For more than a decade, the national political conversation around immigration reform in the United States has been trapped in a Catch-22, author Jonathan Blitzer says.
Anyone seeking to make reforms bumps up against the political reality that those opposed to change will point to the numbers of refugees arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. But focusing solely on the border is never going to resolve the issue of needed immigration reform, according to Blitzer.
One would be hard-pressed to find any expert, regardless of their political persuasion, who would say that problems at the border can be fixed without reference to the wider immigration system. “Because in fact, what’s happened is the wider immigration system hasn’t been reformed or modified in any fashion since 1990,” said Blitzer, a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the 2024 book, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, during a talk Wednesday February 26 at Notre Dame.
“And so the entirety of the immigration system, which has been essentially unaddressed now for decades, is borne completely by the US asylum system — which was never designed to be the answer to the entirety of American immigration policy,” he said.
The journalist discussed how many immigration debates and policies are rooted in historical dynamics, including the U.S. government’s support for repressive regimes in Central America during the Cold War and the consequences of deportation policies that helped spread gangs such as MS-13.
Immigration has challenged a long line of U.S. presidential administrations of both parties, Blitzer noted. “In Washington, the bottom line was always the same. What were the optics? How much will the reality on the ground in a remote part of the country bleed into the national conversation? How soon will partisan opportunists exploit any perception of disorder? In short, how do we keep the border from instantly dominating our politics?”
His book tells the history of political conflicts, foreign interventions and corruption that have destabilized the region and led to the crisis of migrants illegally entering the United States. He provides many personal stories of individual immigrants and families in detailing the complex history and political challenges around immigration.
Blitzer’s visit was sponsored by the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights. He spoke in a lecture and in conversation with Jennifer Mason McAward ’94, an associate professor of law and director of the Klau Institute.
Following are selections from Blitzer’s remarks.
On the state of affairs since the start of new Trump administration:
The conservative end of the spectrum right now — and I wouldn’t even say necessarily conservative, it has less and less to do with actual ideology and more and more to do just with pure power politics — insists that every moment is a moment of maximal crisis.
What we’re starting to see now, in the first spate of executive orders that came out on day one of the current administration, is a series of orders premised on the idea that mass migration constitutes a form of “invasion.” And that invasion in turn triggers what the U.S. is beginning to adopt — a military response to what’s happening.
That’s one of the reasons we’re seeing what we’ve recently seen with Venezuelan migrants, for instance, being sent to Guantanamo Bay. Or with deportation flights, which are usually chartered by ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), instead being flown out by military planes at significantly greater cost to the US government.
How after adoption of the Refugee Act of 1980, the vast majority of refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala were turned away when seeking asylum in the United States:
You had large numbers of people from Central America fleeing absolutely brutal military regimes who were all allied with the United States in the Cold War. And these people arrive in the United States with straight ahead, almost textbook claims for protection according to this new law.
And yet, huge numbers of people from Central America fleeing right-wing regimes were denied asylum because if the United States were to grant asylum in large numbers to people obviously fleeing repression at the hands of American allies, the U.S. would essentially be recognizing its complicity in those atrocities.
On what has happened since 2014, when the number of children arriving alone at the U.S.-Mexico border began to surge:
The border itself has displaced any sort of serious conversation about what immigration reform or immigration policy, for that matter, might look like. . . . Now when people talk about immigration, they’re really only talking about the border. The situation at the border has effectively hijacked the conversation that the country needs to have about immigration.
Margaret Fosmoe is an associate editor of this magazine.