The Station Agent, writer-director Tom McCarthy's first feature film, was a tough act to follow. An intimate, occasionally madcap account of an unlikely friendship, the film was rightly regarded as a near-flawless character study, at once whimsical and profound. The Visitor, in contrast, feels deliberately urgent, suffused with the sense that 9/11 has rendered certain mostly unseen corners of American life Kafka-esque. But McCarthy's emphasis on character remains intact, and the result is a successful political movie that works precisely because it doesn't feel terribly political.

Like The Station Agent, The Visitor follows an engimatic loner, the academic widower Walter Vale. But this time his life is transformed when he finds a pair of illegal immigrants, the Palestinian Tarek Khalil and his Senegalese lover, Zainab, living in his New York pied-à-terre. After an awkward first encounter, Tarek bonds with Walter over the djembe, the West African drum Tarek teaches Walter how to play. All goes swimmingly until Tarek is spirited off, through no fault of his own, into the shadowy world of immigration enforcement. Walter struggles mightily to help Tarek, though it's clear that little can be done. Tarek's mother, Mouna Khalil, soon appears on the scene, and she forges a powerful bond with Walter in their shared desperation. I don't exaggerate when I say The Visitor is a tearjerker.

What The Visitor does, to its great credit, is humanize the victims of an unequal world. Without descending into maudlin sentimentality, McCarthy reminds us that illegal immigrants can be kind, thoughtful, sweet-natured people who deserve better than the caprices of an inherent unfair system. But of course anyone who has ever lived in an American city, which teem with hard-working illegal immigrants, needn't be reminded of that. For that matter, one assumes that most Palestinians and Senegalese are very similar to Americans in all of the relevant respects -- they want a better life for themselves and their children, they flourish in free societies. Insofar as The Visitor is making an argument, that our immigration policies are cruel and capricious, it is making an unanswerable argument. Virtually any approach to immigration enforcement will manufacture tragedy. Consider that, as the film reminds us, the default approach to would-be asylum seekers was to pretend to issue deportation orders without ever enforcing them. Now, after 9/11, the government is more likely to enforce them. And so some very kind, decent people are being torn away from the lives they've built. Surely this doesn't mean we should stop enforcing laws. Rather, it means we need more humane laws.

Yet even a more humane approach to immigration will generate tragedies of its own. For example, the economist Lant Pritchett has proposed that the United States alleviate global poverty through a large-scale guest worker program that would bring hundreds of thousands of workers to this country for short-term stays. But what about the guest workers who don't want to return home? Or the guest workers who don't want to work in a poultry-processing plant -- who would rather play the djembe? An impartial enforcement regime would in all likelihood send such free spirits packing, to allow in a new stream of economic migrants striving to get ahead. A less impartial regime might try to help out one or two hard cases, but it would be all the more capricious and arbitrary.

The only solution truly compatible with the moral vision of The Visitor would be a world of open borders. Perhaps that's the world we should strive for. But like it or not, that world is a long way off.

— Reihan Salam

Filed Under: 9/11, movies

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