Australian journalists need to do better when it comes to reporting on migration

“Why do we live in a van?” asks Romanian journalist Elena Stancu of her unusual now decade-long lifestyle choice. “So we can be journalists, doing the sort of journalism that matters, documenting long-term subjects that rarely attract funding… extreme poverty, racism, school dropout, prisons, domestic violence, hospitals — and emigration.”

It’s a response that’s part business model (how do we pay for journalism?) and part journalistic practice: how do journalists report the current wave of global mass movement of peoples from the outside in? 

Stancu and her photographer partner Cosmin Bumbuț figured the only way they could report (and afford to report) the big inside story of the mass emigration of 20% of working-age Romanians was to join them on the road, living and working across Europe in a six-metre-long van. 

“In our van, any border between our work and our private lives is erased,” Stancu says. “We are our subjects, our articles. We spend more time living the lives of the people we document than our own. We park outside their homes or the lodgings in the strawberry fields; we are with them when they wake up, when they go to work, when they chat with their children on WhatsApp or when they have dinner.” 

On their website Teleleu.eu and in the biggest Romanian daily, Libertatea, they capture the migrant experience. The push and pull of home, the risks of getting — and living — away, the joys and the pain of carving out a new life that holds both the old and new in their hands, through the stories of people like Eugenia, a care worker in southern Italy, or Cristian, a lorry-driver in the English midlands, or Oana, picking vegetables in southern Germany while her daughter Lucia grows up with her grandmother back in Romania. 

World Press Photo winner Cesar Dezfuli has been using the inherent humanisation of photography to tell the story of the people caught in the migration route across the central Mediterranean through his ongoing project, Passengers.  

He started with a head-and-shoulders gallery of 118 people photographed as they were rescued in August 2016 after they’d been found floating in a rubber boat 20 kilometres off Libya. 

The power of the pictures comes from the frame-by-frame portrayal of young men, as they boarded the rescue boat, still in the T-shirts or open-neck shirts they travelled in, with only the blue sea stretching out behind them to the horizon. Call it the Instagram effect: the repetition and rawness of the moment wrench us inside the migrant reality far more powerfully than the edited and curated selections that we pass over as they illustrate daily news grabs.

One of his shots, of then-16-year-old Amadou Sumaila from Mali, won the 2017 Portrait Prize at Australia’s Head On Festival and was displayed at the Museum of Sydney. 

Dezfuli has stayed on the story: the year after the Sydney showing, he started to track down the 118 men. Starting with a single Facebook contact, he searched the web of social networks to find them spread across Italy, France and Germany. He documented their stories in their own voices and photographed their new lives and now, the before and after shots form the latest iteration of the work circulated through public showings.  

Much of our domestic reporting about migration is shaped by the ethno-nationalist populist kick-back — from our own Tampa moment, through Brexit and Europe’s 2016 migration crisis and onto Trump and America’s internal culture wars over the southern border.

Yet, in Latin America, most of the movement of people is happening internally as people find themselves pushed by domestic crises — from Nicaragua into Costa Rica, from Guatemala into Mexico and, most dramatically, from Venezuela into Colombia. 

It’s through journalism-focused not-for-profit foundations that they’re finding a voice. Invisibles.info (in both English and Spanish) uses migration as one of its four themes to tell the narrative of organised crime, while Conexion Migrante writes from the many different perspectives of migrants in, from and to Mexico. 

One recent report looked back at the experiences of undocumented Mexican migrants in New York in the midst of the pandemic. Another looked at the challenges of sexual abuse and health care for migrant women inside Mexico itself.

The migration story is often internal. In India, New Yorker writer Katherine Boo applied the empathic tools of fiction to write the remarkable prize-winning non-fiction book Behind the Beautiful Forevers about a Mumbai migrant community. 

The Wire asked “Who Are They?” about India’s urban migrant workers forced to walk across the country to their homes in the early days of the COVID pandemic. Eighteen months later, Cannes Prize-winning documentary journalists Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya covered the extraordinary exodus in The Great Abandonment. 

While around the world, journalists are finding new perspectives for telling the migrant story from the inside, Australian journalism remains mired in the post-Tampa Canberra political news cycle. It’s time to think ourselves inside the story.

Do you think that Australian journalists lack empathy when reporting on issues of migration? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.