The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer talks about how immigration became a political crisis

The Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights brought journalist Jonathan Blitzer to campus on Feb. 26 for a discussion about how immigration became a political crisis.

Blitzer, a staff writer for The New Yorker who has won several awards for immigration reporting, spoke to a packed auditorium in the Hesburgh Center for International Studies. He delivered prepared remarks and then answered questions in a conversation with Jennifer Mason McAward, associate professor of law at Notre Dame Law School and director of the Klau Institute in the Keough School of Global Affairs.

He pointed out that the U.S.-Mexico border itself has displaced any sort of serious conversation about immigration policy in the United States. “Now when people talk about immigration, they’re really only talking about the border,” he said. “The situation at the border has effectively hijacked the conversation the country needs to have about immigration.”

As a result, Blitzer said, the national political conversation around immigration has been trapped in a Catch-22.

“Anyone who wants to make changes, updates, any manner of reform — however modest, however technocratic — to the wider immigration system bumps up against the political reality that people opposed to any kinds of improvements in our immigration system are always going to point to the border,” he said. The problem, he added, is that the situation at the border can’t be fixed without changes to the wider immigration system.

After his talk, Blitzer signed copies of his bestselling book, “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis.”

Blitzer’s talk tied in with the Klau Institute’s Migration Initiative, which launched last year through collaboration with other experts from across the Keough School and the University of Notre Dame as a whole. The Migration Initiative is supported in part by the Notre Dame Poverty Initiative, a University-wide effort to expand knowledge about what works to alleviate poverty.

The event was co-sponsored by the Institute for Latino Studies, Institute for Social Concerns, Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and the Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy.

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