Jonathan Blitzer, a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis,” which details the humanitarian crisis that has unfolded at the U.S.-Mexico border, spoke Wednesday at the Hesburgh Center for International Studies.
The lecture, titled “Getting Beyond the Border: How Immigration Became a Political Crisis,” was hosted by Notre Dame’s Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights.
Mary Gallagher, the Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs, introduced Blitzer.
“Migration, with its implications for human dignity and human development, is an important theme at the Keough School,” Gallagher said. “It’s also an issue that’s critical for us as students, scholars and citizens.”
Blitzer began his lecture with an anecdote, detailing an urgent phone call that Jeh Johnson, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, received from a top deputy in Customs and Border Protection during the spring of 2014. The deputy claimed that the situation in South Texas was out of control, as many families were arriving in droves from Central America.
“All of them were seeking asylum, which was their legal right, and something the government, by law, had to take seriously. These people were in dire need,” Blitzer said.
Johnson and his wife quickly traveled to McAllen, Texas to visit border patrol stations and temporary detention facilities.
“What they found shocked them ... children were everywhere,” Blitzer said.
Johnson then placed a call to the White House, saying, in an intentionally matter-of-fact tone that Blitzer noted, that the situation was “too big to downplay.”
“In Washington, the bottom line was always the same: What were the optics?” Blitzer said. “In short, how do we keep the border from instantly dominating our politics?”
Framing his lecture through the life of Cecilia Muñoz, who was on the receiving end of Johnson’s phone call, Blitzer then gave a comprehensive political history of immigration policy in the United States. He began with the mid-1980s, when Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized nearly three million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
He then described how, in the 1990s, Bill Clinton cut public services for green card holders and intensified enforcement operations against immigrants living in the U.S., comparing it to the Trump administration’s recent policies on immigration.
“That political moment was a lot like the current one,” he said. “The Washington consensus was that harshness towards immigrants was what a public preoccupied by law and order wanted the most.”
By the time Muñoz joined the Obama administration during the President’s first term, deportations were on the rise.
“Activists across the country were understandably enraged that, for immigrants, the Obama presidency didn’t seem all that different [from] the Bush presidency before it. Immigrants themselves were anxious and confused,” Blitzer said. This was in part because “Obama had inherited the massive enforcement machinery built up over the years after 9/11,” he added.
When Obama won re-election in 2012, Blitzer said, there was suddenly “the mandate and the momentum to pursue comprehensive immigration reform.” Obama needed to build his credibility and political capital and prove to Republicans that he could make tough decisions.
By 2014, though, due to a Republican-controlled House, Obama’s comprehensive immigration reform bill had stalled, and many people from the Northern Triangle of Central America began seeking asylum. The government was “flummoxed” by these new arrivals, Blitzer explained.
“It is natural and obsession-inducing to wonder how this shift caught everyone by such surprise,” Blitzer said. He used what he called the “original sin of the U.S. asylum system” to explain it.
According to Blitzer, when migrants from El Salvador and Guatemala arrived in the U.S. in 1980, in the midst of the Cold War, most of their asylum applications were rejected. It later came to light that the State Department had been exerting control over the asylum process.
“If the U.S. were to acknowledge the fact that Salvadorans and Guatemalans seeking asylum were in fact fleeing repressive regimes in the region, it would mean that the U.S. was supporting regimes that were brutalizing their populations,” Blitzer explained.
At the same time, he said, “the U.S. adopted a foreign policy that, in effect, tightened the bonds between the United States and the wider region.” Thus, increasing numbers of Central American asylum seekers entered the country.
Ultimately, Blitzer argued that the Obama administration’s surprise in 2014 serves as an “origin story” of how the idea of "the border” and the larger question of immigration in the U.S. have been conflated in recent years.
“The situation with the border has effectively hijacked the conversation the country needs to have about immigration,” he said.
Blitzer described the national political conversation as “trapped in [a] catch-22,” in which those opposing reform argue that the country cannot make any changes to its wider immigration system without fixing the border when, in reality, the border cannot be fixed alone, without reference to the wider immigration system.
“The entirety of the immigration system, which has been essentially unaddressed now for decades, is borne completely by the U.S. asylum system, which was never designed to be the answer to the entirety of American immigration policy,” Blitzer said.
While Blitzer thought the Biden administration made progress in opening other legal avenues for migrants to enter the U.S. (as opposed to entering through the southern border), he believes that progress has been lost under Trump.
Finally, before taking questions from Jennifer Mason McAward, the director of the Klau Institute, Blitzer noted that the constant use of the words “crisis” and “invasion” to describe the situation at the border has serious consequences. Specifically, he said it has led the U.S. government to adopt a “military response” to immigration into the country. However, he did not deny that there was a humanitarian crisis occurring at the border.
“It’s a strange moment to be talking about this history because the history haunts the extremism of our present moment,” Blitzer said.
