On Monday, America had its own Alan Kurdi moment.
The lifeless body of a not quite two-year-old washed up on the bank of the Rio Grande River, her nappy emerging from the waistband of her red shorts.
Valeria died in the arms of her father.
Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez tucked his little girl, her shoes still on her feet, into his t-shirt to ensure he wouldn’t lose her.
Even as they drowned, he never did.
Ramírez and his wife Tania Vanessa Ávalos had been held in a migrant camp on the Mexican side of the border. There was not enough food. Temperatures exceeded 43 degrees Celsius.
They'd come from El Salvador, a small and densely populated country in Central America, known for its widespread poverty, violence and corruption. The family was exercising their legal right to asylum.
Their hope was cruelly punished.
When Ramírez told his mother they would be heading north to the United States, she says she "had a feeling". One she now describes as "an ugly premonition."
While her son and granddaughter have taken their last breaths, the image of them, face down, on the doorstep of the home they so desperately wanted to enter, has become a symbol of the refugee plight.
We are viscerally reminded that we live in a world where some lives are worth more than others, and where human beings risk their lives to penetrate invisible walls.
We know this, though.
We know because the same thing happened four years ago, when the body of three-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi washed up on a beach in Turkey.
He looked almost asleep, and the world watched as his tiny body was laid to rest in a tiny coffin.
"It was something about that picture," Kurdi's aunt, Tima Kurdi, later said. "God put the light on that picture to wake up the world."
And the world did wake up. But only for a minute.
Kurdi and his family were trying to reach Canada.
Canadian Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander temporarily suspended his election campaign when it was discovered it was his own ministry who had denied Kurdi's uncle refugee status.
There was a spike in donations, volunteering and campaigning. We became interested. Refugees suddenly didn't look like war criminals. They looked like children.
But Syrian refugees continued to die. We just stopped seeing them.
One year later, after an airstrike on Aleppo, the photograph of five-year-old Syrian boy Omran Daqneesh became the universal symbol of civil war.
Sitting in the back of an ambulance, Daqneesh was dazed, his drawn face covered in blood and dust.
Daqneesh was what children looked like if they stayed.
Kurdi was what children looked like if they left.
But neither of those photographs, really, changed the world.
It has been only days since the body of Ramírez and his baby daughter were found in the shallows of the Rio Grande River, and President Donald Trump has responded with flyers of Australia's own policy on illegal immigration.
"Much can be learned!" he tweeted.
"You will not make Australia home," reads one flyer. "NO WAY," reads another.
How many children need to wash up on a shoreline before we realise that nothing will deter the desperate? That innocent people are dying because the door is closed, not because it is open?
Little Valeria, tucked into her father's t-shirt, who loved to dance and play with her stuffed animals, was surely one too many.
Top Comments
One could also ask what part of, “No” is ambiguous? But I suppose it is ambiguous to the extent politicians and others keep talking about how they should be allowed in, in full knowledge that is not the law.
The West has an organised and safe refugee process overseen by the UN. That is how you apply. If you run the risk of trying to enter any other way, the results can be tragic.
It’s not on the border force or those who want safe, orderly migration, this is on those who encourage dangerous and illegal attempts to enter countries in an improper manner.
The UN has actually called out the Morrison government on the processing of refugees in detention. More than once.
That’s good, shows the system is working and governments are being held to account. They’ve also called out people smugglers who are engaged in a global criminal conspiracy and don’t care in the least about people’s safety, overloading boats for profit.
An "organised and safe refugee process"? Are you kidding? It's a bit hat to apply when you live in war zone, have no education, no English and no documents.
You don’t need English to apply and aren’t we being a little racist and superior assuming people from other countries have no education?
Having left the war zone, you apply in the first safe country you enter. That worked for over 50 years for millions of refugees until the system became a profit centre for people smugglers. If you have the language skills and education and documentation to book an international flight half way across the planet to Indonesia, you have the skills to contact the UN or other authority.