| Illustration by Elaine Degale
In Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio’s Reuniting with Strangers, Monolith does not speak. In today’s world, the monolith experience of immigration and otherness stands quietly, absorbing the pain, displacement, and longing that surround it. Its silence is not empty. It is heavy with everything that cannot be said.
That silence becomes a fitting metaphor for immigration itself.
Migration is often discussed through legislation, detention numbers, pie charts, and political campaigns. Rarely do we speak about its emotional architecture: the grief of leaving home, the exhaustion of beginning again, or the quiet violence of existing in a country where one’s presence is continually questioned from one generation to the next. Immigration is not simply the crossing of a border. It is the multigenerational work of rebuilding a fractured sense of belonging.
A forever sort of resistance.
As another season of devastating wildfires scorches communities around the world, our collective attention shifts rapidly from one catastrophe to the next. Headlines change. Outrage fades. Yet the suffering remains.
This same pattern of selective attention despite collective violence is evident in our politics.
New York City finds itself at the center of fierce debates over taxation, housing, and immigration under Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration. While critics focus on proposals such as a pied-à-terre tax and the city’s political direction, another story unfolds beneath the noise: the continued fear experienced by immigrant families uncertain of what federal immigration enforcement may bring.
That fear deepened following the death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican construction worker who was fatally shot during an encounter with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Houston earlier this month. His death has prompted calls for an independent investigation and renewed national debate over accountability, transparency, and the human cost of immigration enforcement.
Salgado’s death is not simply another headline. It is a reminder that immigration policy is ultimately experienced through individual lives, families, and communities.
Bonifacio understands this. Reuniting with Strangers reminds us that migration leaves invisible scars. The immigrant often becomes a stranger twice: first upon arriving in a new country and later when returning to the place once called home. Displacement reshapes memory, identity, and family itself.
Monolith, therefore, becomes more than a literary character; he becomes the conscience of our age.
This conscience observes us as families cross deserts carrying children. It watches us as neighborhoods disappear beneath bombs. It witnesses as migrants harvest crops, build cities, teach in classrooms, and care for patients while perpetually treated as outsiders. It judges as we grow accustomed to statistics that once would have horrified us.
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza and escalating violence in the occupied West Bank have drawn increasing international scrutiny. While governments issue carefully worded statements, Palestinians continue to face displacement, military operations, and attacks by Israeli settlers. If history has taught us anything, it is that dispossession rarely announces itself all at once. It arrives incrementally. One home, one village, one family at a time… until someone decides to rename the landscape and call it progress.
“Bonifacio understands this. Reuniting with Strangers reminds us that migration leaves invisible scars. The immigrant often becomes a stranger twice: first upon arriving in a new country and later when returning to the place once called home. Displacement reshapes memory, identity, and family itself.”
Meanwhile, immigration policy remains one of the defining political battles in Washington. In contrast, Republicans remain divided over a House-approved budget framework that would provide $73 billion in additional defense spending while reinforcing the SAVE America Act to “protect” voting from the othered populace. Although President Donald Trump has urged lawmakers to approve the legislation before the August recess, Senate Republicans have questioned whether the proposal has sufficient support to pass.
The debate will continue. Bills will be introduced. Elections will come and go.
The deeper question is whether our capacity for empathy can survive the politics surrounding immigration.
Austria-Bonifacio’s Monolith rarely speaks because perhaps he does not have to. He reflects us. He’s a mirror that reveals what we choose to see and what we choose to overlook. As governments race to secure the silicon, critical minerals, and infrastructure needed to power the next generation of artificial intelligence through initiatives such as Pax Silica, questions about who ultimately benefits from these investments are becoming increasingly urgent. For many critics, the pursuit of strategic resources raises familiar concerns about land, sovereignty, and whether local communities will bear the environmental and social costs while others reap the rewards.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy is not that the Monolith remains silent.
It’s when he speaks because it’s an alarm that should then signal our collective conscience to question the silences we’ve grown comfortable with. In the meantime, the world continues to debate borders as though maps have feelings and people do not.
Washington debates immigration. Politicians debate security. Television panels debate optics. Somewhere between the talking points, families continue searching for homes that no longer exist.
Homes are sometimes reduced to rubble.
Yet even the language we use becomes strangely accommodating. Redevelopment. Security. Stability. Revitalization. Unalive. We have become remarkably skilled at finding polished words for broken places; polished words for broken things as if life’s tragedy is just kintsugi. Somewhere, a public relations consultant is probably workshopping a slogan while another family is packing what remains of its life into plastic bags.
Palestinian journalist Mariam Barghouti has argued that Israeli settlers and the military should not be understood as entirely separate actors because, in her view, both operate within the same system of domination – this same monolith of suffering we’ve normalized as we watch wildfires burn from Canada to the world.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Elaine Joy Edaya Degale is a Black-Filipina writer and lecturer at community colleges within the City University of New York (CUNY) and has an Ed.M. and M.A. from Teachers College, Columbia University.
She graduated cum laude from Mount Holyoke College, where she studied International Relations and Development, and continues to support literacy and food programming efforts in Indigenous communities through her Community-Based organization, OperationMerienda.org
