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🟧Week of April 14: I’m off on Thursday and Friday; before that I’m in Washington with a few meetings and a need to finish a Border Update a day early. I’ll try to be reachable, but could be delayed.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
This email has a link to the Border Update, a podcast about the Alien Enemies Act, two posts about some of the people who got sent to El Salvador’s terror prison, some links to recent coverage of Colombia’s peace process, a few shorter posts about border security and human rights, some readings from the past week, and links to upcoming events. (That’s quite a bit for five days since the last update.)
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Over a space of 30 hours on Thursday and Friday, I’m producing a podcast and a Border Update, speaking on a panel, and have 6 other meetings. Plus, my daughter is home from college for spring break, and I’d like to see her.
So don’t expect much posting here or on social media for the rest of the week, and please understand that I will probably be unable to return messages for a little while. Back soon!
Durante un espacio de 30 horas el jueves y el viernes, estoy produciendo un podcast y un Border Update, hablando en un panel y tengo otras 6 reuniones. Además, mi hija está de visita por las vacaciones de primavera de su universidad, y me gustaría verla.
Así que no espere muchas publicaciones aquí o en las redes sociales durante el resto de la semana, y por favor, comprenda que probablemente no podré responder mensajes durante este rato. ¡Volveré pronto!
This one links to the Border Update, a timeline of the Alien Enemies Act judicial order-ignoring fiasco, some links to recent coverage of organized crime-tied corruption in the Americas, some recommended readings, and links to upcoming events.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
This one links to the Border Update, a timeline of the Alien Enemies Act judicial order-ignoring fiasco, some links to recent coverage of organized crime-tied corruption in the Americas, some recommended readings, and links to upcoming events.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
This one links to the Border Update, a WOLA podcast about the Mexico tariff nonsense, videos of three recent interviews in English, some links to recent coverage of arms transfers in the Americas, some recommended readings, and links to upcoming events.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
This one links to the latest Border Update, a subject index to this year’s Updates so far, a brand-new analysis of the military’s role in migration control, a podcast with colleagues at the border in Nogales, links to upcoming events, and two sets of recommended readings.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
This one links to the latest Border Update, media of two interviews about the border and migration, and a joint statement with colleagues at the border. It has links to events and some recommended readings.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
This one links to the latest Border Update and our analysis of the USAID aid freeze. It has a video I made while walking around a deserted downtown Washington looking at all the hotspots where a coup is reportedly taking place inside. It has links to events and some recommended readings.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
This one is jam-packed because between testifying in the Senate, taking my kid to college six states away, and dealing with Trump’s first days and Colombia deportation fiasco, it’s been hard to find the time to assemble an email. So this edition has some serious accumulated density.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
My posting schedule is all thrown off by travel and testifying in Congress, so this one is late and the next one probably will be, too. But when a lot is going on, there’s a lot to inform about, so I’ll keep these coming.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
It may be the last update I’ll send until the weekend of January 11-12. Next week, the last full week before Christmas, is a slow one, and I hope to hunker down and finish a big project (coding, not writing) that I’ve had on the shelf for months. I’ll unveil it at some point next year. So I don’t plan to produce much next week, other than a Border Update. If I do send another message next weekend, it will be thin.
This one is reasonably thick, though: in addition to the Border Update, below you’ll find a great podcast about Colombia, an exploration of the myth that Joe Biden was “soft” on border security and migration, a dig into migration data from the Darién Gap, links to some good readings, and links to three Latin America-related events that I know of during this last working week of 2024.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
It has the weekly Border Update; an “explainer” and a podcast about Trump already starting to threaten Mexico; some notes on Trump’s troubling nominee to head Customs and Border Protection; two pieces about remarkable border and migration data; a CNN Español interview about Colombia; links to some good readings; and links to 10 upcoming Latin America-related events.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
It has the weekly Border Update; some links to coverage of organized crime-tied government corruption during the past month; five interesting readings from last week; and some other items that I’ve posted here over the past week.
There are no “upcoming events” in the e-mail, nor will I post any here. Next week is punctuated by the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States (Thursday the 28th), so little will be happening. I will also skip next week’s e-mail update.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
It has the weekly Border Update; a set of resolutions for post-election daily life; a WOLA podcast episode about what awaits us; an overview of border and migration trends through the end of the U.S. government’s 2024 fiscal year; next week’s relevant events that I know of; five interesting readings from last week; and a self-evaluation of a year of “daily border links” posts.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
I produced 185 "daily border links" posts in the past year as part of our election-year rapid-response strategy. It was worthwhile, but not enough to do indefinitely.
On November 27, 2023, with a U.S. presidential election nearly a year away, WOLA’s border and migration program embarked on a “rapid response” strategy to add facts and context to the narrative about one of the upcoming campaign’s main issues.
That day, we published the first of what would be 185 “Daily Border Links” posts totaling over 150,000 words (plus the link citations).
Each one was a summary of that day’s U.S.-Mexico border-related news: breaking developments and deeper analysis pieces, with fully cited links below each item.
Each was just a few hundred words: a quick read, most of the time produced by about 9:00 or 10:00 Eastern each weekday.
I would then share them on WOLA’s Border Oversight microsite, on my own blog, and—as up to four attached images of each page’s text—on seven social media sites (Twitter, BlueSky, Mastodon, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Tumblr).
I would also share them with three mailing lists: two NGO coalition listservs, and a Google Group open to the public. (You can still sign up for that and get WOLA’s Weekly Border Updates, which we’ve been producing since 2020.)
This was a key part of our “rapid response” strategy because it forced me to do the reading and to be excruciatingly up to date on every development and data point. It was an excellent tool for reaching journalists and fellow activists, experts, and service providers. It helped shape some news coverage, and I know that many people in government were reading it.
The idea was to run the Daily Border Links for a year, through U.S. Election Day, and then shut them down and move on. I would entertain the idea of continuing them if the level of demand and engagement was spectacular.
In the end, the level of demand for the “links” posts was healthy enough to have made it more than a worthwhile effort. But it was not overwhelming enough to merit continuing it beyond the election campaign year.
Here’s an evaluation of the experience:
The good
As a rapid response strategy, the Daily Border Links succeeded in reaching journalists and NGO partners. It appeared to reach U.S. executive branch officials quietly: they knew about it but rarely interacted with them. Legislative staff give much more frequent feedback on our weekly updates, which are actual narratives, rather than on annotated links like the dailies.
Having to write these each weekday kept me super sharp, which made my “post-9:00 AM” border and migration advocacy work far more effective. I know so much about what’s happening, in alarming detail. It made me a good interview, I think.
I didn’t miss a single deeply reported piece, investigation, or NGO or government report. (Though I also see most of those when doing the weekly updates.)
I’m very proud of the archive that will remain on the web for good. The November-to-November story is a journey from the late-2023 Senate negotiations over the “bipartisan border bill” at a time of record migration, to the bill’s failure, Mexico’s crackdown, all the things the candidates were saying as both tacked rightward, the Biden administration’s body blow to asylum access, and the recent decline in migration. All of this interspersed with innumerable fact checks, deeply reported investigations, and tragedies that people forget after a few news cycles.
The not-so-good
As noted, the Daily Links did not set the world on fire, traffic-wise, although it’s hard to tell because—since I wanted to get the information out frictionlessly—I shared them in a way that allowed people to read it without me knowing. I used graphics to put the whole thing on social media platforms, and I mailed it to listservs. My analytics service, Plausible, says that just 2,900 people visited the main news archive page in a year, which is not impressive; 4,600 people when you include visits to individual updates’ pages. But I gave people few reasons to visit the site itself, because the same information appeared in so many other formats and on so many other platforms.
While I created a Google Group mailing list (no cost to me, but not the friendliest format for people without Gmail accounts), I didn’t advertise it except for a link at the top of each post. Still, 158 people signed up between January and now. Between that and listservs, several hundred people got it in their mail every morning. That is good reach for a niche product, but nothing to brag about. (WOLA’s Weekly Updates do a lot better. They’re not as rapid response, and they run long. But Google features them prominently and they often get over 3,000 downloads each. About 1 in 10 exceeds 10,000 downloads.)
I ended up having to wade through a lot of mediocre content in my daily “gatherings” from news sources (a Twitter list of news posters, RSS feeds, Google News searches). There’s a lot of “boiler room,” “shovel,” “press release,” or “police blotter” reporting out there—especially on Google News—that I’m happy not to have to comb through anymore. What a waste of time.
Ultimately, it’s not our goal to be a “news service”: we should be active participants in the movement for a rights-respecting, humane, well-managed border.
During key moments like an election year, furrowing our brow to do rapid-response news-digging and analysis made sense, and I know the links posts inspired some good media reporting, alerted allies to emerging trends and challenges, and improved our audiences’ access to facts (if those matter anymore). But now, I need to spend more time on work that is less shallow, that adds more value, and that doesn’t require racing to put something out by 9:00 AM.
Why stop now? Resources.
So now, 347 days after the first post, the last “Daily Border Links” went up today, and there’s no plan to restart. Some colleagues have contacted me to lament this. They have a point: the Trump transition and the first 100 days are a time when our community could really use daily updates.
But WOLA doesn’t have the resources to maintain this pace right now. Like many NGOs that do human rights advocacy without U.S. government funding, we’re in a lean moment.
I suppose I could be convinced to continue producing them if we had specific philanthropic resources to pay for the big investment in staff time they require. However, institutional funders are less interested in backing national-level “narrative work” about borders and migration right now.
You could see the sector-wide lack of resources in major outlets’ campaign coverage, which tended to cite, repeatedly, a small number of border and migration experts. We’re the handful of people who’ve managed to make a living being credible sources of information and clear explainers, while more current and wide-ranging than our counterparts in academia. (No shade to academia, which rewards deeper specialization and a slower, more deliberate pace, not “rapid response” on a spectrum of issues. Imagine trying to do that while teaching a full courseload.)
Without foundation or big individual donor grant money, could we sustain a continued pace of Daily Links posts by charging people to get them, like a Substack model? Perhaps, but I’m not sure the numbers work for something this niche.
For the number of hours I spent on the daily links—news-gathering, reading, writing, all those mailings and social media cross-posts—plus the WOLA infrastructure that makes it possible, I’d conservatively need $3,500 per month. That’s $4,000-4,500 if you include time spent on the weekly updates, too. That would be 400 people paying $10 per month each, or 800 people paying $5 per month.
Given the traffic indicators I mentioned above, that seems unlikely. If we added a paywall (which many Substacks don’t do, asking for voluntary contributions), we’d be shutting down distribution to those who don’t cough up the money, thus negating the original goal of getting friction-free information to as many people as possible.
So that’s more than you probably wanted to know about our foray into producing daily, rapid-response content during an election year. I’m glad I did it, and I’m proud that I never missed a day without giving advance warning first. I certainly don’t rule out doing it again when the need arises.
After a particularly busy period, a reflection about this website, and the direction of my work in general.
There are moments each year when all my intentions to maintain an up-to-date, compelling, thoughtful personal website just fall apart, sunk by an armada of 70-hour weeks.
I’m emerging (I hope) from one of those moments. In the last seven days, I’ve:
Taught a class at the Foreign Service Institute
Recorded a quick WOLA video ahead of Kamala Harris’s September 27 visit to the U.S.-Mexico border
Prepared testimony and testified in a House of Representatives subcommittee hearing
Driven from Washington to eastern Long Island (6 1/2 hours) and spent time with my father-in-law
Presented on a virtual panel hosted by the Latin American Studies Association
Given a virtual presentation to a group of experts in Colombia
Driven to Brooklyn (2 1/2 hours), while covering the Harris border visit, for a weekend of family festivities around my sister’s wedding, which was terrific (especially my speech, lol)
Driven back to Washington (4 1/2 hours), while covering the Biden administration’s tightening of asylum access regulations (see today’s “Border Links”)
Today, other than an interview this morning, I’ve got a clear calendar, finally. I’m washing clothes, taking a breath, answering messages (sorry if I haven’t gotten back to you, not that you’re likely to be reading this), planing out the next few weeks, and maybe getting rid of the stubborn cough I’ve had for two weeks (it’s not COVID).
One thing I miss during these “high season” moments is having the chance to share more here. This site is a good space for me to get my thoughts together, sharing information and insights that are deeper than a tweet, but not requiring full editorial review or an institutional voice.
I’d like to share more of that, and to have more time to do the reading on which a lot of it is based. But most of my recent posts to this site have been brief, sporadic links, graphics, or border updates, which are not quite the same. It’s not my goal to run a news-brief service.
I may remain in this rut, though, at least through the U.S. elections: such are the demands of “rapid response,” and I’ll also be spending part of next week at a conference in Guatemala, so there will be a bit of travel.
However, I expect some gradual but steady evolution in the coming weeks as I return to this space and use it more to develop ideas and future work.
That future work will be more on the “security and U.S. policy” side of my advocacy and research, where I’ve allowed a lot of weeds to grow during the past few years as my “borders and migration” focus intensified.
This year, though, WOLA has seen a decline in funding for borders-and-migration work. By no means will I abandon that work, which is very important to me even as it’s hard to promise short-term positive change. Still, as the election-period “rapid response” phase draws to a close, I do expect to turn the dial back toward the “defense oversight” work denoted by my job title.
That means more attention to security policy (what’s up with the “Bukele model?”), U.S. assistance (what’s Southcom up to?), state presence and governance (what’s happening with the Colombian peace accord’s “rural reform” promises? or in the Darién Gap?), organized crime and corruption (Ecuador’s crisis, drug policy challenges), and, yes, borders and migration (all of the above topics as they relate to migrants, plus accountability for abuse and corruption).
I look forward to this site reflecting that shift. It will be happening just as we get a new administration and Congress here in Washington. The election’s two possible outcomes point to two starkly different futures.
Neither promises a golden age for a rights-based U.S. policy toward Latin America. But one outcome promises gradual progress, while the other calls for defending what and whom we can, whenever we can, through a long, dark night.
It’s going to be endlessly interesting, and I’ll aim to document as much of it as I can here, even as these “busy seasons” come and go.
Great to be back in El Paso again. I'm here until mid-July, almost to the end of my 2-month work sabbatical. Say hi if you see me at a café or taquería.
View from this morning’s jog.
Great to be back in El Paso again. I’m here until mid-July, almost to the end of my 2-month work sabbatical. Say hi if you see me at a café or taquería.
No deep relaxation or deep thoughts yet... just a polished draft of a long-overdue report on Colombia.
I’m in the middle of week two of this two-month work sabbatical. I’d hoped that by now, I’d have had many moments of solitude and calm, as I caught up on reading and posted deep thoughts to this site.
There haven’t been a lot of deep thoughts posted here, and I haven’t been having many to begin with.
I recall that this happened the last time I had a sabbatical: I spent the first part catching up overdue projects that my regular schedule hadn’t allowed me to work on. It’s happening again.
This time, the main project is a long-suffering report. Back in October and November, I spent two weeks in Colombia (I posted many photos here at the time). I came back, got all my notes together, and then started writing about it. I worked bit by bit, section by section, whenever I had the chance to move the project forward.
As winter and spring passed, there were entire weeks—even some two-week periods—when I did not have that chance at all. It turns out that running a communications-heavy advocacy program about the U.S.-Mexico border and migration, during the highly charged 2024 election year, doesn’t lend itself to also writing an in-depth field research report about migration in Colombia.
Now that I’m on sabbatical, it’s finally happening. I’ve put in about 24 of the past 96 hours working on it, and today I handed off a polished draft to WOLA’s program and communications teams. It’s really nice to no longer say “the report is coming.”
It hasn’t been painless. What was a 16,000-word draft at the beginning of the weekend, with 170 footnotes, by Monday night was a 20,000-word draft with 242 footnotes. By today, I’d managed to whack it back to 14,500 words and 169 footnotes.
If you’ve never had to cut 5,000 words from a 20,000-word report, eliminating entire lines of research that you’d gathered from your fieldwork… well, I don’t recommend it. It’s brutal.
Between that and posting “daily border links,” I never made it outdoors at all today. (It was raining, anyway.)
But it’s great to have it behind me (except for suggestions and revisions). Being able to shut down much of the work over the past 10 days is what made it possible.
It still doesn’t really feel like a sabbatical, though.
Just because it seemed like an interesting thing to do, I’ve linked this site to ActivityPub. Which means you can catch every post by following it from Mastodon, Pixelfed, Pleroma, or any other Fediverse application.
The address is @adamisacson@adamisacson.com.
(And as the graphic indicates, each post has its own unique shortlink using the domain “admis.me.” I figured out how to do that myself. Fancy.)
May 23 was the first day of my two-month sabbatical that I got to spend entirely at home. In fact, it was the first day that I’ve spent fully at home since May 8. So in a sense, it felt like the first true day of the sabbatical.
I did quite a bit of work, though: a daily border links post, a draft of our weekly Border Update that will go out tomorrow, monitoring the Senate vote that once again killed the “Border Act” and its attempt to restrict asylum rights, and substantial progress on a nearly completed report about migration through Colombia.
The “sabbatical” difference was that I got to do all of that in my house while skipping some coalition meetings, turning off WhatsApp notifications, spending much of it writing in our little backyard with the birds and squirrels (it’s not too hot yet), and taking a nap in the middle of the day. I also made really good pizza from scratch, and we ate it over a bottle of wine.
Look at that pizza, I even made the crust from flour, salt, sugar, and yeast. You’d think you were in Naples, except for the pineapple.
Tomorrow will not be so becalmed. I’ve got two scheduled morning medical checkups (nothing wrong with me—I scheduled these months ago, this is what you do when you’re in your fifties) with “Border Update” posting in between. Also, a meeting with congressional committee staff.
But I should be back home, and in reading-writing mode, by mid-afternoon. That’s the plan, anyway.
It was a busy day, not much different from a work day—but I laid some groundwork for my two-month sabbatical, two days in.
I can’t really say that I’m in “sabbatical mode” yet, but I’m laying the groundwork, I suppose?
I’d stayed up a bit too late last night learning how to use Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot for my upcoming coding projects, and then I couldn’t stop myself from writing a data-heavy post about border trends. Knowing that I didn’t have to report to work the next day let me follow the topic wherever it took me, and by the time I looked up from my screen, it was 12:30 AM.
Though I was up later than on a regular work day, this morning otherwise looked like…a regular work day. I wanted to go through my news feeds and create a daily border links post because it’s impossible to look away from Senate Democrats’ deeply regrettable decision to move forward with asylum-restrictions legislation this week.
I also guest-taught a class of U.S. diplomats via Zoom. It was my second time trying out a 45-minute presentation about Latin America’s security challenges. The narrative flows across these topics:
The region’s chronic violence
Deforestation as an example of how laws are not enforced against the powerful and well-connected
What “impunity” means, and how impunity for official corruption tied to organized crime makes organized crime far harder to confront than insurgencies
How state absence from vast territories makes the problem even worse
Why a “pax mafiosa” is not progress, even if it lowers violence levels for a while
The solutions to violence that human rights groups and pro-democracy reformers propose: construction of a democratic security sector
A problem: my community’s proposed solutions can’t make people feel safer in six months. But some politicians offer short-term fixes to security
The “Bukele model” and why it may not work, and especially not in countries like Ecuador
Negotiations with armed and criminal groups, like gang pacts or Colombia’s “total peace”
Amid frustrations over short and long term timeframes, leaders (and U.S. policymakers) often content themselves with repeatedly pushing security challenges down to “manageable” levels
Where “manageability” falls apart (returning to the beginning) is deforestation and climate harm. There is no “manageable” level of that anymore.
While I’m on this sabbatical, I hope to polish this talk some more, then post a screencast delivering the narrative as audio over my slides.
After that talk, I spoke to a journalist about border trends for half an hour. Then I took my daughter out to the suburbs and sat in a cafe while she got a haircut. While in the cafe, I put out one of my weekly (OK, not quite “weekly”) emails to my mailing list.
I paid a quick visit to the grocery store after that, and upon returning home found on the doorstep some items that I’d ordered when I was in Medellín last week. I’m on a tight budget—non-profit salary, child at a private college—but had thought it would be worthwhile to set up a basic screen shelter and some sort of outdoor furniture in our tiny urban back yard.
More than two hours of assembly later, here it is. I now have an extremely rustic “writing shed” to work in during the coming months.
Yes I know, my back yard is a weedy mess. That’s a result of work deadlines, travel, family obligations on off-days, and a series of rainy weekends. I haven’t been here much when it’s nice out. I’ll clean it up during the sabbatical.
I’m writing in it now, and it’s just barely starting to feel, maybe, like I’m on sabbatical.
Tomorrow morning I’ll be working on some of the projects I’d discussed in my “sabbatical coming” post from last week. In the afternoon, though, I’ll be going to the Nationals baseball game with my mother and her husband, who live out in the suburbs. The weather is supposed to be perfect.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
It has highlights from last week’s trip to Medellín, some writing and data work about the border, and some thoughts on my two-month work sabbatical, which started yesterday. There are also weekly events links (16 of them) and links to some good readings.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Looking ahead to a two-month sabbatical. Given all the stuff I'd like to do, the title is deceptive.
That’s it until July 22. I won’t be in my office for more than two months, unless I’ve forgotten something.
I won’t be around to see the little orchid in my office bloom, as it’s about to do.
I’m off to Medellín tomorrow morning for an academic conference about migration. I return Saturday. And on Monday, my two-month sabbatical begins.
WOLA gives us a sabbatical every five years: a time to reflect and work on other projects. My last one was in the fall of 2015. Between the pandemic and my procrastination on the “sabbatical proposal,” it’s taken me eight and a half years to start a new one.
I’m lucky to have it. This is a much different period of my life than last time.
Last time, I’d been doing this work for 20 years and was solidly mid-career; now, I’m entering my mid-50s and thinking about what may be my final 20 (25? 30?) years of doing this work.
Last time, I was raising a 6th grader; now, she has just finished sophomore year of college.
Last time, I did not travel. This time, I’m going to be in Medellín now, Bogotá in June, and El Paso for three weeks in June and July. The first two are conferences. The border visit is just me hanging out.
My work plan for 2024 called for focusing on communications. (How could it be otherwise: I work on borders and migration during the 2024 election year. There’s a lot to communicate.) If you follow this site, you’ve seen that reflected in daily and weekly border updates, other written and quantitative work, lots of social media, and perhaps some regular-media appearances.
That work has been going well: I think it’s been the right strategic choice. But this late spring-early summer interlude is very welcome.
Lately, a typical week has included at least a dozen interviews, a few coalition meetings, a few internal meetings, and 20-25 email and text replies per day, on top of the writing and updates. Work that requires deeper thought has been falling behind.
So I’m ready to at least log out of WhatsApp and miss some of those meetings. The border updates will be infrequent, too, though I don’t plan to shut them down entirely. (I’m still reading the news.)
Now that there’s a chance, though, there’s a lot to think about.
Instead of “rapid response,” engaging in more “slow response”: taking the time to explain what a better security and border policy would look like. That means exploring both the “I have a magic wand” version and the “most we can do within existing law” versions. Of course, we already try to articulate that in a lot of our work at WOLA, but in my view it’s often rushed (tight word limits) or shoved into “recommendations” sections that hardly anyone reads. We’re not doing enough to paint a picture for people, whether of “selling a dream” or just “pursuing the least bad option.”
Preparing—both big-picture strategy and day-to-day survival tactics—for the strong possibility that Americans elect an administration that stands against most of what I care about, and that will seek to use its power against us.
Addressing an adverse funding environment for this work lately. I don’t cost much, but we need to keep the lights on. (This ties in with “paint a picture for people” above.)
Figuring out how to catch up, or abandon, parts of the work that are chronically behind.
Giving a hard look at the whole “border numbers and regular updates” approach that has characterized so much that I’ve posted on this site this year. It’s been regular, it opens the door to key audiences like reporters, legislative staff, and partner organizations. It’s certainly an example of “doing the work.” But is it creative? Is it helping those partners and audiences in the best way? I don’t intend to run a news aggregation service: is there a danger of falling into a rut?
Anticipating how this work will change because of climate change. I fear that this may be a historic summer for the planet, and it’s going to affect nearly everyone’s work. What we saw in Porto Alegre last week could just be a preview. And if I’m wrong, just wait until next summer.
Taking advantage of being in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez for a while without a fixed agenda. Mexico’s crackdown on migration can’t hold for too much longer, and things are already quite bad there. And the State of Texas is making the situation far worse.
In addition to all these things to think about, I’ve got projects that I’m eager to pursue, but haven’t had the time.
During my last sabbatical, I learned a lot of coding (PHP, MySQL, and the now-antiquated jQuery javascript framework) and built a personal research database, parts of which I still use every day. This time, I’ll be fixing some bugs and features there.
But I really want to build a new tool. This one will ease some of WOLA’s legislative work by keeping track of congressional offices and how we’ve worked with them. Years ago, I made a really primitive, bug-ridden version of that; I’ll be starting over from scratch and sharing it on GitHub as I go.
I also have a report on migration in Colombia that is nearly done: 16,000 words (which is too much), hundreds of footnotes. It needs some updating, and it will probably undergo a lot of internal edits and revisions before it goes public. It’s really good, though, and I look forward to releasing it.
I’m writing a chapter for a colleague’s book about drug policy. I’ve got the research in hand, so this won’t take too long.
I also want to get our “Border Oversight” database of CBP and Border Patrol human rights challenges back up to date.
I want to get my own archives and notes in order, with more of them visible to the public in a new subdomain at this site (something similar—though less ambitious—to those “digital gardens” that a few smart people have been creating). Keeping that together will ease my posting of more content at this site and elsewhere.
Here at this site, I hope to post more thoughts more often. My “sabbatical reflecting” will be much richer with a journal to record thoughts and observations. That would also help me to recall this period later, when I’m back in the day-to-day fray. (I didn’t do that during my last sabbatical, and my memories, sadly, are a blur.) This long-winded post is an effort to do that.
I know this is a lot. I’m not going to beat myself up if I don’t do all of these things, and I certainly don’t want to finish the sabbatical more tired than I started it. But if I spend this time well, I’ll emerge able to contribute more, and more creatively, for many years.
Finally, all of this means that you should not take it personally if I don’t answer your email right away, or if I end up ghosting your WhatsApp message or missing your DM. This is why I’m in “slow response” mode, and I’ll be back soon enough.
This site has been quiet this week. It will remain so for a bit longer, then I expect to be posting way more than usual.
In about half an hour, I’m headed downtown to WOLA’s 50th anniversary celebration and human rights award dinner. I’m looking forward to seeing dozens of people I’m very fond of, and whom I haven’t seen in a long time.
Tomorrow, I’m off to Massachusetts to pick my kid up at college (sophomore year, incredibly, is over). On the way back, I’ll be seeing an old high school friend in New Jersey, where I grew up.
Then on Tuesday, I’m off to Medellín for three days, to participate in a conference on migration at Colombia’s National University.
When I return a week from Saturday, things get interesting. I’ve got a two-month sabbatical. (WOLA encourages staff to take sabbaticals every five years; in my case, it’s been eight and a half years.)
I’ll be traveling to Bogotá for a few days in June for the LASA Congress, and to El Paso for three weeks in June and July for a “change of scene.”
Both while traveling and while at home, I want to do some deep thinking and also some work on a “coding project” that I’ll discuss here along the way. Actually, it’s two coding projects, but I’ll see how much I manage to accomplish. Like a carpenter who makes his own hammers, I’m fashioning tools that will help me do my work better when I come back.
During those two months, once I catch up on all the accumulated sleep deprivation, I expect to have a lot more unstructured time than usual. That means I’ll be harder to reach, because a sabbatical full of meetings and emails isn’t a sabbatical at all.
I’ll be posting to this site often, though. One idea I’ve had, which I’m not ready to commit to, is to post an original entry every evening, so that I can have a record of this mid-career time “out of the fray.” Those records and ruminations may be of more value to me than to readers, but I guess that’s the whole point of running a personal website.
So be warned, for a couple of months this site may depart dramatically from the “daily border links” and “infographics” groove that it has slipped into lately. I look forward to spending more time here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
There’s a Weekly Border Update, an analysis of why migration is unexpectedly declining at the U.S.-Mexico border so far this year, a look at the link between cocaine trafficking and violence in Ecuador, and a podcast about international drug policy. Also, links to some really good readings, and to 11 Latin America-related events that I know of in Washington or online this week.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
There’s a Weekly Border Update with a bit too much data, a roundup of arms transfers that took place in the Americas over the past month (way too many), links to five really good “long reads” about security in the Americas over the past month, and some notes about asylum access at the U.S.-Mexico border. Also, links to some really good readings, and to six Latin America-related events that I know of in Washington or online this week.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
There’s a Weekly Border Update after an eventful week; a few charts showing what appears to be an unusual spring migration slowdown at the U.S.-Mexico border (but not on the migrant route further south); some links from the past month about civil-military relations; and some other interesting odds and ends. Also, links to some really good readings, and to six Latin America-related events that I know of in Washington or online this week
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
This one has a Weekly Border Update; a "Border and Migration 101" screencast; a long written piece about what will happen if the Biden administration starts blocking asylum seekers; some links from the past month about organized crime-tied corruption; links to some good readings, and to 11 Latin America-related events this week.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
There’s a Weekly Border Update; a screencast video where I give a lengthy “Border and Migration 101” presentation; a long written piece about why it will harm people—but make little overall difference at the border—if the Biden administration starts blocking asylum seekers; some links from the past month about organized crime-tied corruption; and an argument for the urgently opening up more asylum appointments at border ports of entry. Also, links to some really good readings, and to 11 Latin America-related events that I know of in Washington or online this week.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
This one has a Weekly Border Update; a new mini-report plus a podcast about security in Ecuador; and a breakdown with links explaining the past month in Colombia's peace process. Also, links to some good readings, and to an incredible 46 Latin America-related events.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
This one has a Weekly Border Update; a new mini-report plus a podcast about security in Ecuador; and a breakdown with links explaining the past month in Colombia’s peace process. Also, links to some good readings, and to an incredible 46 Latin America-related events that I know of in Washington or online this week (counting Inter-American Human Rights Commission hearings). It’s going to be a busy week.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
This one has a weekly Border Update, links to recent coverage of arms transfers in the region, new data about migration at the U.S.-Mexico border, and an old video of a Venezuelan colleague about whom I'm extremely worried right now. Also, links to events this week and readings from last week.
Here’s a new “weekly” e-mail about stuff I’ve been working on, for those who’ve signed up to receive them.
This one has a weekly Border Update, links to recent coverage of arms transfers in the region, new data about migration at the U.S.-Mexico border, and an old video of a Venezuelan colleague about whom I’m extremely worried right now. Also, links to events this week and readings from last week.
If you visit this site a lot, you probably don’t need an e-mail, too. But if you’d like to get more-or-less regular e-mail updates, scroll to the bottom of this page or click here.
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