Category: Uncategorized (Page 15 of 15)

The power of propaganda has long been intertwined with America’s immigration policies, steering public sentiment from one extreme to another. Throughout history, nationalism has been wielded to manipulate the American people’s views on refugees—alternating between embracing them as part of the nation’s patriotic duty and rejecting them in the name of self-preservation. This fluctuating stance has shaped America’s role as both a refuge and a gatekeeper, shaping its identity in global migration discussions.

Reflecting on this, I wonder: What if President Truman had never pushed for the Displaced Persons Act? Could the American role as a migration hotspot have been completely erased, altering the nation’s trajectory and the lives of millions seeking refuge?

In Michael Longo’s The Picnic of Freedom, the instability of political power is laid bare. The book’s exploration of the Austrian-Hungarian border in 1989 shows a haunting reminder that “history cannot speak for itself; it must be given voice.” (p. XII). Longo captures the urgency and fear that underlie the collapse of authoritarian regimes, making me feel as if he was drawing parallels to the constant surveillance of Orwell’s 1984. His depiction of political leaders navigating the end of an era is a powerful testament to how easily the tides of history can shift—just as immigration policies often do.

What I find most compelling about Longo’s writing is his ability to encapsulate the fragility of political systems. He notes, “One may make myriad mistakes in retelling history; it is a minefield of misinference and omission.” (p. 27). This quote resonates with me as I consider how narratives around immigration are constructed and reconstructed, often depending on who is telling the story and what they wish to emphasize—or omit.

Turning to Jessica Goudeau’s After the Last Border, her historical analysis of U.S. refugee resettlement focuses on the recurring question of American identity. Goudeau highlights how immigration debates have always been intertwined with questions of national character, mainly when she writes, “Immigration debates have always been about American identity” (p. 96). Whether it’s the resettlement of displaced persons after World War II or earlier waves of immigrants, these debates reflect more profound struggles about who belongs in the U.S. and who does not.

Goudeau also addresses the discriminatory attitudes that often underlie U.S. immigration policy, using the Chinese Exclusion Act and the treatment of Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis as case studies. The ship, often referred to as the “voyage of the damned,” became a symbol of the uncertainty and fate that many refugees face. It is a reminder of how protectionist policies, justified by a “better safe than sorry” mentality, have historically allowed America to turn a blind eye to the very people it claims to stand for: those seeking safety and freedom.

The binary way in which we are taught to think about the Iron Curtain that Longo points out in the first chapter, I think, is a tendency that extends across a lot of the ways in which we think about policies surrounding immigration. Too often narratives like the organizers of the picnic, officials within the government that were helping the organizers, what Longo terms “a shadow archive of secret decisions,” and kind strangers that are seemingly encountered through happenstance, like Norbert, are lost to these broader narratives that fit the political agenda or narrative of the times. As I was thinking through what it meant to introduce personal narratives that complicate these historical monoliths, I found myself continuing to return to this idea of “truth” in journalism and ethnography. I think often in an investigative or archival piece there is a tendency to pursue what we conceptualize as “objective truth.” But I appreciated the fact that Longo paid equal attention to “personal truths” in capturing the border—that is, what the border meant to the people in his stories, rather than simply focusing on the border’s physical or political qualities.

I do think, however, that there are limits to fully capturing “personal truths,” particularly when you are an outsider looking in. This idea is illustrated in the section where Longo drives to Lake Fertő in an attempt to experience what the border meant to the Hungarians at that time. While Longo describes the geographic features of the lake, there are limits to how “accurately” a writer can describe any given experience that is not their own. The limits of our ability as journalists to totally empathize or understand the experiences of the people that we study, and how to address or confront those limits was another lingering question that I had. I’m also curious to know what Professor Longo, as well as others in the class, think about what the Lake Fertő symbolized. To me, it seemed as though it was a place in which the people of Sopron, and later the Hungarians, were able to enjoy a limited form of freedom, yet simultaneously served as a reminder that the border was insurmountable—that it could be maintained without the barbed wire or fencing.

I also found Longo’s choice to write himself into parts of the book interesting. Particularly where László expresses to Longo the challenges of the project: “One of the challenges of your project, he says, is going to be to capture how crazy it was in those days.” I appreciated the fact that the book used these interludes to capture the limitations of the Project as well as how Longo went about gathering information.

I also found the idea of the border as both a physical and imagined object as particularly compelling. The line, “the East, the Iron Curtain soon became an uncrossable divide, powerful not just in its scale, but also in the mythology that justified its rule,” as well as the fact that Simone’s family had never previously seen the border or even knew where it was before crossing it particularly capture this point. I appreciated the fact that the reading captured not just the physical qualities of the border but its inherent ideological qualities as well.  As we look at different immigration policies throughout the semester, I am particularly excited to explore these two dimensions of what borders physically are and what they mean to the people who cross and maintain them.

Reading Response #1 – Allison Jiang

A mantra that McPhee refers to whilst describing the essentials of a strong lede is that “A Thousand Details Add Up to One Impression” (56). This specific phrase stuck out to me as a philosophy that carries great impact in the stories that have been—and are currently being told—about immigrants in the U.S. What McPhee advises is that the “crude tool” of handpicking what words, people, and places bring out the most relevant, essential detail of the subjective situation at hand. However, he mentions a tactic that may reveal certain patterns in how migration reporting has portrayed specific individuals:

“I include what interests me and exclude what doesn’t interest me… [“Interest”] in this context has subdivisions of appeal, among them the ways in which the choices help to set the scene, the ways in which the choices suggest some undercurrent about the people or places being described” (57).

Reading through how immigration policy has changed over decades in Goudeau’s writing, this idea of “interest” stood out to me. In Chapter 2 detailing refugee relationships with European refugees during 1945-1951, the way that immigrants were portrayed in the process of postwar America sought to appeal to the morality of the public, as well as a broader national mission of being a global champion in freedom, justice, and peace spoke to how they portrayed immigration policy decisions. For example, Goudeau writes that the U.S. saw themselves as “a home for the displaced people of the world” after the atrocities of the Holocaust. The American public carried deep sympathy and shock towards the genocide of the Jewish people and the crimes of the Nazis, a kind of joint appeal of supporting victims of these war crimes, manifesting in foreign aid policy and the Nuremberg trials.

However, later came the influx of immigrants during the period of 1880-1945 that included a larger variety of nationalities—namely, nationalities that did not conform to the standard of desirable U.S. immigrant: literate, upper-class, white, Northern European, and without disabilities (97). What was being created was a hierarchy of what traits were valued in an immigrant, amidst an America that was growing increasingly restriction towards immigration.

In examining the history of anti-immigration sentiments and policy in conversation with an evolving American identity, what “details” and “impressions” that are being presented become the driving factors behind what specific narrative is being pushed to a nation that, generally, was trying to reconcile with being the global ‘good guy’ as well as implementing self-protection “better-safe-than-sorryism” through measures of increased national security, racialized & economic fears as commonsense policy.

McPhee’s description of an interest-capturing “undercurrent” in this era was one that praised immigration policy that were based on eugenics, population control, and a biologically backed notion of cultural superiority: buzzwords that spoke to the distrust of nonwhite immigrants. A notable image from the reading is the political cartoon leading up to the Chinese Exclusion Act, where an Irish and Chinese man eat at Uncle Sam: a striking symbol of what messages, impressions, and details of immigrants the nation fell back onto. In this context, the scene being set rests in othering immigrants and using handpicked details to illustrate them as a threat, as something other.

I started with the John McPhee reading and, probably for that reason, I then read the other pieces with an eye towards their narrative. I was happy to see the structure McPhee laid out in The Picnic, where linearity is less important than good writing. Especially in the first chapters of Longo’s book, time jumps around constantly; it’s not the form that I expect historical nonfiction books to take, but in this case I found the thematic organization to be much more fun to read.

I was also interested in the craft and information-gathering behind Longo’s book. I’m wondering how he decided where to “start” his story – while the prologue brings us to the present, the book begins pretty shortly before the August 19th picnic. I’m wondering how he decided to begin it there, and not with more historical context of the iron curtain? And since the information gathered can’t be “seen,” how did he gather it and feel out which details were most important? Thinking particularly of the meeting between Gorbachev and Németh where the aides were told to stop writing what was happening, and Longo’s reference to the “shadow archive of secret decisions,” how was this archive of material accessed? I imagine that many of the events we write about in this class might have happened before we could start reporting, so we might come across similar experiences with hidden information. And in the seventeenth chapter, there’s such a wealth of detail and emotional information – since the book was written ~30 years after the event, how was that information gathered and selected?

One quote from the prologue particularly stuck with me: “There’s a saying popular in Hungary, he says. The future is certain. It’s the past that keeps changing.” In all these readings, there are continual references to the power of reporting. Goudeau references articles, speeches, government reports on the state of camps – these are affecting change in government and political opinion. Poszgay’s public radio address does the same. The readings collected this week present writing as a political act, in these cases with antifascist potential. Reading both Goudeau and Longo (where criticism of militarized borders should cause reflection on our end) we’re confronted with the present by understanding the past. Their pieces of writing have potential to cause change; returning to the quote I initially called to, they have the potential to present the past in a different way. The American border requires scrutiny, and the return of fascist parties in Hungary (and everywhere in the world) equally calls for action. I don’t know how to make my writing effective, what it is that takes words to action, but these readings personally make me feel responsible to learn how to. I’m very excited for this class.

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?

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