It was really helpful to read these four incredible long form pieces and see what they shared (and didn’t) in structure. The first three pieces that I read, “The Mother Who Changed: A Story of Dementia” by Katie Engelhart, “Anger and heartbreak on Bus No. 15” by Eli Saslow, and “When can we really rest” by Nadja Drost, to my eye, were all structured similarly despite the very different stories they were telling. Each started with a vivid scene and used its characters to illustrate the story of a larger issue, weaving back and forth between the story and historical and, at times almost scholarly, context.
I found “The Mother Who Changed” particularly interesting structurally. Englehart didn’t just weave between the story of her characters and the broader context, but had to tell almost two versions of the story as told by Diane’s daughters and by Denzil – the very basis of the piece was in the “then-self” v.s. the “now-self” of dementia, and in the ways that the people in dementia patients’ lives understand them differently.
Engelhart’s two sets of sources had diametrically opposed understandings of what had happened in the battle over Diane’s care, and yet Englehart managed to present them both respectfully without seeming to choose a side – this is the power and importance of the third party observer. Englehart would switch every few paragraphs from telling the story through the eyes of Diane’s daughters and from those of Denzil, consistently showing two different versions of the same moments.
When Englehart did throw in her own voice, however, was in the large sections of the piece that went through the history of the frameworks for assessing capacity. These sections felt almost more like academic writing – she would write for many paragraphs using scholarly sources and quotes from academics, and even include her own analysis and claims. One moment that stuck out to me was when she wrote that,
“In our own lives, we insist on the right to make our own choices, even bad ones — what is sometimes called “the right to folly.” As independent agents, we are free to be unreasonable and unwise and to act against our own best interests: maybe because of flawed reasoning, or just because we want to. But with older relatives, we often insist on prudence over passion.”
I read this as her own analysis, not as coming from a source – it’s cool how with long form at this level, journalists can play with the rules.
The Darien Gap and bus pieces similarly used a specific set of characters as a framework for telling a larger story, gliding between anecdote and context. The final piece I read though, “What Bobby Mcilvaine Left Behind,” felt different. Senior told the story from a personal perspective – her relationship to Bobby and his family was a key part of the story. The piece read almost as a profile of Bobby and of his family, rather than using it as an illustration for a bigger phenomenon.
Author: Annalisa Jenkins
Julia Preston’s piece in Foreign Affairs was a damning indictment of Trump’s migration rhetoric and a warning of what would come with his election. It was written in October as a plea to not underestimate the danger of a Trump presidency or to discount his nativist rhetoric. It’s a bit surreal reading it now, two weeks after he was elected. It feels like we’re marching towards an abyss of fear, chaos and uncertainty. How are we meant to be, as journalists and as people, in a society where truth seems to make no difference?
Preston’s piece was one of countless pieces outlining the blatant mistruths spread about migrants and about Kamala Harris’ record. “In a relentless barrage of mistruths, Trump insists that the influx of undocumented migrants under Biden is on the order of 21 million people, a wholly made-up figure,” Preston wrote. But none of it pierced through or seemed to make a difference. I admit to feeling pretty lost – how do we move forward if the truth doesn’t matter? What is the role of journalism if calling out blatant lies and hatred doesn’t seem to make a difference?
On a more tangible note, I thought that Preston made a concise and compelling explanation of how devastating mass deportations would be on every level. She spoke of individual trauma, family separation, community destabilization, and the incredible blow to the economy. She wrote of how Harris had planned to build legal pathways “for undocumented immigrants, especially the farm workers who make up nearly half of the nation’s agricultural labor force.” In research for my sociology class, I stumbled upon a staggering figure: one out of nineteen civilian workers in the United States are undocumented (Gleeson). “Trump’s plan to shrink the country’s labor force, Posen wrote, “‘is both broadly and deeply self-destructive,’” Preston wrote.
Another important part of Preston’s article was on the total dysfunction of the asylum system. The system was created in the 1980s, and was “never designed to handle large numbers of migrants,” Preston wrote. Before hearing Preston speak at the church in New York, I had no idea of the history of the asylum process. Speaking with her has emphasized how important it is to understand the history, intention, and practice of migration laws – a daunting task given the extreme vagueness and complexity of the system. “Since 2010,” Preston wrote, “changes in the populations that were migrating, and the failure of Congress to update the system with new legal channels for refugees and laborers, have made asylum the default access for migrants coming to the southwest border.” The border crisis is fostered and fed by dysfunctional and destructive immigration policies that were not designed to deal with migration as it is today.
The next four years under Trump are terrifying – I hope we finally start to take him seriously now that he’s been elected, for as David Graham wrote, “If personnel is policy, as the Ronald Reagan–era maxim states, then the president-elect is deadly serious.”
The readings this week brought up a few things for me. The first: I really had no concept of the scale at which migrants were coming into the United States. I grew up in Baltimore, which, in my understanding, has generally been a place migrants come to as a second or third stop after arriving in the U.S., but not as a port of entry. Far from the Southern border, and with the much bigger cities of D.C., Philadelphia, and New York just a few hours away each, the stories of mass-migration always felt pretty abstract and far away. I’d read and seen news before, of course, documenting the sheer numbers of people fighting to find a place to exist, but reading about the overflowing shelters and emerging camps of homeless people really put some visuals to it for me.
Governor Abbot’s bussing plan is unlike any policy I’ve ever heard of; it just sounds sort of absurd. “Bus by Bus, Texas’ Governor Changed Migration Across the U.S.” shows how inhumanely it was done, not coordinating with groups that receive immigrants, sending them at odd hours to different places, and refusing to work with the receiving cities. It was clearly not a plan created with the interest of the migrants in mind, and there were parts that are downright petty (two buses showing up at Kamala Harris’ house in the middle of the night?!).
But the plan has also done what it set out to do. I know how abstract migration through the Southern border felt growing up on the East Coast. Abbott is right that Democrats (myself included) have ranted on about his harsh border policies with no understanding of the reality of the situation, and it was important that the rest of the country see the scale and stakes of what is happening. It was wild to read about New York City, go back on its policy requiring the provision of a bed to people that need it. It is obvious that more resources are needed to help transition migrants into the U.S; New York’s ICE appointments are booked through 10 years out (City and State NY).
And yet, the readings also showed that we know how to do this. The United for Ukraine policy created a seamless entry for Ukrainian refugees into the country. They were sponsored by families, spreading out all over the country, and immediately allowed to work. There was no narrative of the “burden” the migrants were putting on the country, nor of them “stealing” jobs.
This point of work seems to be the essential one. In NYC, the mayor was pleading with the federal government to extend TPS to the migrants coming in so that they could work, which people desperately wanted to do. As soon as the government granted Venezuelans TPS, 60,000 began working, allowing them to become self-sufficient (City and State NY). Why would the government refuse to allow asylum seekers to work, ensuring that they remain unable to provide for themselves? The articles highlighted how differently immigrants coming from different places are greeted.
Throughout Michael Longo’s The Picnic, I was fascinated by the relationship between Austria and the Hungarian resistance. Early on in the book, we see young activists embrace Otto von Habsburg, the would-be heir of their former imperial force. To these young revolutionaries, Austria represented freedom and life beyond repressive communist rule. I understood both their initial skepticism and their eventual admiration; there was a palpable sense of hope and even shared identity.
What surprised me a bit was the way Austrian officials seemed to meet this sentiment with a sense of responsibility. As the Eastern German refugees of Hungary finally broke through the Iron Curtain, they were met immediately with warmth and acceptance from the Austrian government, taken to inns, given food, and being transported to Vienna (Longo 161). I was initially taken aback when I read this, and then tried to understand why I had reacted that way. In my lifetime, aside from perhaps a short period after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I have never seen a population of refugees greeted with such immediacy, responsibility, and even an apparent sense of joy. Granted, this was a single paragraph from an author’s perspective detailing one mayor at a heightened and momentous occasion. But the reception still felt different to the headlines I grew up reading about Syrian or Central American families fighting for a space to exist.
Reading Jessica Goudeau’s The Last Border helped to verbalize some of these swirling questions and the context behind them. Borders have always existed out of fear for the other. The first immigration restrictions in the U.S. were born out of intense fear of the “cultural threat” that Chinese immigrants brought to California in the 1880s (Goudeau 95). Eugenics drove the quota systems of the early 20th century (Goudeau 97). And the iron curtain was “A shield defending them from the forces of capitalism and unrepentant fascism inherent to the west” (Longo 23). The immigration history I have learned about for years is one of cruel, racist, eugenetic and harshening restrictions on those trying to enter the United States.
I hadn’t learned about the period that Goudeau describes directly after WWII, where the U.S. threw open its doors to displaced Europeans. I was fascinated by the way it happened, built upon an identity of powerful benevolence and heroic saviorism. Was this replicated in Austria? Did it welcome Eastern German refugees to show itself as a symbol of freedom and opportunity? Or was there a true, lingering identity of kinship? Did the welcome last as more refugees came? Was this a universal reaction or was there opposition? How did that feeling change once the wall came down for good? This is a part of the world and story I know very little about, I look forward to exploring it through the lens of reporting. Journalists were present at every stage of these stories, capturing people in intimate, often tragic moments. What is a journalist’s responsibility in these moments? When are they being exploitative?
