Tyler Jager ’18 on Aligning Theory with Reality and Making an Impact

By Meredith Morin

As a student at Burr and Burton, Tyler Jager ’18, was influenced by the relationships he forged with faculty, and he was moved by the power of narrative voice and scholarly inquiry. His time at BBA built on Jager’s lifelong interest in his own family’s immigration story, which traced his roots back to the Russian Revolution of 1917, then France, then to the United States. Jager also credits his growing interest in immigration and its global humanitarian effects on the anti-government protests and uprisings in the early 2010s, known as the Arab Spring.

His interest in the power of humanity and care led Jager to pursue volunteer humanitarian work in Greece as part of a maritime searchand-rescue aid organization helping displaced refugees fleeing to Europe from Afghanistan and Syria, among other countries. Jager worked on the island of Lesvos in Greece the summer after he graduated from Burr and Burton and before he began college at Yale University. Jager went on to pursue a joint BA/MA at Yale in political science, specializing in political philosophy and comparative politics. He also completed a multi- disciplinary academic program (akin to a minor) in the human rights program at Yale. Jager completed his BA and MA in December and graduates this May.

Jager’s experience in Greece inspired him to enter the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics Essay Contest in 2022. His essay, “Navigating the Border Between Hospitality and Justice: Refugee Pushbacks, Search-and-Rescue, and the Ethics of Solidarity” won first prize and earned him $10,000, which he hopes to split among a few search-and-rescue organizations in the Mediterranean.

In 2020, Jager worked for Vermont State Senator Kesha Ram’s senatorial campaign as her Director of Policy. During the pandemic, Jager took time away from Yale to work as an editorial intern at Foreign Affairs Magazine, a publication dedicated to foreign policy and international relations. “It was a really cool way of synthesizing the kind of writing I started out doing in college. I didn’t have a traditional journalism pathway. I was coming to write more from an interest in scholarship,” he said.

In his Elie Wiesel prize-winning essay, Jager describes the work of non-governmental organizations to provide tactical aid and support to refugees escaping over the sea and the heartbreaking practice of pushbacks, the illegal system of forcibly expelling refugees over an international border directly protracted periods in terrible conditions. Often, these detainments come right on the heels of immediate search-and-rescue efforts to clothe and feed refugees, creating an uneasy relationship between the rescuers and the refugees and also between the volunteer rescuers and governmental law enforcement.

In his essay, Jager describes the role of the maritime search-and-rescue aid organization that he volunteered with in Skala Sikamineas, a fishing village on the north shore of Lesvos, Greece. Jager was part of the “land crew” tasked with scanning the sea for small boats of refugees, as well as staffing and stocking the reception center and aid tent in a transition camp, meant for helping refugees

Graffiti on an abandoned factory building on the island of Lesvos shows local frustration with the Moria refugee camp.

–TYLER JAGER

after seeking asylum. Jager ponders the often fraught relationships between non-governmental organizations that seek to shelter, feed, and clothe refugees in the short term with the policies of the countries receiving the refugees and the practices of receiving countries’ law enforcement.

“In the Mediterranean Sea, aid organizations coexist in an uneasy symbiosis with the authorities,” Jager wrote. “They must work within border and asylum regimes to stay operational, even when they know their presence could work to legitimate those abusive systems.”

Jager described the commonplace practice of authorities who expel refugees or detain them for for a few days. “During my time in Lesvos, I never met an aid worker who felt that the services and provisions we provided were adequate,” Jager wrote. “In the face of the physical and mental injustices that our clients would experience in the asylum system after we saw them, our work often felt like a drop in the ocean.”

The larger juxtaposition between providing immediate aid with the lack of systemic support for refugees was frustrating, Jager said. “We took on responsibilities designated for larger organizations like UNHCR because no one else would,” he wrote. “To stay licensed, we had to comply with the requirements of the Hellenic Coast Guard and the EU immigration authorities, even as we knew how exploitative they could be.”

Despite this frustration, years after his experience on Lesvos, Jager reflects on the concept of charity vs. duty. “The conclusion that I came to in the essay is, even if you know that it’s true (systemic exploitation), it doesn’t release you from the ethical obligation to do something that is unquestionably the right moral thing to do,” he said.

Throughout his study of humanitarian ethics, both on the ground in Greece, and in his studies at Yale, Jager said, “There are some academic scholars that think that the sludge of reality is one thing, and thinking of things in a purely academic way is another, and it’s important not to be distracted by things that are everyday injustices or issues is your life.”

But in his work in Greece, Jager realized that it is important to see that systemic reform necessary to make real and lasting change is not free from a relationship with these ‘everyday injustices.’ And, Jager believes that this idea of seeing the alignment of these two issues, rather than their opposition was something he learned at Burr and Burton. “At BBA, we have a rich tradition of seeing those two things as connected,” he said. “And, that is definitely something that I want to take with me, both in this essay and beyond.”

Jager was encouraged to enter the Elie Wiesel essay contest by Jim Silk, the Binger Professor of Clinical Human Rights at Yale. As he was beginning the work to enter the contest, Jager enrolled in a class taught by The New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman. Stillman’s work focuses on immigration policy, which helped Jager determine that journalism can be a powerful force for change.

A highlight of winning the essay contest was meeting Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel’s family. Wiesel, who died in 2016, was a writer, political activist, and Holocaust survivor. “He was such an icon of narrative writing and thinking about ethics,” Jager said. “I will always be very sad that I didn’t win this contest a few years earlier before he passed away. All the same, I’m so happy to be associated with the Foundation.”

Jager returned to the island of Lesvos last summer, spending three months there to write his senior thesis about how aid organizations themselves can affect the perception of refugees. During his initial volunteer project, Jager witnessed an unexpected issue when it came to the public’s perception of refugees. “People’s opinions of refugees really depended on their relationships with these aid organizations,” Jager said. “Greece is not a rich country,” and he said that the local perception of “diverting” needed resources to refugees was real and divisive. “I found that people were developing this emotional and moral criterion for these humanitarian aid organizations. They were attaching meaning to whether these organizations were creating dignity for Greeks as well, and I found that a lot of that hinged on the individual aid workers. Because humanitarian aid workers are not always well-behaved.”

Jager witnessed firsthand the damage of refugee stereotypes. “With immigration narratives, there are so many stereotypes,” he said. “You either have the ungrateful refugee or the DREAMer (students who are beneficiaries under the DREAM Act) who was the valedictorian. And, most people aren’t in either category. They are more complicated than that.”

One important takeaway for Jager both from his experience in Greece and through his essay is that he hopes to work “in the realms of systemic change and politics.”

Experiencing that conflict between real and immediate needs and broader systemic change helped Jager envision ways to encourage change on a more global scale. Jager hopes to pursue an academic career in law, perhaps as a clinical professor. “That’s the hopeful plan— it’s a long path. Teaching and education have always been interesting to me,” he said.

For some current students, Burr and Burton’s mission of “educating students intellectually and morally for a life of responsibility, integrity, and service” might feel more like aspirational rhetoric. Yet, as students become alumni, and as alumni become working adults, many find that the care and intention of Burr and Burton’s mission as an independent school that serves the public with the express goal of providing opportunity for all, have become a part of who they are and what they pursue in deep and lifelong ways.

For Jager, his time in Greece was life-changing. He said, “I think it changed me in the extreme.”