With the recent refugee crisis in Europe, the issues surrounding DACA and the Muslim Ban in America, we seem to be facing a crisis in immigration. This crisis is communicated to the public through visual media--photographs, televised news, documentaries, YouTube videos-- that define our perception of reality. The question that undergirds and guides my research is "Can the empathy that is generated by looking at photographs and other media work to ameliorate the immigration crisis?" Cultural theorists are divided on empathy's social impact. Wai-Kit Ow-Yeong's has argued that empathy can serve as a strong motivation for public action. On the other hand, Saidiya Hartman and other critics of empathy have discerned in this affect a tendency to involve a single onlooker in the suffering of a single individual in a private interaction that impedes collective public action. However, both critics and advocates of empathy are united in the belief that empathy can initiate a change in public and private attitudes towards immigrants. Building on this belief, I aim to explore how, in our media-saturated age, photographs, in particular, can generate empathy as an affective resource for the amelioration of the immigration crisis.