Author: Frankie Solinsky Duryea (Page 1 of 2)

Surprise surprise, I really enjoyed all these Pulitzer Prize winning articles. For all the similarities these articles had, I thought they had some pretty significant distinctions too. It’s my second time reading the Jennifer Senior article, which personally raised questions about the value of re-reading, and I have to honestly say I just love it – definitely my favorite of the articles. I was immediately struck by the beginning. I find it relevant to note that each article this week begins with a physical image (a photograph, omitted elements of last-week’s pieces on structure). The writing then also begins with an image, transitioning into a scene, with the second section really acting as the nut graf; similarly, Drost’s and Engelhart’s articles begin with scenes from the “starts” of the tension in the story (though Drost’s arguably isn’t exactly the start). All three articles then zoom out into context, but do so in different ways. I was appreciative of the historical context Drost provided (which I don’t remember being present in the recent Atlantic Darien piece). The context in the other two was very character driven, Engelhart making this broad sweep over Diane’s life, while Senior makes her context very personal. I’m amazed that even the background in her article comes through with the “I” so deeply entrenched; the “you” too. Sam articulated in his reading response the difficulty of getting across background without boring the reader. I agree that part of why Senior’s article is so successful is that it feels personal, and conversational – even the context is related to her. More generally, though Bobby and his family are the obvious throughlines, I’d argue Senior uses herself as a main narrative vehicle. And it works really well! I also was surprised by what I felt was an absence of “nut-grafs” across the three articles. All the writers seemingly develop their “points” in the second sections, building on them over time.

While I understand Drost’s impulse to have her story be basically linear, all scene-based, I found it difficult to understand the point at times. As a result; especially when her story ends, I wanted to scream out “but this isn’t the end!!” and something about her narrative construction made it feel like it was supposed to be. Maybe this is a more general critique, but I felt like her article did so much more “showing” than “telling.” I realize that is what we’re constantly advised to do, but I honestly would’ve appreciated some telling. Where was the data? How their story played into larger narratives felt lost to me. Senior, on the other hand, did such a great job of bringing her story out into other contexts. I mean, let’s talk narrative deviation… a three paragraph section devoted to the relationship between 9/11 denialism and January 7th? Human grief relating to political grief? How interesting is that! I really do find those asides so spectacular, and I thank god for whatever editor let her do that. Also enjoy academic / literary asides, from Senior and Engelhart. They both punctuate the middle points of their articles with intellectual background, but they do so in ways that don’t feel overwhelming. These articles raised for me the need to think about overlapping storylines and arcs. These are all so successful, in my mind, because they have multiple moving parts. Each character feels like they have their own character arc to consider (is this a helpful way of thinking about writing?) Especially Senior’s! There’s so much going on that by the end, I had almost forgotten about the initial diary, yet I never lost excitement. I hope this article would make McPhee jump for joy – it’s an exact articulation of his idea that a story should have multiple endings. Every section near the end could be the closer, and it kept me really at the edge of my seat. There are no “exit ramps” in the story, it continually felt like there was more to get, and I thought that was the result of overlapping stories. She writes that “If you’re going to cede the power of the last word to someone else, you’d better be damn sure that person deserves it.” and then she does cede that power to Bobby in the end! Blows me away.

Thinking also about sentence-level structure: Senior and Engelhart both use “he said she said” setups at points. I can’t tell how I feel about these… I worry about sensationalizing a story. Lines like “But she still had it, just so you know.” feel like too much. I understand we have to learn the rules and then break them, but it still feels weird to see them broken so clearly. Should we think about longform akin to book-writing, just a little bit? I think part of why Senior’s article is so great is that it reads as if it’s a section from a book (and it’s interrupted by an ad for her book On Grief).

One last thing, and I just want to take a step back from structure and consider theme. Drost’s article has a clear individual story that it tells – it’s bringing attention to the conditions in the Darien gap (though the fact that another very similar story had to be written only three years later, and nothing had changed, is maybe a bad sign). But Engelhart and Senior are answering vague questions. More than anything, they’re complicating our understanding of grief and memory; of healing and autonomy. They’re huge questions, and fun to grapple with. But how do you even take on such large questions, and what are you supposed to take from their articles? Maybe I can say I learned specific things from Engelhart’s, that I could bring into conversations about dementia and conservatorship. But with Senior’s, I’m not sure I can articulate what I learned. I hope it’s clear from my previous comments that this isn’t a critique – I loved this article, seriously. Deeply deeply impressed by her writing. But I finished reading the article, went to eat dinner with my family, and the conversation immediately turned to my grandmother’s death and the grieving we all went through / are going through. Our conversation circulated around grief processes for like ten minutes, and I found myself unable to bring up the Senior article. I just had nothing to say in respect to it. I couldn’t define one key point from it, one thing that would actually help with the personal experience of grieving that we all feel. But the story touched me personally. I believe there’s a lot of value to that. Maybe it’s good that the story resists narrative closure. Maybe this a long winded way of saying that I’m happy there was no clear resolution to the article, and it inspires me to take on unanswerable questions through longform. All to say I loved these articles.

[I am hoping that my article will be able to begin with a scene about Maryam Yusufi and her friends. Maryam was a journalist in Kabul, now she’s an influencer in the United States. Ideally one of her friends is seeking asylum or on humanitarian parole – i can then introduce the threat that the Trump administration poses, while talking about the forced roles of American society]

The history of US-Afghanistan relations begins in the 1980’s, but the conversation about Afghan refugees is most often framed by the United States’ withdrawal from the region in 2021. 

When US troops stopped supporting the Afghan government, many knew the Taliban would take control, but the immediacy of the invasion was without precedent. As the Taliban stormed Kabul in mid-August of 2021, the outflow of Afghans skyrocketed, airports overrun and refugees fleeing to wherever possible. 

In an attempt to salvage a dire situation, the Biden administration expedited resettlement processes for Afghans; Special Immigrant VISA programs and humanitarian parolees were transferred to secondary vetting sites en masse, bringing 76,000 Afghan evacuees into the US. Popular media scolded the government’s failure of a withdrawal, while decrying conditions at the military facilities that Afghan evacuees were held at; the number of evacuees falls far behind the number of eligible refugees. 

Now in the United States, many of these Afghan refugees fail to find work and integrate. According to a study by the Immigration Policy Institute, only 61% of Afghan immigrants in the U.S. were employed in 2022. Other figures were equally grim: the median household income for Afghan families was $48,000, compared to $75,000 for the average immigrant household. 

[I’m not sure whether Zahra is the best person to go with, considering she’s spent most of her time in Canada] 

Zahra Nader is part of an earlier group of Afghan immigrants. In 2017, she moved to Canada with her husband. The first female foreign correspondent in Kabul, with experience at the New York Times, she didn’t expect the job-search to be so difficult. She recalls asking around, about how to find work. “I was often told that you don’t necessarily come from Afghanistan and, you know, become a journalist here,” she said.

“I was very depressed,” she remembers. “Suddenly, because I’m living in a safe country, that meant that I was no longer relevant.” Her experience is not uncommon. Many members of the upper-middle class evacuated after the fall of Kabul, as they immediately faced threats from the Taliban. Here, English-language difficulties and a lack of job-training make employment difficult. 

Hope for Nader wasn’t lost: In 2021, she used her savings (which she had intended to use for the construction of a new home back in Afghanistan) to open The Zan Times, a newspaper that highlights Afghan women’s stories in Afghanistan and abroad. 

But she knows her success story isn’t common. “When you’re an immigrant, and things are very tough here too, especially with the new American administration, you can imagine how much it will become more difficult for people to risk their lives to come and then be sent back,” she said. She, like many Afghan immigrants who have found success in the US, is worried about what the new administration means for them.

“We feel like we’re stuck in between a rock and a hard place,” said Arash Azzizada, co-founder of the non-profit Afghans for a Better Tomorrow. “Which is a US that harms our community and a gender apartheid being instilled by the Taliban.”

Azzizada’s organization works with recent Afghan refugees, most of whom resettled in New York City. He said that increasingly, he’s seeing Afghans who qualify for SIV status coming through the US’ Southern border, with or without documentation. The process of applying for asylum takes a long time – even when expedited – and for many Afghans facing the threat of violence, that time could cost them their lives.

Now in the US, Azizzada sees these migrants (regardless of how they enter the country) struggling to find suitable work. “They’re civil rights leaders, you know. Women’s rights activists, diplomats, people who were really big deals in their home country,” he said. “And now, they’re sitting in a city run shelter.”

He, like all the Afghans I spoke to, insists on the gratitude felt by evacuees and refugees. Conditions in Afghanistan continue to deteriorate. “Our people were fleeing famine, Taliban persecution,” he said. As of May 2024, more than one third of Afghans are experiencing acute food insecurity. And conditions, especially for women, continue to deteriorate. Girls are denied access to education after the sixth grade, and a recent law outlawed women’s voices in public places. 

[Here could be a good place to include the story of women currently in Afghanistan once Wahid connects me with them]

Azzizada, Nader, and Yousufi all decry the conditions in Afghanistan. But, Azzizada continues, that doesn’t excuse the way Afghans are treated in the US. “You said you stood with us, and then with the way the withdrawal happened, and with the way you’re treating us now,” he said. “It’s just a sense of deep betrayal.”

Azzizada points to the Trump administration as a further threat for Afghan refugees. He said that while Afghans themselves are a divided voting block – many older Afghans immigrants dislike the democratic party and voted for Trump in this election [i would like to expand on this point, if it fits into the article at large.] – refugee-aid organizations like his are very concerned for what the Trump administration’s policies will look like.

In Trump’s first term, he failed to bring Afghan voices (especially those of women) to the negotiating table with the Taliban; his promises to end humanitarian parole and deport undocumented immigrants now threaten the livelihood of many Afghan-Americans, who wonder where they will go, with Afghanistan impossible to return to. 

Trump’s administration poses an even stronger threat to women. Facing gender-apartheid at home, Azzizada said that many Afghan women refugees are coming to him asking how Trump could possibly be in power. “I think the Trump administration poses a threat to women worldwide,” he said, “And that includes Afghan women.” 

Between encroaches on bodily-autonomy, migration persecution, and public statements that belittle female colleagues, Azzizada said Afghan women are shocked by what they’ve heard from Trump. Hearing about what’s happening in Afghanistan, he said that Trump’s administration is “a subtle reminder of what they fled in the first place.”

[really hoping i can get some scenes while in Virginia this weekend. Eating dinner with Maryam and co on friday night, that could be a good lede. I will try to meet with them again on sat or sun (potentially a place to return to, as a closer? Also going to meet with some less privileged (more recent) Afghan evacuees there (either through AWA, VACC, Wahid, or Azzizida). Hoping to find someone who would be a good stand-in for Zahra. I also have my interview with Nasiba Maqsudi and my talk with Davoudi from HIAS – I didn’t want to use either of those scenes in this, because I’ve already written them. But hopefully i will also get a lawyer to talk about the specific challenges threatening Afghan migrants, I’ve written a couple and will follow up. Right now, it’s hard to focus my article specifically onto the points i want to be making, so I assume much of this will be cut]

I really enjoyed these articles, in how they help visualize the writing process. Particularly with Rosenthal’s article, I was reminded of the classic video of Kurt Vonnegut drawing story structures on a blackboard; I’m continually reminded of the benefits forays into fiction-style provide. Drawing from other genres of writing, and thinking about journalism as the collision between narrative and informational, hopefully will inform my writing a little more. Great quote from George Saunders (which I’m going to butcher) along the lines of “ you should write how you talk and think, so talk the way you want to write,” which more generally I think applies to the idea that our output is founded in curation of our input. Reading varied writing that I appreciate is the best way to write how I’d like to. I also was interested in the way McPhee celebrated the theme-driven story narrative, in opposition to the chronological one; I wanted to read Preston’s article analyzing its structure, so I broke it up and was happy to find it constantly disrupted chronology. It started in the present election, jumped back to 2021, moved forward, then jumped back to 2016 and moved forward, then jumped to the present, only for a brief encounter with Eisenhower in the far-past. I see how this structure works – and it works well for this analytical / opinion style article – but I’m wondering whether I’ll be able to do something thematic for my longform article. I was just writing out a layout, and I’m wondering how to plan my article before getting the sources and interviews? Is that even a good idea, or should i just immerse and figure it out after? Hard to know how much to prepare without it interfering with my openness to change, in the moment of reporting. 

Despite really enjoying these articles, I’m having a hard time immediately transferring them to my practice. One thing I got from the McPhee piece was how personal his process is – it feels very dependent on the kind of person you are. He talks about the personalized system that was created for him on Kedit; we now have so many different programs we could use, but choosing one is daunting. There’s a turn towards online softwares, and I agree that they’re helpful; transcription softwares especially save so much time, and google drive does a great job of keeping my information backed up and easily accessible. My immediate thoughts were 1) people are turning towards AI to help in their articles… I get that it’s a helpful tool, but I worry that it’ll take away creative potential and limit me, so I don’t use it. It feels like journalism is dependent on work – the best articles are ones where you can tell how much time the author put into them, and that work is unavoidable. But do tools like AI help us cut out the unnecessary work, or just constrict our whole process? 2) on the opposite hand (!) I’m still a huge proponent of paper and analog work. Maybe it’s just because I can romanticize the article-creating process better when I imagine myself working with sprawled papers (and I think being able to romanticize your work process is one of the few ways of keeping yourself constantly engaged) but I really enjoy working with paper; I also just feel more personally connected to the work when I can hold it. Regardless, this is making me want to start printing everything I write to engage with it that way. Regardless of the actual process, I was really grateful for the way McPhee treats writing with a “i’ll do my best,” mindset. Especially in a class of really dedicated students, I think we have to submit to the story’s will. If the effort’s been put in, it’s been put in. Learning when to put the pen down, or close the computer, will probably make our final results better.

My story is centered around the experience of Afghan women in the US – currently, it is based on four questions / ideas:

This quote from a lawyer at HIAS: “we failed Afghans, we continue to fail Afghans.” I want to see what ways our system forces educated Afghan women back into the traditional / familial roles that they escaped in the 2010s when the Taliban was expelled from big cities.
What do Afghan women think about a Trump administration? They’ve fled gender discrimination, and came to find an American election that was framed as a gender-war.

Sub-question, which is that I’m wondering what Trump will do about humanitarian parole once in office… he has threatened taking it away, but then he’d have to kick out Afghans. After all his finger-pointing at Biden for the Afghanistan-withdrawal, this would be a real contradiction. What threat does his administration pose for Afghan migrants?

How are Afghan women managing a less familial culture? Especially as many of them have family either still trying to get in.

Best case scenario: i find someone who has family that came up through the Darien (which many Afghans are doing now, because Brazil took away the protections that had initially driven many to immigrate there) and I can speak to that migration story also

How are different generations of Afghan migrants relating to each other (pre-2021, the 2021 influx crowd, and those receiving asylum now) – is it like Latin American migrants, where the older ones have some resentment towards the recent crowd?

My points of access:

Nasiba, who I’ve already written about. Good example of an educated woman who has less opportunities here than she had in Afghanistan pre-Taliban takeover

Wahid and I are going to Virginia the weekend of November 29th, to spend two days there. There’s a huge group of Afghans there, and he could connect me with some interesting people:

https://www.iwmf.org/community/maryam-yousufi/

Former journalist, now basically an Instagram influencer, 367k followers. Has an afghan clothing brand, really interesting example of tradition colliding with American culture

He’s said that once I meet Maryam, I could probably meet a lot more people in her circle, who are similar – how are these women, who seem to be doing well, affected by US policy w.r.t migration and asylum?
Connecting with Women for Afghan Women on November 19th – hopefully they are willing to let me visit their Virginia office, where I could meet a more traditional counterpart to Maryam. If not, I’ll be in Virginia either way. Large Afghan population there, there are other community centers I can contact otherwise. Wahid’s family also lives in Virginia, maybe they could connect me with recent migrants.

NY trip:

Yalda Afif works at Commonpoint community center, used to be director of Afghan resettlement for HIAS. She also is (was?) close friends with Bibi Aesha, who was the TIME cover story in 2011 about Afghan woman repression – would be interesting to check in, and see how Aesha is doing now?
Have connected with the people at WAW. Media-communications officer is out until the 19th, but they’ve indicated i could maybe visit the New York Queens office once she’s back

Minimum viable story: I tell the stories of multiple Afghan women (ideally different class background and time since they’ve come in – Nasiba is a Dari-speaking Hazara, Yalda is Pashto-speaking, hoping to bring in varied groups) showing how they’ve adapted to the US, are supported and challenged by it, and what the Trump administration means for them.

Outline:

I can’t really do a lede or nut graf until I get to immerse

Beginning with a scene of Maryam and her friends, if I can get them to talk about life in Afghanistan as compared to life here. Planning on embedding for a day, hopefully can get them just relaxing. Zoom out to talk about the challenges of living in the US, bring in HIAS quote.

Talk background for a while, bring in general experience of Afghans migrants in general, their migration story, then zoom in on Afghan women and the statistics about illiteracy and unemployment among them – incorporate interviews from HIAS lawyer, bring in more “typical” example of what resettlement has looked like: Nasiba + WAW- or Yalda-connections

Bring in interviews from researchers Held and Rai, about unique challenges Afghan women face, about the loss of extended-family systems (here’s an opportunity to bring in the fact that many Afghans are waiting for their family to be granted asylum – some still in Afghanistan, others coming up from the Darien, others in Iran/Pakistan, facing repression there). Support with an example of Afghan women living traditional lives here (this will be a challenge to find access, maybe a write-around?)

Talk more explicitly about the Trump administration (compared to the experience of women still living in Afghanistan, which comes up in every interview). Come back to Maryam and her friends – are there any similar scenes I might see between Maryam and the other Afghan women I meet?

^^ this is ALL very dependent on the access I get during my trip. Feels very variable, uncertain. How can I set up my time there to ensure I get what I need? This is my biggest concern.

The articles chosen for this week were tremendous – each one demonstrated what journalism has the capacity to be. Powerful and affecting, these were great examples of embedding. I’m struck by the quality and quantity of reporting that went into these, not just in terms of how they got the support to engage in such long projects, but also in the organization of information. Taub had papers sprawled out on his floor… how do you go from that to a tight article? Topically, I felt like these stories all showed underrepresented voices. In yours, Deb, I was most impressed by the final detail that Um Nour was facilitating sex-work; to survive means to take advantage of your social position at every rung of the ladder. Victims of economic violence perpetrate violence against others, unfortunately usually those lower in the ladder than them. This is a side of migration, and of everyday living, that normally is overlooked. Each story felt like it unraveled dominant narratives to show underlying ones: from fake chinese threats to the relationship between the BVT and Halabi, the real events are always shrouded in other narrative constructions. Particularly after this election, I think we need to key into the narratives that are created by institutions of power. The American voters were against Biden’s migration policy and “his” economy because they were led to feel that way. Narrative journalism can be weaponized by the state (Austria), or by individuals (Wang). Regardless, there seems to be an obligation to criticize and question the things we hear. We interact with narratives all day, and live our lives accordingly; knowing which ones to look into is difficult, and sniffing out those fake narratives feels essential to good journalistic work. 

Now, methods-talk again. I’m really attracted to embed-style journalism because of the wealth of details that comes out: that Sayyid takes away his empties because he’d be the one picking them up later, that one of the women on stage cried while dragging on her cigarette, that Pircher is called “rumpelstiltskin” behind his back, these details are what make a story great, and they show me that the reporter has done their due diligence. At the same time, I’m abundantly aware of the challenges embedding creates. Langfitt’s work is amazing, but I don’t think it could be done anymore. I talked about Langfitt with a friend who laments the impossibility of foreign-correspondance in China, and he joked that if you tried the “free Taxi,” bit now, your second or third passenger would be a CCP officer. Embedding is reliant on access. Taub bypasses this by using documents and investigates by moving around the subject, but even here he somehow has access (which to be clear, I don’t understand… how does he get all these internal documents!? How does he get top-secret BVT memos?). Embedding is a great tool, but there needs to be an open door to go through – how do you open that door? This “access,” question creates further challenges – Hessler is a foreigner, and so why Sayyid trusts him is slightly unclear… at a certain point, it’s to get something. Embedded reporting straddles a line wherein subjects become friends or collaborators. There’s some mutual exchange. As shown in the Langfitt article, this can have serious consequences. How do you make sure the information you’re getting is positive, reliable, etc? Hessler’s interaction with Wahiba shows another big problem in embedded journalism or immersive journalism. A lot depends on the social standing of the journalist themselves, or their identity! A foreign man could never see Wahbia and talk to her for a story, but there’s probably a good story to her life and to her. Without her perspective, a lot is lost in my opinion. Someone else could write a story with access to her. Just not Hessler. And to navel-gaze for a moment, I couldn’t write it either! Given my position and identity, more doors for immersive reporting are open to me than most. I’m abundantly aware of that privilege there. But at the same time, thinking specifically about trying to talk with Afghan women for my final paper, my position will create challenges. These articles also present an alternate to our norm, wherein the reporter is themselves the migrant, rather than the other way around. There is the challenge of possible misunderstandings – I guess the solution is to immerse so deeply that you don’t feel like an outsider any more, but getting that far feels difficult. Lots of words, lots of thoughts. Each of these articles was a novella unto themselves, so I feel like I could (and should) say more, but generally just impressed and motivated by these readings.

“In the first Taliban era, I can say that psychologically, all women died. They were alive only physically,” said Nasiba Maqsudi from her home in northeast Philadelphia. “I was one of those women.”

Nasiba was a doctor in Kabul, Afghanistan, when the United States pulled its support from the country. Her husband, Muhammed Khan Maqsudi, had worked for the UN, and with its support, the two fled with their son to Pakistan in October of 2021.

After two years of waiting with a pending asylum-application, the family was able to move to the US in July of 2024. Nasiba said that she goes out as often as possible, trying to improve her English-language abilities and learn about American culture.

Now in the US, she is grateful despite difficulties, and wants to use her position of power to support those she left behind. “As far as myself, I’m not going to Afghanistan anymore,” Nasiba said. “I hope I will be able to help out women from here.” 

Nasiba Maqsudi was born in 1989, in the Ghazni province to the Southeast of Kabul. She’s ethnically Hazara and a Shiite muslim, two historically targeted minority groups in Afghanistan. 

In the 1990s, the Sunni Taliban government oppressed and committed mass violence against the Hazaras, who are of South Asian descent. By 2001, violence against Hazaras was mounting in Central Afghanistan and was receiving international attention.

Nasiba and Muhammed, who’s also a Shiite Hazara from the Ghazni province, remember the repression brought on by the Taliban. “The people of Afghanistan were totally hopeless,” he said. He remembers the Taliban cutting off access to food and medical supplies. 

During this time, Nasiba saw countless women sick, without access to proper medical care. “I witnessed myself losing four siblings that my mother lost during the pregnancies,” she said. 

“When the US came to Afghanistan in 2001, the situation totally changed,” remembered Muhammed. “We exercised peace, security, dignity. We became very very happy.” 

“When the Americans came to Afghanistan, I feeled I was born again,” Nasiba said. “It was so wonderful for me, I never will forget that time.” With new freedom for education and enfranchisement, Nasiba returned to her memories of the Hazara repression. “When I was looking at the women suffering from different diseases and problems, my plan was one day to be able to start treating these poor people and poor communities without any payment,” she said. She enrolled in Kateb University in Kabul, to study medicine. 

After graduating in 2019, she started working at the renowned Istiqlal hospital in Kabul. “I had the plan to build my own clinic, and I was working on the building,” she remembers. “But unfortunately, it didn’t happen.”

In 2021, when the Taliban took control of Kabul, Nasiba remembered feeling as depressed as she had when the Taliban was first in power. “I lost hope. I was only thinking about my husband and my children and there was no ambition,” she said. Since 2001, protections for women, Shiites, and Hazaras had increased, and 2021 brought with it aggression against all three groups.

In October of 2021, the UN helped Nasiba, Muhammed, and their then-thirteen-year-old son flee to Pakistan. Nasiba remembers her time in Pakistan anxiously, saying that she was so worried they’d deport her back to Afghanistan that she never left the house. Muhammed submitted a P1 asylum claim with the UN’s support, and the family was finally accepted in June of 2024. 

After a month in Qatar where they were interviewed and further background checked, Nasiba and her family flew to Philadelphia. There, they were connected with the Nationalities Service Center (NSC), who helped them with medicaid, food stamps, and housing. 

After three months, NCS connected the family with their Matching Grant program, an effort to connect immigrants and refugees with suitable jobs in their fields. “They couldn’t find a job for us,” Muhammed said. 

Nasiba and Muhammed are not alone in their job-search difficulties. According to a study by the Immigration Policy Institute, only 61% of Afghan immigrants were employed in 2022. Facing ill-equipped job training programs and difficulties with English, many educated Afghans refugees are either jobless, or employed at menial positions. 

The job-search difficulties among Afghan evacuees are worse for women, complicated by many factors. According to the Immigration Policy Institute’s study, only 37% of Afghan women were in the American labor force in 2022, compared to 57% of all foreign-born women. 

Dr. Abha Rai at Loyola University and Dr. Mary Held at the University of Knoxville argue that economic pressures in the US put strain on traditional Afghan gender dynamics.

They see cultural differences as central to the general difficulties in integrating. “In the US, because of how expensive things are, sometimes men and women both have to work,” said Rai. “Maybe they didn’t do it like that back in Afghanistan.”

“Coming into the United States, Afghan women have gained freedoms,” adds Held. “But also by working, and through these freedoms, have gained power and agency in the household.”

Rai and Held admit that the job-finding process has been less-than-perfect for Afghan refugees. “Coming from that structure, males had greater agency and greater power in the home, so just by women gaining power, it can shift men’s sense of power,” said Held. “The difference in the responsibilities, respect, and power between Afghanistan and the United States,” she continued, “can lead to interpersonal conflict and stress within the family.

The Maqsudi are relative outliers in this trend – Nasiba worked the last ten years, and Muhammed moved to Kabul full time when she began school at Kateb University. But still, they haven’t been exempt from culture shock.

“Since we came here,” said Nasiba. “I realized that I used to live in a very traditional country. So slowly I realize that men and women have the same rights here in the US.”

“Women can go and find jobs and go out and walk the same as men are doing. This is something very promising for me,” she continued. Still, she acknowledges that NCS and Matching Grant have failed to place her with a job that uses her experience and education.

“We failed Afghans, we continue to fail Afghans,” said Shayan Davoudi, immigration lawyer at the HIAS refugee resettlement organization. Since 2021, he has worked on the asylum cases of over 100 Afghans, and said he consistently sees them being passed over for job opportunities, without viable paths towards career success. 

“Think about a young Afghan who couldn’t continue his education back in Afghanistan. Could that person realistically in this country continue education? Obviously the answer is no,” explained Davoudi. “An American citizen in this country post high school, you either got to have money, or get admitted to a school that can get you some scholarship.” And without green cards, he explained, Afghans have few opportunities for scholarships. 

“The majority of my clients, they were educated people, they had their whole dreams,” he said. Here, he continued, “they have to start from zero.”

Nasiba remains optimistic, despite lack of help from job-agencies.  

“I hope that here I can change my life by pursuing my education, and hopefully by becoming a doctor,” she said. While as a P1-visa holder, she can enroll in medical school, the economic challenges create mounting difficulties. 

She said that regardless of her circumstances here, they are incomparable to the challenges that Afghan women are facing. She keeps in contact with her sisters, parents, and friends, all of whom have stayed in Afghanistan. “Part of our heart is allocated to the country and the place that we’re from,” she said. 

Just as she’d first hoped to open a free clinic in Afghanistan, she now wants to help others with her medical abilities.  

“I hope that one day I’ll be able to do something here and through here I can help many women in Afghanistan,” she said. Before that, she’s looking for a job that will help her stand on her own two feet.

I’m deeply impressed (and inspired by) all the cases of creative journalism put on display this week. In a profession that sometimes feels tired and rigid, it’s really cool to see imaginative work being done and I have many questions. How do you reconstruct stories after the fact, reliably? How do you counter other (malicious) media narratives? How does AI help (and, I assume, complicate) open-source reporting? With an abundance of information that you can dig into, how do you even begin knowing where to start? With everything that we are able to access, what is still lost to us? 

I found it really interesting that the documentary emphasized organization to such an extent. The internet is disorganized and seeing the process of investigation rather than archival is powerful. Thinking about how documentation is only powerful when accurately narrativized, I felt like many of our readings this week pointed to equally sinister uses of information. Living in an age of hyper surveillance, it’s nice to imagine that we can utilize technological paper trails as citizen-journalists, but it also feels like a scary affirmation of the ways all documentation (and much of journalism) contributes to state databases. Data can always be twisted, and Russia claiming the hospital they bombed was uninhabited (despite the videos showing the opposite) is an obvious example of how fact can easily be denied or manipulated. And as there begins to be more and more content on the internet, propaganda and misinformation spread so quickly. Sometimes it feels like we spend more time fighting misinformation than creating new positive information. Still worth it.

All these readings were unfortunately framed for me by another recent article I read, which talked about the abundance of documentation that we have available about Assad’s crimes in Syria. Nothing has happened as a result of that documentation. While continually amazed by the investigations that are possible, issues of accountability immediately come up. In Bellingcat’s case, the character that is given attention in the documentary is al-Werfalli. With outstanding arrest warrants and an abundance of evidence, he died in 2021 without having ever been to court. My generation is already distrustful of a failing ICC – Sinwar, Netanyahu, Putin, we aren’t seeing arrests at any significant level. It’s incredibly meaningful to transmit information, but the question then becomes how we translate that into action (which is a recurring theme and issue in journalism). I’m really impressed by the Ukrainian Government’s effort to document the war through civilian crowdsourcing – this seemingly will give a very comprehensive picture of human rights abuses, a database of information that can be mined for criminal evidence. But how do we get that evidence to mean anything?

I love the story about the Darién Gap by the Atlantic… I just think it’s tremendous. The stories from this week have raised more questions than provided answers, personally. Firstly, I want to interrogate the impact of the Darién story – it made waves when it came out, front page and cover story on their edition which feels huge for a migration story. But since then, what has changed? I have google alerts set for news about the Darién gap, and it’s always the same news. At this point we know migrants from all around the world are coming through it (Africans, Asians, etc) and we get daily horror stories about deaths and abuses on the journey. How does a story about the Darién make an impact at this point? And when will real change happen? Alma Guillermoprieto writes that “because the media were much more important than they are now, my articles (…) had to be taken seriously by the policymakers and by the public.” I disagree with the value-judgment given to the media over time, but I do agree that policymakers used to respond to the media more. What has changed? Readings from this week more generally made me aware of the ways governments sanction migration, even in its illegal forms. Panama doesn’t necessarily outlaw smuggling through the Darién, they just make it less safe. The US doesn’t outlaw immigration, they make it more difficult. (1.6 million “gotaways”!!!!) I found the New Yorker article sad in how it affirmed the political machinations behind migration policy. I enjoyed the way it zoomed out from migration and showed it as an issue that sheds light generally on the current political landscape. What does it tell us? That we’re in deep trouble. Minor things: one of the guys outside “Stripes” says there’s an app for human trafficking… what is it!? That is a fantastic story. Similarly, I’ve heard surprisingly little about CBP One… are tech stories just not sexy? I imagine it’s having a huge impact at the border, but I only ever see statistics. Writing about tech in an interesting way is deeply difficult. 

I’m going to now turn to some “methods” questions again. Particularly focusing on photography since we have Robert Nickelsberg in class with us. The photos in both the Atlantic piece and the New Yorker piece are striking, how does / did he select photos for articles? What does his editing process look like, or was the magazine work he did from El Salvador edited by others? The New Yorker piece in particular makes me think of Ken Light’s Midnight La Frontera, a photography project I have personal issues with, but still find deeply, deeply compelling. How do you walk the line between taking photos that shock without doing so in an intrusive or voyeuristic way? I guess that’s a general question to be applied to photography, but photojournalism carries its own independent weight. And he’s done work on reconstruction of the past / confrontation of the past – at least that’s how his photos are interpreted by the writers collected in Legacy of Lies – what did that process of creation look like? I think I just have general questions about photojournalism, but those can be left for tomorrow. Enjoyed these readings, questions float about.

Naqibullah Obayd, 35, moved to the United States in July of 2024. A policy-maker by profession, the Taliban threatened Obayd after he refused to work for them following the 2021 takeover of Kabul. He fled to Qatar with his wife and two daughters, and after a year and a half, received asylum in the US.

After four months living in Philadelphia, employment quickly became Obayd’s biggest concern. As part of the newest wave of refugees, he belongs to a group of largely educated Afghans who are struggling to find work in their professional fields. 

Obayd has a master’s degree in policy-making from Gazi University in Turkey, with six years of professional experience. In 2021, he “was working as a plans and policies director in the attorney general’s office of the Republican government,” he explained. On November 2nd of 2024, he interviewed to be a grocery bagger at Walmart. 

76,000 Afghan evacuees came into the United States in August of 2021, the largest American evacuation since the end of the Vietnam War.

That month, the Biden administration created the Operation Allies Welcome program; it served as an immigration pathway for vulnerable Afghans, particularly those who had worked for the US government. After extensive background checks, the admitted Afghans entered the United States either as Humanitarian Parolees (a temporary protection which needs to be renewed every two years) or, if they had worked for the US government, through Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs).

Louise Sandberg of the Princeton Interfaith Refugee Resettlement Committee (PIRRC) has worked to resettle 127 people since 2015, 86 of them Afghans. Her organization works with the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, and she said that the work has been harder than expected. 

“With Afghans – with the overlay of these traditional values and the extended families they’re coming from…” she trailed off. “It’s really difficult.”

PIRRC helps refugees find housing, schooling, and employment. “It was an eye opener,” said Sandburg, about the Afghan evacuees. “They’re moving towards independence. Most of them are able to support themselves for the most part. But it hasn’t been easy.”

According to a study by the Immigration Policy Institute, only 61% of Afghan immigrants were employed in 2022. Other figures were equally grim: the median household income for Afghan families was $48,000, compared to $75,000 for the average immigrant household.

Obayd said that many of the difficulties in finding work are due to improper job training. He said that without the proper direction, he had many unanswered questions: how to write a resume, how to job-hunt, how to act in interviews – he felt that he hadn’t been properly prepared by the refugee agencies.

More generally, Obayd said English-language difficulties have complicated the job-searching process. “I want to do a job in my own field, in the future,” Obayd said. “But right now, I need to improve my English.”

Obayd said another problem was that resettlement agencies were only finding jobs to meet their quotas. “Their policies for job seeking is that they are filling their targets,” he said. “They just want to put people in different jobs which is not going to help them in the future.”

Despite his master’s education and extensive experience in plan and policy making, he said that he hasn’t been connected with any related work opportunities. 

Shayan Davoudi, an immigration lawyer at the HIAS refugee organization, said he’s seen Obayd experience reflected in the cases of many Afghans. 

“The majority of my clients, they were educated people. They had their own dreams, they had their own profession, they had their whole life,” Davoudi said. “Regardless of what age they came to this country, they have to start from zero.”

“And 0 means, more likely than not, forgetting about what you had in your country,” he continued. Davoudi has worked with over a hundred Afghan refugees since 2021, and said that regardless of master’s- or doctorate-level education, he sees many Afghans “just end up being an Uber driver, Lyft driver or working in a factory.” Without proper systems of support or training, many of them stop trying to find jobs in their professional field. 

“You know, after 2-3 years of being in this country,” Davoudi said, “you lose hope.”

As of the publishing of this article, Obayd hasn’t heard back from Walmart about the potential job, but he’s hopeful. He insists that he’s grateful to the United States for welcoming him, and he calls out human rights abuses in Afghanistan. 

But he continues to hope that in the future, the resettlement agencies will match him with work in his professional field. “I’m a policy-maker, they want me to be a carpenter,” he said. “It doesn’t work like that.”

The side-by-side presentation of articles about Afghan immigration and US-military “mistakes” returns us to a theme that has permeated this whole course: during the first class, we discussed how underfunding foreign countries leads to the need to immigrate away from them. This week’s readings felt like an extension, that foreign military destabilization will also always lead to refugees. Even in a case where the United States presents the work that they do as “helping,” (and it ostensibly was meant to) their missteps led to public fear. American conservative voters will sometimes say we have no moral obligation to accept refugees and provide them with comfortable living conditions, but with the damage the US has caused abroad (in aerial violence and the rushed evacuation from Afghanistan) it does feel like we have a need to help. Still, despite SIVs and humanitarian parole, it feels like we’re doing surprisingly little in comparison with Iran and Pakistan. As global leaders, is the US obligated to help more than they would in other cases? What other obligations does the US have? Khan mentions at one point that the military didn’t give condolence payments to the families in Tokhar – is economic repayment a path towards accountability?

I’m also struck by how interrelated all migrations stories are. Afghan immigration is of course not existing in a vacuum; I find it really interesting that PBS reported many are now trying to come in through the Southern Border. And the newest waves of refugees aren’t just coming from Afghanistan, I have to assume many of them are coming from European and Arab countries. How is the issue playing out globally? And more locally, what role do the US government and NGOs play in cross-state migration? Immigrants want to be close to diaspora hotspots (like CA, St. Louis now, and D.C.) but how easy is it to re-resettle? I definitely agree that Afghan media and businesses need to grow roots before migrants will feel fully comfortable, and I wonder how long (historically, considering other groups that have been in their place) that will take? We’ve generally looked at immigration historically, and I’m finding myself curious as to whether any groups have come to the US with similar issues – if education, median yearly household income, and English language proficiency are so low, what historically has been the best way to combat that? And why aren’t we considering Afghans as part of a greater historical trend?

I’m also in love with the way that the second part of Khan’s reporting begins outlining her methodology; it feels like journalism-student gold. (cross-checking information in official reports with civilian reporting, using wayback machine, importing all data to an app where she could access it on her phone). I found it interesting that she also suggests meeting people “unplanned” – not warning them – because this way the information flows the most smoothly and is most reliable. Thinking about her work in the context of our prior harm-reduction, I’m a big fan of the way she presented herself totally honestly, but also imagining it was difficult to keep up contact – how do these families feel about their publication now? Also, she tells Katbeeah what the internal US documents say – is that necessary / does that help? I wonder whether hiding information like that could be better for the victims. I also found it interesting that both Khan and Hays referenced FOIA requests – I understand these vaguely, but I’m wondering at what point they feel useful. They seem outside the scope of what we’re working on, but is there a point as a journalist when that kind of information is necessary? Also, would have loved to have seen how she organized her information (considering there was so much by the end!!) + how she determined which stories to tell, out of so many possible (and deserving) accounts. Starstruck by both of Khan’s articles, lots to think about.