Reading Response #1 – Allison Jiang<\/p>\n
A mantra that McPhee refers to whilst describing the essentials of a strong lede is that \u201cA Thousand Details Add Up to One Impression\u201d (56). This specific phrase stuck out to me as a philosophy that carries great impact in the stories that have been\u2014and are currently being told\u2014about immigrants in the U.S. What McPhee advises is that the \u201ccrude tool\u201d 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:<\/p>\n
\u201cI include what interests me and exclude what doesn\u2019t interest me\u2026 [\u201cInterest\u201d] in this context has subdivisions of appeal<\/strong>, among them the ways in which the choices help to set the scene<\/strong>, the ways in which the choices suggest some undercurrent about the people or places being described<\/strong>\u201d (57).<\/p>\n Reading through how immigration policy has changed over decades in Goudeau\u2019s writing, this idea of \u201cinterest\u201d 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 \u201ca home for the displaced people of the world\u201d 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.<\/p>\n However, later came the influx of immigrants during the period of 1880-1945 that included a larger variety of nationalities\u2014namely, 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.<\/p>\n In examining the history of anti-immigration sentiments and policy in conversation with an evolving American identity, what \u201cdetails\u201d and \u201cimpressions\u201d 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 \u2018good guy\u2019 as well as implementing self-protection \u201cbetter-safe-than-sorryism\u201d through measures of increased national security, racialized & economic fears as commonsense policy.<\/p>\n McPhee\u2019s description of an interest-capturing \u201cundercurrent\u201d 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reading Response #1 – Allison Jiang A mantra that McPhee refers to whilst describing the essentials of a strong lede is that \u201cA Thousand Details Add Up to One Impression\u201d (56). This specific phrase stuck out to me as a philosophy that carries great impact in the stories that have been\u2014and are currently being told\u2014about<\/p>\n