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.”
On Witherspoon Street, just blocks from the looming FitzRandolph gates that mark the entrance to Princeton University, notices hang on three dozen homes announcing their proposed demolition. The plan centers on the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood, historically Black and now predominantly the home to Latin American immigrants, and reflects a contentious debate on affordable housing development that has consumed Princeton for decades.
“In the beginning, nobody from those houses were aware of that it was happening,” said Veronica Olivares-Weber, a former member of Princeton’s Health and Human Services Commission and a leader in the town’s migrant community.
The units that will be torn down are “not safe, stable, secure housing,” said Tom Pinneo, board chair of Housing Initiatives of Princeton and head of Pinneo Construction. Many of the homes, Olivares-Weber said, lack heating and basic services.
“They need to be changed to make sure that they’re in better condition,” she said, “but I want to see people from the old town making sure the families who are currently living there are going to have a plan.”
As Olivares-Weber understands it, Hillier Properties’ plan is to tear down 36 houses. Seventy-four new units will be built in their place. 15 will be designated as affordable.
Demolition notices put up months ago point to 13 additional constructions, 4 being affordable. Without a formalized plan, Witherspoon residents are confused about what will happen to their homes, Olivares-Weber said. Hillier Properties did not respond to interview requests.
Whatever the precise numbers, with only a percentage of the new constructions designated as affordable, most of the current residents will not be able to stay on Witherspoon. “The math doesn’t add,” she says.
Given the neighborhood’s history of displacement, Olivares-Weber fears how the demolitions could affect Witherspoon families, “they’re families that don’t have full time jobs; they work in restaurants, they receive low salaries, they don’t have income to put aside and say, ‘Oh, I’m going to go to another house.’”
Hillier Properties’ plans to prioritize current residents for smaller units behind the proposed renovated ones; pay relocation costs for the families; and help with their rent, said Matt Mlezco, the founder of affordable housing advocacy group Princeton Grows. This “would be such a great example of what smart equitable housing policy looks like,” he said. “Of course, my understanding is none of those plans are formalized yet.”
Olivares-Weber isn’t confident in this support. “They say they have a plan but haven’t put anything in writing,” she said. She described a lack of Spanish outreach and translators at community meetings, as well as a generally cold reception at the planning meeting they attended. “The feeling was that they were not very welcome in the meeting,” she said.
And even were financial support to be offered, Olivares-Weber fears displacement of families that have lived here for many years.
“Relocation means not only in Princeton. ‘Relocate’ can be in the towns that are close to Princeton,” she said. “These families, they don’t have a car, right? They’re walking to their work. They’re walking to their schools. If you’re being relocated to another town, you cannot go to the Princeton schools where your friends are.”
Tom Pinneo thinks that Princeton undervalues the economic impact immigrant displacement would have. “What if the workforce went on strike for a day or a week?” He said, “I think there would be like much more, holy cow, we really depend on these people.”
Olivares-Weber hopes for more concrete plans so that families can plan for the future. “Some people are scared. Some people don’t know what to expect. Some people are hopeful that they’re going to help them. And some people will look for places to go because they know it’s going to happen, but we don’t know when.”
Local affordable housing advocates point to an overall lack of affordable housing as the root of displacement worries on Witherspoon. “It’s easy to look really narrowly at any one development or any one redevelopment project and think about a lot of the short-term implications,” said Matt Mlezco, “but to understand how we got here, you have to understand the backdrop of decades of not doing enough to build and provide affordable housing puts a lot of pressure on housing now.”
Mlezco explained that, “part of the reason why so much attention gets focused on the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood is it’s one of the very few places in town where you can actually build apartments or anything that isn’t a single family detached house.” Were there affordable housing in other parts of town, a family leaving their home wouldn’t mean leaving Princeton, he said.
In its infancy, Princeton had two parts: a township wrapped around the borough, explains Justin Lesko, the Planning Director of Princeton’s Planning Board. The suburban zoning codes of the township and the more urban codes of the borough are still in place, he said. Therefore while the side of Witherspoon closer to campus is zoned for multi-family homes, farther from the university, only single family homes can be built.
Although the Mount Laurel doctrine of 1975 requires all New Jersey towns to provide their “fair share” of affordable housing, this was not enforced until 2015 when “the state judiciary finally stepped in and said, okay, enough’s enough,” Mlezco said.
Historic Preservation – a designation meant to protect historically significant houses – is often used as a tool to block the construction of affordable housing, says Tom Pinneo, who has won three Historic Preservation awards.
“Affordable housing overlays” in parts of Princeton can be used to build multi-family housing in areas zoned from single family homes, but the process is much more bureaucratic, Pinneo says. A house is “historic if you want to build affordable housing, it’s not historic if you just want to build another single family home”
With a “profound lack of affordable housing,” Mlezco said, a false binary choice of undignified housing or forced displacement has been normalized, but “it doesn’t have to be that way.”
Flanked by her late husband’s work uniforms hanging beside her podium, Carmen Luna called for an end to the exploitation and endangerment of migrant workers. She spoke at a press conference on September 17th announcing a lawsuit against Grace Ocean Private Ltd, the owner of the cargo ship that crashed into Baltimore’s Key Bridge in March. The collision killed her husband, Miguel Luna, and five other migrant workers. “We search for justice,” she said, “not for ourselves, but for all of the immigrant essential workers and their families.”
The announcement was accompanied by lawsuits from small business owners and the port of Baltimore as well as city, state and federal governments, all seeking to hold Grace Ocean Private accountable for the tragedy. The lawsuit on behalf of the victims’ families, however, stands as a call for more than economic compensation, Luna said. It also calls for protection to ensure that such tragedies don’t happen again.
Luna set the focus on a dangerous job that had put her husband at risk for years before the crash. She detailed the physical toll that her husband’s long night shifts as a welder had taken, leading him to hand surgery a few months before his death, and pointed out burn marks and holes in his work uniforms beside her. “We shouldn’t live with fear for our security while we provide for our families,” she said.
Early on the morning of March 26th, the DALI, a Singaporean-owned cargo ship crashed into the Key Bridge, a key point of transportation stretching across the port of Baltimore. Within a week of the accident, Grace Ocean Private filed a petition to limit their legal liability to $43.67 million. At the September press conference, Gustavo Torres, the director of CASA de Maryland, a migrant legal services organization, decried the petition as a quest to “erase accountability they owe to these families, to these men, whose lives were stolen.”
“This was an entirely avoidable catastrophe resulting from a series of eminently foreseeable errors made by the owner and operator of the DALI,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton in a DOJ press release. The Department of Justice joined local and state actors in filing a lawsuit as the September deadline to contest the petition approached.
Work-place injury among migrants happens “all the time,” says Dr. Barbara Cook. Dr. Cook founded the Access Partnership at Johns Hopkins University, providing free medical care to immigrants who don’t qualify for health insurance. She explained that employers in dangerous fields (roofing, tree cutting, construction) hire insured contractors, but actively seek out migrant workers who don’t qualify for insurance to do the “scut work.” In doing so, she said, employers bypass workers compensation requirements that come with a risky job.
“What an unbelievable tragedy that the very people who are most unseen are the ones who lost their lives,” says Matt Dolamore, Program Director for the Esperanza Center, which has provided social services for the families of the crash victims. “What it does show in a super clear, nationally — internationally prominent way is the hidden labor that migrants do every day that we completely fail to acknowledge,” he said.
Matt Dolamore and the Esperanza Center played a key role in the network of support that unfolded around the families of the victims. The morning the bridge collapsed, Baltimore City and County, each of whom had lost workers, asked the Esperanza Center to “play a case management role for the surviving family members,” Dolamore said. The city and county, he said, understood the mistrust between immigrant communities and the government, and relied on grassroots organizations like the Esperanza Center.
The Esperanza Center protected these traumatized families from media attention, distributed the hundreds of thousands fundraised for them, and coordinated complicated, international funeral processes, Dolamore said. Daniel Zawodny of The Baltimore Banner described how relatives living outside of the U.S. were granted “humanitarian parole,” that allowed them to come to the U.S. for the funerals. Likewise, Dolamore said, Maryland-based families were allowed to travel to their home countries for memorials.
The Esperanza Center and CASA de Maryland both applauded the government’s coordinated response. But the families deserve more than family funerals, says Gustavo Torres of CASA de Maryland, which organized the legal support of the families. “Justice means immigration reform including federal immigration relief, to ensure that immigrant workers are not vulnerable to dangerous worker conditions, work permits immediately, and citizenship now,” Torres said.
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?
