant something very different to French revolutionaries than it did to the framers of the American Constitution.
To James Madison, the term was a nod to a broad imaginary consensus among white people across the states, not unlike the meaning of “Peoria” to a Hollywood producer. To Robespierre, however, the meaning of le peuple was “born out of compassion,”as political theorist Hannah Arendt observed, forged “by those who were exposed to the spectacle of the people’s sufferings, which they themselves did not share.” Le peuple—in her words—referred to “more than those who did not participate in government,” not merely to citizens, but to “the low people.”2 For a member of the revolutionary political class to prove his worthiness to represent the unhappy people—as Robespierre called them—he had to prove his ability to share their pain. Hence, the highest political virtue for more privileged revolutionaries became the ability to show compassion for the most unfortunate.
Arendt’s use of “spectacle” doesn’t suggest there’s anything outrageous involved, but simply that there is distance between the observer and the sufferer; that to the extent that feelings are shared between them, they are based purely on sight rather than on experience. Compassion–shared feeling–occurs when individuals experience pain together, or at least when the observer can imagine feeling the same pain. But the greater the distance between observer and sufferer, the more likely the compassion devolves into pity, a sentiment which implies hierarchy, even superiority. While most people would welcome the compassion of others, few wish to be pitied. To inspire pity makes one pitiful, and the pitiful, those who are deemed incapable of helping themselves, can inspire contempt.
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Manipulating outrage and white compassion for oppressed African-Americans worked well for civil rights advocates in the 1950s and the early 1960s. It was images of police brutality, German Shepherds, and firehoses that caught the attention of John F. Kennedy. A decade earlier, it was testimony that segregation damaged the personalities of black children that led to the decision in Brown v. Board. Yet, however effective politically, damage imagery—as sociologists call it—has its costs. For one, what appeals to white benevolence isn’t always what’s best for the group in question.
The great civil rights strategist Bayard Rustin insisted that it was “the virtues praised by the black preacher” that “ultimately became the strengths of the civil rights movement.” More than anything else, it was the “perseverance and courage—characteristics extolled from the pulpit each Sunday” that helped give ordinary people the bravery and self-control to face “the clubs, the firehoses, and the dogs.”3
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News stories carrying images of ICE agents aggressively nabbing immigrants sometimes come with quotes from psychologists warning of the long-term psychological trauma the children of the deported are sure to face. Sympathetic media invariably paint the very immigrants who had the courage and resourcefulness to uproot their lives and take their chances in a foreign land, as timid innocents.
Even the highest ranking defender of immigrants, U.S. Senator Alex Padilla shared his trauma in an emotional floor speech. He fought back tears as he recounted being handcuffed and dragged out of a press conference after he challenged the secretary of Homeland Security on ICE’s aggressive tactics.
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There’s little doubt that victimhood carries persuasive moral authority in American politics. It’s an inevitable part of political strategy. But it cannot be allowed to diminish the dignity of the very people who need support. Sociologist Jerry Gafio Watts argued that victimhood is ultimately a “parasitic status,” entirely dependent on the compassion–virtue–of the distant observer. 4
Fifty years ago, historian and sociologist Orlando Patterson warned that gains born of the politics of pity can wind up being Pyrrhic victories. “As long as one is in the position where one has to appeal to the moral sense and mercy of another person,” he wrote, “one remains, almost by definition, his moral inferior.”5 That’s because in a crisis like this, the moral superiority of the virtuous observers is elevated more than that of the victims themselves, which only reinforces the racial hierarchy all Latinos–not just the foreign born, and not just the undocumented–must contend with every day.
In 1963, novelist Ralph Ellison responded to a white literary critic’s contention that since the “real” black experience was one of unrelenting suffering, the black writer must always be commensurately outraged. Taking offense, Ellison responded by referring to an African American tradition that “teaches to deflect racial provocation and to master and contain pain.” It is a tradition, he wrote, “which abhors as obscene any trading on one’s own anguish for gain or sympathy; which springs not from a desire to deny the harshness of existence but from a will to deal with it as men at their best have always done.”6 I promise you, immigrants of all backgrounds share that same ethos.
When Donald Trump or his allies have demonized Latino and other immigrants, they paint them in exaggerated negative caricatures. Surely the defense of immigrants–undocumented or otherwise–should not resort to employing equally distorted depictions that ultimately serve to feed the moral superiority of the political/intellectual class.
Because in the end, if legislation is ever passed that will overcome America’s dishonest immigration policy–one that allows the U.S. to benefit from the work of people to whom it refuses to grant legal status–it will not be due to compassion. It’ll be because both sides of the aisle finally transcend moral hyperbole and admit that America needs tough, driven, resilient people to keep its economy growing.
- Harold Meyerson, “Trump is Provoking L.A. to Fire Up His Base,” Financial Times, June 9, 2025. ↩︎
- Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1990), 75. ↩︎
- Bayard Rustin, Strategies for Freedom: The Changing Patterns of Black Protest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 40. ↩︎
- Jerry Gafio Watts, Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 10. ↩︎
- Orlando Patterson, “The Moral Crisis of the Black American,” The Public Interest 32, (Summer 1973): 52. ↩︎
- Ralph Ellison, “The World and the Jug,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 111. ↩︎
