How to Interview Immigrants with Patience and Care

I thought I had an agreement with Siddiq.

He had come to the United States with his family just before Afghanistan began to completely unravel in 2020. He was making a life for himself. He was enrolled in community college. He was picking up English more easily than the rest of his family. A trusted go-between had introduced us, telling me privately the family was a little skittish about talking to a reporter. So I took it easy. I was reassuring, patient. I asked Siddiq about his family’s misgivings and his own second thoughts. When we were finally scheduled to talk, he didn’t answer my calls, emails or texts.

He ghosted. And I understood.

Deborah was enthusiastic about talking to me. But once she began telling me how she had come to the U.S., undocumented and unafraid, she hesitated. “You know what? Can we do this without using my last name?” I asked her if, even now, after so many years in the U.S. — at first breaking the law and now a legal permanent resident — she worried about publicly telling her story. “Not everybody knows this part,” she said.

And I understood.

Crowding into the parlor room of an old row house in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, I sat with a group of young men trying to get legal documentation in the U.S. They had been cheated by a notario, an immigrant posing as a legal adviser, who had taken their money and disappeared. Some of the young workers, agitated by the presence of TV cameras, microphones and lights, asked if I could not show their faces. Others, angry and eager to tell their stories, said they didn’t care who saw them. It made for a tricky shoot, but my videographer managed to work around everybody’s personal requirements.

And, of course, I understood.

It is the lot of any reporter to cover, explain and illuminate the lives of people to inform the greater public. When subjects are insecure about their status in America, or know they are breaking the law, that is a part of the stories we tell. As reporters, we must ask what is needed to honestly and thoroughly report for readers, listeners and viewers. We must also consider how to treat our subjects with decency and care.

Like all reporters, I want to tell a good story — one that provokes, informs, edifies. At the same time, for my own peace of mind, I can’t turn the people at the core of immigration coverage into a means to an end, into exploitable details rather than real human beings who are taking a real chance by talking to me. If my subjects are living and working in the United States in violation of the law, I have to inform them of the risk, and they have to be comfortable with it before we proceed. I make sure they understand that if I shoot video of them, or take their pictures, that risk may be heightened.

If they are reluctant to talk, I can offer them some form of protection. Like a reporter would for anyone feeling unsafe, I can identify them by first name only in a print piece and explain to readers why their last names weren’t included, while having verified their complete names. I can promise them I will not show where they live in a way that can be identified. I can describe their employment in general terms, without giving the name or address of an employer or a company. If I endangered them or their families simply by covering them, I would not be a reporter. I would be an informant.

Building trust through patience and transparency

Over the course of a long career, I’ve done everything from 30-second radio spots to long-form TV documentaries, from small newspaper items to books. I’ve had subjects expose their lives to me on a sliding scale according to medium. On radio and television, they are understandably more self-conscious and worry about exposure. In print, they have felt freer to discuss details of their lives without the pressure of bosses, neighbors and friends examining their private details.

Once I have fully informed a potential subject of what I want to talk to them about, and what I plan to do with what they tell me, I proceed as I would with any news story. When I was talking to Afghans while reporting for my book “We Are Home,” they were skittish about talking to any reporter. Even the promise of an obscured identity was not reassuring enough. They feared not just their own exposure, as they waited for a final decision on status from the U.S. government, but worried deeply for relatives still living in Afghanistan. It took weeks of phone calls, of beating the bushes, of pleading and cajoling to be introduced to Amjad (not his real name), a former officer in the Afghan military waiting in California for the arrival of the rest of his family.

Deborah’s story, of years living and working in the shadows, and moving from an underground United Nations of undocumented service workers in New York to a secure and comfortable legal existence in Southern California, was a good story whether or not the reader knows her last name and where she works today. Agreeing not to discuss her present-day profession, her current hometown or her last name was, in context, a worthwhile trade-off for a revealing story of undocumented life in America.

A Texas EMT who saved lives in hurricanes, extracted panicky and sick people from apartments during the pandemic, and waited for a solution to the long-term tension of life under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, was in no danger of being deported. After a decade, he was sick and tired of living in limbo and wanted to use his platform to demand action on his case and the cases of hundreds of thousands like him. His status in society — as a brave, trustworthy lifesaver working in grueling conditions to serve his community — was essential to his story and made it clear why he had no hesitation in using his name, Jesus Contreras, and going on the record.

In return for our transparency, we get something very precious: a chance to look inside the lives of the people we cover. Ask any reporter, and they will have a story of talking to someone and having something really special emerge in conversation: a stunning detail, a moving anecdote. People give you something that makes you say to yourself, “I got it! This is great.” And this happens more often when they trust you.

The ground rules are not really that hard: be honest with the people you cover and honest with the people you report for — and everything gets easy after that. We make a deal with people who allow us into their lives. We have to be upfront with them about what we do with the details of their lives they share with us. If there is risk involved, we have to be honest about it, so everyone at both ends of the transaction is clear about what’s going on at every step of the way. If a reporter gets a notion, “Can I show your commute to work?” “Can I talk to your boss?” it brings a new set of negotiations and another reformulation of the ground rules.        

We do it for the people who talk to us. And at a time of cratering trust in news organizations, we also do it for the integrity of our newsrooms and our reputations as honest practitioners who deliver the world, piping hot, to our viewers, listeners and readers each day.

OTHER TIPS FOR REPORTING ON IMMIGRATION 

Do more than look at data. Talk to people. 
• Don’t just report on immigration polls and policy; include the voices of those impacted. 
Approach undocumented people with respect. 
• Identify yourself and who you work for. 
• Explain the process, from being on the record to where the piece will publish or air. 
• Respect their wishes. Explain what they say might change a situation, but don’t push. 
Be careful with language when reporting on immigration status. 
• Refugee: Someone who has been forced to flee their home over war, violence or persecution.  
• Asylum seeker: Someone who is also seeking protection from dangers in their home country, but who hasn’t been officially recognized as a refugee.  
• Migrant: A general term for someone who has left their home country. 
• Undocumented: Someone living in a country without proper authorization.