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The newest influencers on social media aren’t the people you’d expect. They’re not Hollywood celebrities, cultural tastemakers, athletes, or late night comedians. Instead, they’re migrants, many of whom may not even speak English. They are arriving in America with only the clothes on their back and the smartphones in their hands, and they are using social media to document their journeys.
Why are migrants embracing social media?
If you’ve spent any time following the news recently, you’re probably aware that something strange is happening on our borders these days. There are entire caravans of migrants from all over the world trying to cross our borders in order to live here permanently. Many of them have traversed hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to get to the U.S.. They have crossed rivers, navigated jungles, hiked through forests, and dealt with an untold number of obstacles along the way, including dangerous smugglers and other criminals.
So maybe it’s not so surprising that many of them are choosing to document their journeys on social media. And some have been so successful that they are choosing to become “perpetual migrants” – they are taking the same dangerous journey, over and over again, just for the clicks. In some cases, they are creating detailed, multi-part series that can then be binge-watched by other aspiring migrants. All of this has turned them into instant social media celebrities in their home countries.
What’s particularly stunning is that it’s not just migrants from Central America or South America who are making the long, dangerous trek to America and posting content on social media. It’s migrants from literally all over the world. Some of the most popular migrant influencers are creating content not in Spanish, but in Mandarin, Hindi, Punjabi, Haitian Creole, and Persian.
And they have coined all kinds of terms to describe what happens on this journey, all of which are turned into hashtags that are instantly recognizable to migrants. For example, if you see a YouTube video labeled with the term “donkey video,” it refers to an informal route taken by migrants to get to America.
It’s getting to the point, in fact, in which you can become pretty selective about what types of migrant videos to watch. The most popular are those that feature the Darien Gap (the narrow strip of land that connects Colombia and Panama), since this is generally considered to be the most dangerous part of any migrant journey.
What to make of all this new social media content?
At one level, this new trend is extremely fascinating. Some have called this new social media content a “digital almanac” of what a journey to the United States is like these days for migrants. It’s sort of like a modern Ellis Island experience for the social media generation. Decades from now, kids will probably be searching social media, looking for YouTube videos from their grandfathers or great-grandfathers, to see how they came to America.
However, at another level, this new social media trend is very troubling. Things have gotten so out-of-control at the U.S. border that illegal immigration has turned into one of the hot-button political issues of the current presidential election. Elon Musk has even gotten involved in this issue, hosting live streams from the Texas border. That’s because states like Texas are so jam-packed with migrants that they are literally sending them to different states around the nation via bus or plane.
So the last thing we need right now is social media’s glamorization of illegal migration. At some point, the big social media platforms – and especially YouTube – need to realize that they are part of a growing problem now.
