I really enjoyed the chapters we read about the Pan-European Picnic in Matthew Longo’s book. I thought the book did a really good job of blending the broader macro-political events and even the personalities of the politicians with the reality of Hungarians, Austrians, and East German refugees on the ground. I would be curious to ask Matthew about his research process. I think something that is interesting about accounts of refugees that Matthew’s book highlights very well is that the experiences of refugees highlight the human duality of being insignificant and the center of one’s own universe. From one view, individual refugees are each an insignificance in the scheme of the world and history—a statistic— but at the same time from another perspective they experience epic struggles and stories with twists, turns, and angels which are beyond the imagination of most people who have not themselves been refugees. 

 

I found John McPhee’s reflections on writing leads very interesting and he has some great one-liners of advice. I was particularly taken with the idea that the lead is the first thing you should write. I was also taken with the idea that “A thousand details add up to one impression”, which I thought was very true of Longo’s description of the actual day of the picnic. 

 

I found it fascinating to learn more about the public discourse around migration in the US in the build-up to WW2 and see how many parallels there were between what was being said then and what is being said now in the US and Europe. There were several themes that I noticed in this discourse that particularly stuck out to me. 

The first is that there was a racialised hierarchy of immigrants. For example, the Immigration Act of 1924 made it easier for people to immigrate from England and Austria than from Italy and Greece. Another example would be the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was one of the few early successes of the “restrictionists”. This was in part because Chinese immigrants were perceived as a cultural threat as well as an economic threat. I think this is reflected today when we consider the discourse around immigrants to the US and Europe from the Middle East. Many people decry Islam as a threat to “Western life and values.” Ukrainian refugees, by contrast, were welcomed with open arms by people in the UK, as were dissidents fleeing Hong Kong, a former British colony. 

The next thing that struck me was how immigrants were blamed for economic downturns. The restrictionists were much more successful once the great depression started. I also noticed that Goudeau highlighted how many Chinese immigrants were based on the West Coast, which was economically depressed when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed. My understanding of the economics is not great, but as I understand it, immigration is often economically vital. The Reform Party in the UK has been making a particularly big deal of blaming immigrants on the UK’s economic difficulties which began with the 2008 financial crisis and then got worse with Brexit. 

Finally, I really liked Goudeau’s description of one part of the political discourse as “better safe than sorryism”. I feel like I have heard this type of argument made hundreds of times in contemporary discourse around immigration. I am curious to know if there was any what I would call “I-told-you-so-ism” which we see so much of now. What I mean by this is when an immigrant commits a violent or sexual crime, their status as an immigrant is held up as a sign that this was foreseeable and could have been prevented simply by not allowing them to enter the country.