The Carolyn Benton Cockefair Chair continues to play an influential role in the cultural and intellectual life at UMKC and in the Kansas City community.
The Cockefair Chair continues its 60-year tradition of presenting fascinating lectures. Lectures are announced as soon as arrangements are final. Please check this website and subscribe to our contact list so that you are sure to receive the most current lecture information.
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The Making of an Immigration Crisis
Date: May 14, 2024
Time: 6:00pm
Location: New Venue - UMKC Student Union, Room 401, 5100 Cherry St., Kansas City, MO 64110, (UMKC Campus).
Admission Fee: Free and open to the public
Parking Information: Cherry Street Parking Garage – Levels 5 and 6
Event Contact: Matt McLain Register Here
About the Topic:
Everyone who makes the journey faces an impossible choice. Hundreds of thousands of people who arrive every year at the US-Mexico border travel far from their homes. An overwhelming share of them come from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, although many migrants come from farther away. Some are fleeing persecution, others crime or hunger. Very often it will not be their first attempt to cross. They may have already been deported from the United States, but it remains their only hope for safety and prosperity. Their homes have become uninhabitable. They will take their chances.
This vast and unremitting crisis did not spring up overnight. Indeed, as Blitzer dramatizes with forensic, unprecedented reporting, it is the result of decades of misguided policy and sweeping corruption. Brilliantly weaving the stories of Central Americans whose lives have been devastated by chronic political conflict and violence with those of American activists, government officials, and the politicians responsible for the country’s tragically tangled immigration policy, Blitzer reveals the full, layered picture for the first time.
About the Author:
Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He has won a National Award for Education Reporting as well as an Edward R. Murrow Award, and was a 2021 Emerson Fellow at New America. He lives with his family in New York City.
Past Lectures
In the past few years, our audiences have heard famous historians, experts on climate change and foreign policy, renowned authors, educators and others who examine contemporary life. More outstanding lectures are coming from the Cockefair Chair.
Recent lecturers include authors Adam Gopnik, Andrew Kaplan, Ben Lerner and Meg Wolitzer, experts on climate change Diana Liverman and Bill McKibben, artist Carrie Mae Weems, former Ambassador Michael McFaul, educators Sarah Lewis and Sarah Marty, historian Andrew Bacevich, former Press Secretary to the President Josh Earnest, founder/executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative Bryan Stevenson and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson
