Cueta’s border fence in 2012. Photo by Mario Sánchez Bueno/Wikimedia Commons.

“No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.” This passage from Warsan Shire’s Home has become one of the defining lines of the 21st century, quoted beneath photographs of overcrowded boats, following wrecks and rescues in the Mediterranean, whenever another image forces the world to confront displacement, movement, and migration. The images that emerged from Ceuta—a Spanish enclave on the northern coast of Morocco, where thousands of people crossed from Morocco in late July—felt hauntingly familiar. People of all ages in the water, a sea of plastic sandals, clothes soaked through, phones and babies held above the waves. Families waiting for word that someone had made it across. A boy wrapped in a wet shirt, phone pressed to his ear before he’d even dried off, calling his mother. Aerial photographs reduced thousands of individual lives into what looked, from above, like movement itself. The geography had changed, but the visual grammar had not. A decade ago, the photograph of three-year-old Alan Kurdi gave the Syrian crossings a name and a face, briefly breaking through the language of crisis and provoking immense public empathy. Yet the crossings in Ceuta—or Sebta, as it is known in Arabic—were met, in many left-wing circles, not with empathy but with debates about geopolitics.

The resemblance between the images does not mean northern Morocco is Syria; the histories are different, as are the legal and political realities that shape the movement of human beings. Their familiarity reveals something worth sitting with: we have become remarkably fluent in reading images of migration while remaining surprisingly illiterate in reading images of empire. The camera arrives at the shoreline, but the history does not get captured in the frame. Images move us quickly; they provoke outrage, sympathy, and fear almost instantly. What they rarely do is explain themselves, and what we rarely do is think beyond the politics and geography we already know.

Canadian audiences, like those elsewhere, have encountered this visual archive before. The Mediterranean crossing became one of the defining images of the last decade, with photographs of overcrowded dinghies and exhausted families becoming synonymous with displacement itself. Canada responded with a humanitarian narrative that celebrated refugee resettlement, one that rightly transformed many lives while also drawing a quiet line between the carefully selected refugee and the person who simply arrives. Much of that welcome was, in practice, offloaded onto the public: private sponsorship groups fundraised, housed, and resettled families in numbers the government’s own systems could not have processed alone, letting Ottawa claim credit for generosity that citizens were doing the work of. That generosity was also politically useful. Canada resettles refugees every year, but the Syrian initiative allowed the government to expand that image of generosity without bearing the full cost itself. Months after the resettlement push began, Trudeau announced Canada’s bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council, and Canada’s ambassador to the UN later cited the country’s welcome of Syrian refugees as part of the case for why it deserved one. The bid failed in 2020, but the instinct behind it is worth naming: even a humanitarian........

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