"Community is How We Get Through the Darkness": Unexpected Lessons from an Immigration Conference
The 10th Annual Asylum and Immigration Law Conference was held at New York Law School this week, but most of the lessons I learned weren't on the agenda.
If you are under the impression that academic and legal conferences are populated by pallid professors floating about like helium-filled cortices whose more primitive neural networks dangle untethered from the ground, you have been sorely misled.
Conferences are more like family reunions: multigenerational gatherings replete with the cast of quirky characters of varying description and disposition not unlike a Wes Anderson film. You have your familiar faces of your own generation, siblings by choice or circumstance, matriarchs and patriarchs with diverse legacies, awkward teenagers making their first reluctant or possibly overenthusiastic appearances, aunts and uncles who married in the family, and a few scattered outsiders who bravely appear to inject a much-needed dose of diversity. The fact that most of us are unclear under which category we properly belong is part of the fun.
I found myself contemplating belonging and community as I sat in attendance at the 10th Annual Asylum and Immigration Law Conference at New York Law School in Manhattan this week. The conference brings together academics, policy analysts, practicing immigration attorneys, paralegals, law students, and (until this year) staff from government agencies. The first day packed in seminars on the latest research on the immigration court, Latin American migration policy, and a meet-the-author book discussion with Jonathan Blitzer, while the second day lined up a dozen intensive training sessions on various aspects of immigration law.
The conference’s visionary is the indefatigable Lenni Benson, whose sweeping impact on the field of immigration law over thirty years as a law professor (and longer as a working attorney) is only overshadowed by her own tireless commitment to incubating and launching projects and organizations that draw people together and take on a life of their own. It was Lenni who sparked my contemplation on community, and in particular my search for better metaphors for what conferences are, what they do, and how to communicate the value of this conference to those who could not make it.
In her opening remarks on the second day of the conference, Lenni acknowledged the palpable sense of powerlessness and futility that the current flood of policy changes might reasonably inspire. Lenni then added that coming together to learn and to connect was essential, especially now.
“Being in community is the way we get through the darkness,” she said.
You could feel a collective sigh of recognition in the room. Indeed, many of the routine interactions around the conference began with looks and embraces of shared exhaustion, like emergency room doctors called back to work for what they knew would be a four-year-long car crash. Lenni articulated what a lot of people were feeling.
Now—I am not an attorney. When I attend legal conferences, I typically do so as a kind of participant observer, even if I am also speaking. I am interested not only in the content of the legal seminars, but also in the socialization of people into immigration lawyering as a field of practice and the ways in which working immigration attorneys navigate competing legal, ethical, political, and relational demands. I am, in some ways, a nosey cousin. At the same time, I have developed a sincere admiration for the work of immigration attorneys. And to the extent that I also also share some (though certainly not all) of their experiences and understandings of the immigration system, I also affirmed (and felt affirmed by) Lenni’s call to resilience through community.
Community takes a variety of textures and shapes, but I believe that community formed through shared learning is a tragically underused natural resource in our country. Yes, we need places to process our emotional and psychological reactions to the volatility going on around us. But we should also take seriously the fact that our information ecosystem has become so dangerously infested with disinformation, hate speech, obscenity, and a contagious contempt for logical reasoning that is so corrosive as to corrupt even the possibility of reasoned discussion.
This is, of course, a key part of the political project we are living through. When, in 2021, J.D. Vance repeated Richard Nixon’s phrase that “professors are the enemy,” he was speaking honestly. To learn, to think, to teach—these acts are treasonous in an authoritarian state and those who commit such deviant acts as these have always risked being branded enemies of the state. On an even simpler and more general level, but consistent with this assault on well-reasoned thought, consider the ways in which social media algorithms interrupt our critical faculties and assault our more benevolent and nuanced sensibilities.
The darkness Lenni referred to included the many recent immigration policy changes, but I believe it also referred to attempts to undermine our natural enthusiasm and curiosity for learning how the world works. Indeed, this is what I felt most viscerally at the conference. My hours spent learning how attorneys can create a strong court record in order to appeal negative decisions, the various legal grounds for immigrant detention (and release from detention), and the new policy realities for asylum seekers—it might sound dry and technical, but it wasn’t. It was a detox from the spectacle of news headlines and sensationalism that reminded me that, yes, there is a body of law and a strong nationwide network of competent people and organizations who are not powerless.
As much as I try to embody this in my writing to you, the conference was an important reminder for myself not to get distracted by the rhetoric. There is meaningful work to be done, but it requires a commitment to being an active part of a learning community. Public rhetoric tries to convince us that it’s all vibes, when in reality competent action has not lost its social value—not at all. We need learning communities as much as we ever did, and perhaps more, because our brains need places to feed on knowledge. This is how we equip ourselves: by learning and thinking together, even if all we have are these mash-up family reunions of people trying to stay sane in trying times.
So enough contemplation, let me share with you some of the people I met at this most recent family reunion as well as what I learned.
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Representing Immigration Courts Through Performance Art
First, I am excited to introduce you to Irina Kruzhilina, an artistic director and faculty at the New School, who is currently working on a project to bring the drama of immigration courtrooms to the stage in a performance that I’m confident will communicate the truth of removal proceedings in a way that data and policy briefs never will. Artists help us think beyond the epistemic frames we grow used to. Artists engage with questions of how to represent the truth of human experience without treating the question as if truth were simply a debate over facts and law.
It was inspiring to know that this big umbrella of community includes artists who are offering us new stories and new ways of storytelling. I’ll share more about Irina and her team’s work as it takes shape and becomes public, but for now you might visit her most recent work called SpaceBridge. SpaceBridge is a workshop program and a live theater piece which brings refugee children from Russia together with their American counterparts to build lifelong friendships while coming to terms with their differences. A trailer for the performance is available online below.
As some of you know, I have a deep passion for literature and art that drives my constant search for new and different ways of talking about immigration. My recent essay on the incredible photography of Greg Constantine is just one example of this. If you know of creative artistic works that touch on the topic of immigration, please share them with me.
Words of Gratitude
I want to mention the many people who I was fortunate to see in person that have inspired me over the years. This includes my Ohio State friend Alex Holtzman, now a professor at Hofstra University. One of my graduate mentors, Amna Akbar, introduced us years ago, and it’s exciting to see his work as an educator continues. I finally met Karen Musalo in real life, Center for Gender & Refugee Studies and a legend for her work on gender based asylum claims. Michelle Méndez, my Baltimore neighbor and attorney with the National Immigration Project. Also present was Dree Collopy, my Washington, D.C. neighbor who wrote the book (literally) on asylum; I was excited to finally meet her in person, too. Relentless NYC immigration lawyer Rex Chen was kind enough to share photographs of the event with me. I could go on, but I am just so grateful for the connections, old and new, that gave me life.
Groundbreaking Immigration Court Research
Okay, I need a minute to nerd out. Lenni was kind enough to invite me to be a moderator for the first session of the conference because she and her coauthors were presenting a new paper based on a quantitative study of the immigration court. Here’s the big idea. A lot of us in the immigration research world have done what are called ‘courtroom observations’ in immigration court. This simply means sitting in on immigration court hearings to study and learn about court processes. But these courtroom observations raise an obvious and fundamental question: do judges change their behaviors when an outside person (not court staff or immigrants) is watching them?
This is trickier to study than it might seem, but Lenni and her team of coauthors led by Decio Coviello found a way. Lenni has been coordinating courtroom observations in New York City for a while so she has a lot of observational data on court proceedings. But this study is a bit different. In this study, Lenni and Decio used properly randomized assignment of observers to courtrooms integrated with detailed study of the EOIR data, in a way that allowed them to draw rigorously validated conclusions about the causal effect of courtroom observers. And in short, yes, courtroom observation does change judges’ behavior, even when judges don’t realize it.
Their paper is forthcoming, so I won’t share more than that. But from my perspective, it will set the standard for rigorous research on immigration courts. It was a real honor to be a part of the conversation and I can’t wait to read the final product!
Jonathan Blitzer “Everyone Who is Gone is Here”
Jonathan Blitzer joined the conference to talk about his book Everyone Who is Gone is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis on Thursday evening. Heather Axford, Director of Central American Legal Assistance, facilitated the powerful discussion. I have not read the book yet, but at least I own it now thanks to Lenni handing me a copy at our session on Thursday morning.
Blitzer’s book is too expansive for me to summarize here, but I want to highlight one key observation from the event that ties into the themes of community and learning that run through today’s post. Blitzer made a point early on that his book was inspired, in part, by a desire to zoom out from the narrow crisis-driven politics and reporting around immigration in this country. He didn’t say this, but I believe he also was interested in telling stories about immigration that didn’t simply stop at the border.
As part of that shift in temporality, he makes the observation that we are oversaturated with catchphrases like “Biden Border Crisis” or “Trump Border Crisis” that give the impression that the entire story of immigration is always tied to whichever administration is in power. In fact, the story of Central American migration is a much longer one. Blitzer said at one point (I’m paraphrasing here), “We need to see Central American migration as one story, not as separate stories about different presidential administrations.”
It was a concise way of expressing something that I’ve felt recently as I talk to people who are only now becoming more aware of the plight of immigrants in the country and associate immigrants’ vulnerability specifically with Trump. Yes, it’s true that the Trump administration’s policies focus heavily and aggressively on immigrants. But if we only tell the story that way, we are rendering invisible much of the history that explains why immigration is such a powerful and divisive issue in the first place. And that story does not fit so neatly into distinct presidential administrations.
Blitzer’s observation also reminded me, and I hope it reminds you, that this isn’t the first time that immigration policy feels politicized, and it’s because good people have always found ways to stand up for decency that organizational infrastructure and legal precedent exists. Looking around the room, I was reminded of the work of Karen Musalo, who succeeded in getting female genital mutilation (FGM) recognized as grounds for protection (see Matter of Kasinga) or the many other organizations listed below who emerged to challenge other moments of anti-immigrant and anti-refugee backlash.
That is to say, taking a step back and learning our history doesn’t solve our present day problems, but it might give us the clarity and confidence to not give into despair. Who knows what we will yet create out of the necessity of our moment and leave to the generations that come after us.
“Being in community is the way we get through the darkness.” – Lenni Benson
Next Steps
Conferences like this one take an enormous amount of coordination and support. I always want to express my appreciation to the New York Law School for hosting the event, and Immigrant Arc and the Federal Bar Association’s Immigration Section for co-sponsoring the event.
If you would like more information about the event along with gobs and gobs of great resources on immigration law, go to the conference website and navigate into the pages on materials for each of the sessions.
If you’re in the New York area and looking for places to invest your time and resources, consider supporting the Safe Passage Project, which Lenni founded. They do incredible work to provide free lawyers to immigrant and refugee children who are being deported.
The other organizations below helped make the event possible at a time when they are all facing direct political and financial attacks simply for providing legal and social support to noncitizens who are trying to follow our country’s immigration laws.
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Glad to see you connecting this with literature and art more broadly. Happy to know this was an invigorating conference.
Thank you for sharing Irina's work! I'm always searching for creative spaces that tell stories through mediums like film or theater. Her Spacebridge program is very moving.