The harsh reality of racial prejudice, and discrimination against immigrants foregrounded in The Visitor (2008), is similar to what is happening in America, Europe, Canada, and other parts of the world. Individuals such as Tarek have been marginalized and and have faced unjust consequences for being immigrants. Murru (2008) affirms the intolerance and the harsh treatment encountered in rich countries by many migrants, regular and irregular.
The indifference of bureaucratic power
Early in the film The Visitor (2008), as Walter drives from Connecticut to New York to deliver the paper he has supposedly co-authored, there is a “support our troops” sign on the highway. The sign is a reflexive affirmation of patriotism, presumptuous, the kind of thing—loyalty, obligation—that governments count on; and it gestures toward American soldiers fighting in Iraq, after the unrelated (or speciously related) September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attack. The question is not only what do we owe our government and its mandates; but, also, what is owed to us?
Taking the subway, Tarek uses his train card to allow Walter through and is himself entangled in the turnstile, and policemen, waiting and watching policemen, accuse him of jumping the turnstile, of fare-beating, and arrest him. Their response to Tarek is cold and suspicious, and, of course, when he is brought to the police precinct and it is learned that his status is not by law, he is detained. Kephart (2006) states that fear of terrorists makes middle-eastern men particularly suspect. As Tarek says, “terrorists have money and support” and are not vulnerable as he is (The Visitor, 2008).
Even with the lawyer Walter has hired, Tarek remains vulnerable to government whim, and subject to deportation without concern for his preferences or relationships. The irony is that Tarek’s father had been a journalist, and had run afoul of Syrian authorities, and was jailed; and by the time his father was freed the man was too sick to live. Johnson (2018) confirms that the way power works is often the same, no matter where one finds oneself.
The limits of white male privilege
Walter uses his authority against a student (refusing to accept a paper) and against Tarek’s mother (refusing to describe his proposed book); and both are moments of insensitive power, lacking concern for the feeling or the need of the other person. Walter’s increasing friendship with Tarek and with Tarek’s mother softens his responses, but, despite Walter’s hospitality to both, his private hospitality, Walter’s empathy and his money do not protect Tarek when it matters the most, in his dealings with public or political power. Walter assures Tarek’s girlfriend, Zainab, that they will be able to get Tarek out of detention, but he could not (The Visitor, 2008).
Walter visits Tarek in detention, in an obscure part of town (a space on the margins, apart from the main life of the city). Walter encounters a bureaucracy, and an indifference to human individuality and reasons, he would not have been faced with otherwise. In the prison, there is no privacy, and the lights are always on, and babies and letters are raised to the glass partition by visitors for viewing by detainees. Control and surveillance are constants. This shows that immigrants who are detained are treated as criminals. It is humiliating for an individual, and shattering for relationships. This is exactly what we learned in Gorski (2010) that the deficit ideologue justifies this belief by drawing on stereotypes already well-established in the mainstream psyche — stereotypes which paint disenfranchised communities (in this case, the immigrants) as deviant and dangerous.
As Johnson (2018) states that not all white are privileged and powerful. As we see that Walter learns the limits of his own power, neither the lawyer that Walter has hired nor Walter’s direct (intellectual, emotional, moral) appeal helps Tarek (The Visitor, 2008).
The rules regarding the powerless, such as Tarek, are what they are. What is ironic is that the guards in the detention center are African-American: so, blacks get to exert a power against foreigners that is otherwise turned against them. The vulnerability of the immigrants is devastating.