From Bureau Chief to Uber Driver
For the Byline Podcast, Steve Scherer, former Foreign Correspondent for Reuters, talks to Adrian Goldberg about migration after his own enforced move from Canada back to the United States.
More than 300 journalists have been laid off by the Washington Post, the paper which most famously broke the Watergate scandal, in the latest legacy media jobs cull. Steve Scherer knows exactly how the Post’s redundant employees will be feeling. Two years ago, he lost his post as international bureau chief for the news agency Reuters in Ottawa, the Canadian capital, and now drives an Uber for a living back home in the United States after being forced to leave his adopted country.
Scherer confessed on the Byline Podcast that it’s been a difficult transition after working as a foreign correspondent for 25 years, not least financially. He now earns around a quarter of his previous income and lives just above the poverty line. By way of compensation, he has absorbed important life lessons – especially the value of migrants to Western economies.
As a reporter in Europe, he had witnessed at first-hand attempts to rescue African migrants by the Italian coastguard under the Mare Nostrum initiative launched in 2014, following a shipwreck off the island of Lampedusa, which killed more than 360 people the year before.
“At the beginning, the European Union and Italy were empathetic,” Scherer recalls.
“They wanted to save people who were risking their lives, because they realised that people smugglers were just pushing them out to sea, and didn’t care if they got there alive or not. That lasted a year, but under the pressure from anti-immigration parties who were gaining ground at the time, Italy was forced to discontinue it, essentially by the European Union. That’s when the NGOs came in and took up the slack.
“When I was on the ships [as a reporter] I was struck by just how many people they would cram onto these boats. It was terribly unsafe. They were not seaworthy and a lot of people died. Thousands and thousands of people died. It’s the world’s deadliest migration route still today.
“I was just struck by the indifference, because it was my job at the time to shine a light on that humanitarian crisis and nobody seemed to really care enough to stop it and to come up with a solution that was humane. It was a disappointing experience as a journalist, because I covered it really closely for several years, and it didn’t lead to any positive policy change.”
Despite his obvious empathy for the people he was reporting about, Scherer admits there were limits to his understanding of those who risked their lives on treacherous seas in an attempt to reach Europe. Whilst he acknowledges that his own experiences are very different to theirs, he says his precarious recent existence has given him greater insight into their plight.
“I had a hard time understanding, for example, the desperation that would drive a mother to take a child on a boat – even though I talked to them and I knew how horrible the conditions were in Libya – because it was just so dangerous. But now that I’ve been in a situation where you’re running out of money and you have to leave one country for another to find a job, I think it just brought me a little closer to those people who I used to cover and who I used to talk to. I told their stories for many years, and I guess I just feel more like I understand them better now. Not completely – you know, I’m not getting on a boat and risking my family’s life – but I am upsetting their lives quite a lot. I had to sell my house, I had to say goodbye to my friends, take my kids out of school. So it was a really humbling experience.”
Scherer was forced to relocate to the US when he lost his job, due to Canada’s strict immigration rules, relocating to the suburbs of Washington DC where, ironically, his new cab-driving role brings him into close proximity with migrants, whether first, second or third generation: “A lot of the people I pick up speak very little English, mostly Spanish, or they came here a long time ago, and they’re the ones essentially working the service economy, providing us our meals, taking care of us in the hospital, fixing our cars, teaching our children.
“The number of school teachers that I take to work is incredible. Pretty much all elementary school teachers, hardly any of them are white Americans, so it was eye opening. Most people think of Uber of as a way to get to the airport, or it’s something you take home after you’ve had a few drinks, but for a lot of people, it’s a basic service just to get to and from work in a suburb like the one I live in now, that doesn’t have great public transport.”
As a result of his experiences, Scherer rails against the denigration of migrants. In the US, this has been seen in President Trump’s so-called crackdown on “illegals”, implemented brutally by ICE. On this side of the pond, tax exile and Manchester United owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe recently complained that the UK had been “colonised by immigrants.”
Scherer said: “It really makes me sick. A lot of people distinguish between refugees and migrants [but] I don’t tend to. I think that everyone who is driven to leave their country and their friends and their family to try and find a better life in another country usually is going to be a hard worker, and they’re really just trying to find either a better way for themselves or their children.
“I don’t see any human difference between them and me, and I don’t understand how you could distinguish, just because of really a bureaucratic issue, that someone is ‘illegal’.
“It’s not illegal to exist anywhere. So I disagree with all of it. I’ve seen people come to Europe in those boats and make lives for themselves, have children and get married. They’re positively contributing to the countries that they live in. Their hard work is paying for the pensions of the Swedes and the Germans and the Italians, I just feel like they’re totally unappreciated.”
As for Scherer’s own future, he runs an uplifting Substack but understands that long-term staff jobs in legacy media organisations are becoming ever scarcer – as his own experience and the shrinking of the Washington Post demonstrates.
He’s still in the market for freelance commissions, but in the meantime, he’ll continue driving his Uber to earn a crust. There’s no trace of bitterness in his story-telling, but he does end with a simple plea for respect from those who are fortunate enough to enjoy more comfortable lives.
“One of the striking things about being part of the service economy is that nobody really notices you. You’re basically invisible. And that is really, really different from what I used to do, right? When I was a journalist, people knew my name and talked to me because they knew who I was.
“Now when they get in the back of your car, you’re just another face in the day and you’re basically forgotten as soon as they get out. It’s a very, very different feeling than I experienced as a journalist, that’s for sure. Try to recognise the people that serve you, because they’re just like you. It’s just that they have a different kind of job at a different income level.”
Listen to the whole interview on the Byline Podcast here:
Subscribe to Steve Scherer’s Substack here: