The story of immigration as an epic, not a slogan
Jonathan Blitzer is reaping the harvest of investing time, the seed of trust.
More than 600 guests have just about finished exiting the Hyatt Regency Greenwich after BuildingOne Community’s (B1C) annual benefit breakfast, and Blitzer, the keynote speaker, is signing one last copy of his book, “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis.”
During Blitzer’s stop on “The Daily Show” last week, host Jon Stewart kicked things off by thrusting the 523-page book on the desk and chaffing, “What are you doing to me? I have a family. I have a life. This is a very long book.”
Given the seven years of reporting that Blitzer invested in his book, it’s a model of efficiency. This guy knows a thing or two about context. One thing the United States is not in 2024 is the adjective in its name. The nation is least united over the very issue that should continue to define it. So, he recognizes that B1C’s ability to draw so many people together in support of immigrants is evidence that it has become a Connecticut beacon.
“Here I am in 2024 and it’s 7 in the morning and there are 600 people here. That’s insane,” he observes. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything like that. And people turned out with enthusiasm. That was not a sleepy crowd.”
The breakfast event’s migration in recent years from Stamford venues to the spacious Hyatt in Greenwich mirrors B1C’s expansion. The guest list included Attorney General William Tong, several members of the Connecticut General Assembly, Greenwich First Selectman Fred Camillo, state Treasurer Erick Russell, New Canaan First Selectman Dionna Carlson, Westport First Selectwoman Jennifer Tooker and Darien First Selectman Jon Zagrodzky.
Stamford Mayor Caroline Simmons, whose resume includes a stint with Homeland Security (the department that oversees immigration and border protection), welcomed the rare melting pot of Democrats and Republicans with a comment that someone needed to say aloud: “What a great bipartisan group of supporters in this room. We could get a lot done together.”
B1C is getting a lot done, in the form of hosting language, legal and employment services to integrate immigrants into area communities. Friday’s breakfast came
on the heels of a public victory, as staffers were able to thwart a cannabis shop from moving into the Stamford building that houses B1C’s offices and its afterschool tutoring program for children. It was also a day of transition, as Executive Director Anka Badurina is stepping down after nine years. Her successor is Elena Perez, who previously served as development and external relations director.
Blitzer appluded all of them.
“It’s always an education for me to be around advocates who work in this vein, because in many ways their work is unspun from the politics. They’ve got to roll up their sleeves and do the nuts and bolts of this work on a grinding, daily basis.”
Blitzer has been lauded for his writing at The New Yorker, where he started as a fact-checker. If I’d done a better job checking facts in advance, I wouldn’t have needed him to tell me he grew up in West Hartford before crossing the border to his current residence in New York City.
During his address, Blitzer maintained the relatively grave tone the issue demands. The closest he came to humor was a dry delivery of the line, “We’re in an election year. Maybe you’ve heard.”
He also mocked himself for focusing his speech on the border while declaring that too much of the national conversation is entrenched there.
The issue reliably defies swift remedies. Blitzer reminded the audience that there’s been an Obama immigration crisis, a Trump immigration crisis and a Biden immigration crisis. It was probably a Coolidge immigration crisis that inspired The Immigration Act of 1924. Future presidents will surely see their name appear before the same phrase.
The success of Blitzer’s book is that he doesn’t
try to simplify this mammoth challenge, but embraces, in his words, “building the story on an epic scale.”
It’s Cinemascope, not TikTok. Naturally, Amazon peddles a summary of the book for $3.99 for those whose attention span expires at the end of a network sitcom.
During his speech, Blitzer noted that he’s commonly asked a version of the question “Is asylum dead?” like it’s a headline in The New Yorker. Even in conversation, Blitzer speaks with the cadence of a storyteller. This comes out in his description of challenges he faced as a journalist chasing a throughline in different corners of the globe to weave together threads of The Impossible Subject.
“It is important for me to see it as a reporter trying to ping between different constituents.
“That may mean being in New York City or Washington talking to high level policy makers.
“That may mean spending time on the Mexican/Guatemala border.
“That may mean spending time in the winter highlands of Guatemala or in the U.S. borderlands.”
There’s no lost ark, One Ring or Holy Grail containing the magic remedy to the immigration crisis. In one stop on Blitzer’s book tour, his New Yorker colleague Evan Osnos (who grew up in Greenwich), invited him to embrace a fantasy scenario that would allow him to wave a magic wand conjuring a single, effective policy.
Blitzer told their Washington, D.C., audience that his wish would be to “work with foreign governments to set up … regional processing centers across Latin America to increase legal avenues for people to begin to manage what their claim is to come to the United States.”
The obstacle, of course, is that the lack of political continuity between administrations
does not allow the time needed to anchor such an initiative.
My own fantasy question to Blitzer was about reaching the people for whom immigration policy = wall. What could possibly be said if such skeptics filled an audience of 600?
“I consider it a success if, at the end of a story, they got to know the people involved in a much deeper way and it gives them pause. And that when they hear the political bromides on either side they become a little bit more discerning. A little bit more skeptical,” he replies.
Blitzer knows he can sound wonky (“The original DNA of the asylum system as we know it has built into it the original sin of geopolitics”), but his work is grounded in humanity. He marveled at the speaker who proceeded him, Beberly Coy. Coy detailed escaping a violent home life in Guatemala at 17 with her younger brothers and walking for two months to Mexico. She eventually was reunited with her mother in Stamford in 2016 and is now studying to become a social worker.
“Helping families in crisis like Building One Community helped mine is a dream for me,” she said.
The dream of a Dreamer.
“It’s an honor to follow someone like that,” Blitzer says. “Everyone was hanging on her every word because they should have been. There’s a journalistic lesson in this that the more specific you can be, the more vivid these stories become and the more relevant they become.”
To allow people to be seen. To be heard.
“And drawn with empathy and understanding,” he concludes. “That, to me, is the gold standard of what this is all about.”