Immigration stories are American stories. How one writer learned to tell them.

Episode transcript

Sarah Matusek:  If I can challenge my own preconceived notion about immigrants and immigration in a workday, then I’d say that’s been a good day.

Clayton Collins: That’s the Monitor’s Sarah Matusek. 

Sarah, who’s based in Denver, is certainly not the only Monitor reporter paying attention to immigration. It’s a big Washington Bureau story, too, as a major issue in the presidential campaigns. Her beat is the Mountain West. So Sarah writes on regional issues like water and wolves. But more and more of her weekly advisories, the look ahead notes that Monitor writers post for their colleagues to see, show her writing or contributing to many stories with immigration at their core. That’s by design.  

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Collins: This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Clay Collins. Sarah was last on this podcast a year ago to talk about reporting from Lahaina on Maui after the devastating fires there. She joins me again today. Hey, Sarah.

Matusek: Hi, Clay. Thanks for having me.

Collins: So you’ve got a fast growing body of work around immigrants and refugees. You wrote a very affecting cover story, with vignettes exploring individual lives. You wrote an explainer that got into details of deportation. And you’ve been writing about refugee sponsorship and a migrant work prep program. I want to talk about all of that, and about how you maintain fairness on such a politically charged subject. But First, let me ask you about something you clearly take pains to do, and that’s keeping humanity at the fore. In a story that sometimes sets up in cold demographic or policy terms, a numbers story, you’re really writing about lives.

Matusek: Hmm. It may seem obvious, Clay, but it’s become so important for me to recognize that an immigrant story starts long before they reach the United States. They’re an individual, just like any American, who has a really rich interior life, of hopes and fears and hard decisions. I’m thinking of an Afghan dad I met in Pennsylvania this year. Growing up, he had started to try to learn English on his own, trying to read foreign words on scraps of newspaper he’d find in imported mango crates. And now, he and his wife and two super cute daughters are in the U.S. on what’s called a special immigrant visa, having fled the Taliban. And now, he’s in the position of watching his young daughter learn English, formally, in school. And at the same time, he’s also watching her lose her native language, Dari. So their family has gained a lot by coming to the U.S., most of all safety, right?  It’s also undeniable that they’ve left behind a life, too.  

In immigration, there are so many narratives of intractability, right? Everyone agrees, both on the right and the left, that our immigration system is broken, has been for years. There are also narratives of scarcity and limits around solutions to fixing this system. And so I’ve come to realize it’s so important to treat my sources with the opposite mindset. And that means not thinking of my sources in limited terms, but actually having something to contribute beyond just my story. And so when I resist that framing of lack, I’ve actually found expressions of bounty, of generosity. Whether that’s a Sudanese refugee in Alabama offering me homemade cake and orange juice in her living room, or a Venezuelan asylum seeker in Utah who insisted, he really insisted, that he share with me cookies that he had just been given at a food bank. 

It’s also our job to present the humanity of not just our immigrant sources, of course, but really any stakeholder in this immigration debate. I recently spoke with a rancher who lives along the Arizona Mexico border. He has cameras all along his property that track movements at night of people crossing the border illegally and coming over his property, what the government would call “gotaways.“ And it’s been really tough for him to watch over the past three decades. He says there has been 35 people to die on his ranch. But I came to realize that this gentleman is also friends with a liberal immigration activist who I’d also interviewed. She goes out regularly into the Arizona desert borderland, leaving water for people who may find themselves stuck there as they cross these counties. And I learned that not only was she friends with this conservative rancher but that this rancher also leaves water out on his property for anyone, including migrants who may need it in the brutal Arizona heat. And so even though at first glance, these two individuals may seem to come from opposite sides of the political spectrum, they actually both share the same goal. No more deaths in the desert.  

Collins: I’m wondering, hearing about the Afghan anecdote you just told, how do you establish trust with migrants you interview, especially people who might originate in places where having an elevated public profile might not be prudent?  

Matusek: I can’t assume that people understand what my job as a journalist is. I’m often in the position of having to explain what on versus off the record means, what the Monitor is as a news publication. And that certainly is part of the work in building trust with sources like immigrants who may not have a full lawful status here. I’ve had to be pretty clear about what my role is and what it’s not. I had an asylum seeker source once text me over WhatsApp whether he should settle in Denver or New York. And that’s not a question that I can answer for him.  

I’ve also found it useful to ask for feedback, to try to raise my own self awareness around you know, potential insensitivities. And so, the Monitor has generously afforded me and other reporters access to interpreters and translators to deepen our reporting. Just as an example, one interpreter who helped me speak with asylum seekers from Mauritania and Senegal here in Colorado helped me understand and manage my own expectations around eye contact, right? I was told that if these gentlemen didn’t look me directly in the eye, to not take it other than something that they were just used to as a custom where they came from. And that’s an example of a key insight that informed my interactions with them.

Collins: There’s some real zero-sum thinking going on in some quarters when it comes to migration, you know, that even legal immigrants get their footing at the expense of native born Americans. Uh, the counter of course is that the U.S. was built by immigrants. But I’m wondering how do you integrate what can sometimes be fairly virulent anti immigration views in your reporting without actually feeding that fear narrative?

Matusek: It is true that we’ve seen record numbers of illegal immigration. The Biden administration has seen over 7 million encounters with Border Patrol along the Southern border. And that’s more than triple the amount that Trump saw during his time in office. At the same time, those numbers alone don’t reflect the number of people who enter and stay in the U.S., and what share can establish a legal basis to stay even temporarily here. 

Another basic concept to understand: it’s illegal for an immigrant to enter the country between our official ports of entry. It’s also true that immigrants may apply for protections like asylum, even if they entered the country illegally. One part of the country likes to focus on the act of illegal entry and won’t easily acknowledge asylum, another part of the country focuses on the right to seek asylum, but won’t easily acknowledge that crossing the border into the U. S. is still a crime. 

I recently spoke with a Colombian couple. They’re now here living in Denver. They’ve applied for asylum. And on their journey to northern Mexico, they said that they had the intent to do what the U.S. government is requesting of migrants like them, which is to present themselves at official ports of entry, lawfully. While they were trying to go through this route of scheduling an appointment, they were kidnapped in Mexico, thrown into a van with other migrants, told not to talk, and they were ultimately thrown into the Rio Grande River just south of Eagle Pass, Texas.  The woman was pregnant, and the couple also had a three year old. They didn’t know how to swim. They barely made it to the other side of the river, they told me, as American authorities looked on. They’re safe now in Denver, but they say that their son was so traumatized by the incident that now, here in Colorado, he won’t get in the water at the pool. So on paper, yes, they are unauthorized immigrants. They are also asylum seekers because they’re applying for asylum. And even though it was their intention to come the quote unquote right way, their agency was taken away from them. So hopefully that’s just one example for our readers about how some of this binary thinking about open versus closed borders, legal versus illegal, gets pretty complicated when you listen to people’s stories. 

Collins: Security is certainly a shared concern, ideally across the political spectrum and, you know, human trafficking, cartel violence, these things are real and documented, but as you say, they’re not the whole story.  

Matusek: That's true, and even if the majority of immigrants arriving are coming purely to better their family situation, including people with legitimate asylum claims, it is important to recognize credible threats to public safety.

So I live in Denver, and along with the city just east of us, Aurora, officials have alleged the presence of a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua, or TDA. There's been some conflicting information about how much of a draw Denver, which has helped a lot of migrants, has been to this group, but officials say they do believe that people affiliated with the group have been involved in crimes.

So, some context might be helpful here: the Biden administration designated that gang as a transnational criminal organization in July. That's a big deal. It's also a big deal that federal authorities have confirmed alleged affiliates of TDA have come up through the southern border.

Back to where I live in Denver. The Rocky Mountain Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA, has confirmed to me that the agency has seized fentanyl destined for the Denver metro area from individuals believed to be linked to TDA. That's also concerning, as overdose deaths involving fentanyl are rising in Colorado.

Collins: So you’re Denver-based, as you said. And that’s a city that’s become more of a migrant magnet in recent years. How much does living in Denver day to day inform your perspective on this story? 

Matusek: It’s a fascinating case study around how federal decisions have local consequences. Since late 2022, Denver has tracked the arrival of more than 42,000 migrants, though not all of those individuals have stayed in the metro area, much less the state. The city has offered short term shelter to some, others have asked for travel tickets elsewhere, where they may have friends or family connections outside of Colorado. All told, the city’s migrant response has cost some $74 million. There are a lot of people in the state who are pushing back against that price tag, right? And that allocation of resources towards people who may be ultimately deported from the United States. Of course, the city also has pre existing challenges like affordable housing and homelessness for our own domestic population that residents would like to see better addressed. 

It’s been so interesting to watch Denver pivot, especially within the past few months, because the city is no longer offering several days or weeks worth of shelter to new arriving migrants. And we’re only getting, like one migrant a day arriving now, as opposed to dozens or even hundreds as we saw last year. And instead, they’re prioritizing a few hundred migrants who arrived in past months and who are applying for asylum. To focus their resources on them, including help with temporary housing. And one of those programs is called Work Ready, that I’ve just started to report on. If you apply for asylum, which you can only do within the United States, you have to wait at least six months from the date of your filing that application before you can receive a work permit. It’s been interesting to see how the city is now investing in English classes, even computer classes, to help give these  asylum seekers a leg up for the day when they can work with work authorization. The city is also frustrated that there’s been federal inaction on the issue of work permits, because there are dozens of companies here, the city says, that has wanted to hire these migrants, but it’s not the state or city’s ability to issue work permits. That’s the role of the federal government.  

Honestly, I don’t think that the heart of the immigration debate is about Americans not wanting more immigrants wholesale. I see the issue more about the rate of change, and how immigrants enter, and who deserves to stay. Throughout American history, immigration has always ebbed and flowed. I’m actually currently reading a book about how Abraham Lincoln thought about immigration. It’s fascinating to see the same arguments pre Civil War around immigration play out now. And in fact, I just read a passage about how Lincoln condemned an anti-Irish riot in Philadelphia in the 1840s. So being able to have some historical context has really helped kind of mellow my thought as I move forward. 

Collins: Hmm. Thank you so much for all of your work on this important story and for coming back to talk about it. 

Matusek: Thanks so much, Clay. Always a pleasure. 

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Collins: And thank you to our listeners. You can find more, including our show notes with links to the stories that we discussed, and to all of Sarah’s. Work at csmonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Jingnan Peng. Mackenzie Farkus is also a producer on this show. Our sound engineers were Noel Flatt and Alyssa Britton. Noel also composed our original music. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2024.