AMID ALL THE FICKLEreversals of the last
four years, there’s one area where the
Trump administration has demonstrated a
steady and unrelenting focus: restricting
immigration.
There is, of course, the wall — whose my-
thos looms large, even if the actual struc-
ture is less impressive (and less effective)
than the president lets on. But if you think of
the wall as not so much a physical deterrent
to migrants as a symbolic monument to na-
tivist ambitions, President Trump’s impla-
cable devotion to it begins to make sense.
The one discernible principle that seems to
animate his policymaking has been an un-
wavering determination to keep foreigners
out. Barely two weeks after his inaugura-
tion in 2017, he famously announced his
travel ban — an executive order so hastily
put together that it would undergo numer-
ous challenges and iterations for more than
a year until a version of it was upheld with a
5-to-4 ruling by the Supreme Court.
Visitors aren’t immigrants, but their
treatment is connected. As the lawyer and
historian Julia Rose Kraut recounts in her
new book, “Threat of Dissent,” there’s a
long history of foreigners in the United
States being subjected to the vicissitudes of
the government’s discretionary powers.
Another recent book, “Separated,” by the
MSNBC and NBC News correspondent Ja-
cob Soboroff, shows how the Trump admin-
istration carried out a policy that amounted
to a humanitarian catastrophe: systemat-
ically taking children from their migrant
parents at the border. Reading these two
books together will give you a sense of how
the United States, a country that prides it-
self on its constitutional protections, also
possesses a body of immigration laws that
can be weaponized by an executive branch
willing to do it.
In “Threat of Dissent,” Kraut writes
about what she calls “ideological exclusion”
— the effort to block and even deport non-
citizens because of their ideas and beliefs.
Suspicion of foreigners goes back to the ear-
liest days of the republic. The Alien Friends
Act of 1798 allowed the president to detain
and deport any noncitizen deemed “danger-
ous to the peace and safety of the UnitedStates,” which at the time was in an unde-
clared naval war with France.
President John Adams used the Alien
Friends Act as an opportunity to refuse en-
try to a visiting delegation of scholars (“We
have had too many French philosophers al-
ready”), and to draw up a list of Frenchmen
to be deported. One of them had fled the
Reign of Terror years before and settled in
Philadelphia, opening a bookshop whose
customers included Adams himself. Asked
why this bookseller was on the list, Adams
replied, “Nothing in particular, but he’s too
French.”
Kraut traces how different ideologies
would be considered intolerably dangerous
according to the dominant fears of a given
era. Anarchism gave way to communism;
communism gave way to Islamic radical-
ism. Foreigners suspected of unacceptable
anti-Americanism included Charlie Chaplin
and Graham Greene. (Chaplin was so in-
censed by the ritual humiliations he had to
endure at the hands of immigration authori-
ties that after leaving the United States for a
European tour he decided not to return.)
Even citizenship didn’t always ensure pro-
tection. The anarchist Emma Goldman was
denaturalized in 1909, and shipped to Revo-
lutionary Russia a decade later.
More recently, in 2019, a 17-year-old Pal-
estinian from Lebanon who was about to be-
gin his freshman year at Harvard was de-
nied entry at the Boston airport; border pa-
trol agents searched his phone and laptop
and told him he was “inadmissible” because
of social media posts — not by him, but by
his friends.
The foreigners in Kraut’s book generally
constitute a privileged class — scholars,
writers and artists whose ideas (or mere
proximity to ideas) have been used against
them. The foreigners in Soboroff’s book, by
stark contrast, are among the most vulnera-
ble, persecuted for their presence alone. In
“Separated,” he describes traveling along
the southern border during the early part of
the Trump presidency to report on tighten-
ing immigration enforcement. All the while,
a more horrifying story was starting to take
shape.
By the time the homeland security secre-
tary Kirstjen Nielsen put her signature toan official policy of family separation in
May 2018, border agents had already been
separating asylum seekers from their chil-
dren since the previous year. This punish-
ment of migrant families was compounded
by a process that Soboroff describes as ei-
ther willfully cruel or cruelly negligent.
Record-keeping was so shoddy and inade-
quate that authorities didn’t properly keep
track of which child belonged to whom,
making reunification for some families ex-
ceedingly complicated, if not impossible.
The statistics that do exist are startling:
Since the summer of 2017, Soboroff writes,
at least 5,556 children were taken from their
parents — the true number is still unknown.
The head of the American Academy of Pedi-
atrics called family separation “govern-
ment-sanctioned child abuse”; the nonprof-
it Physicians for Human Rights called it
“torture.” Even though the policy was offi-
cially ended after a public outcry in the
summer of 2018, separations continued. Mi-
grant parents who are detained at the bor-
der with their children have again been
presented with an impossible choice: con-
sent to their children being released with-
out them, or stay together in indefinite de-
tention.
“Separated” is structured chronologi-
cally, with the narrative of Soboroff’s own
discovery of what was happening
presented incrementally, highlighting the
secrecy and “extraordinary confusion” of
the process — and how removed even a
journalist like Soboroff was from what was
happening on the ground. He also recounts
the story of Juan and José, a father and son
who fled narco-traffickers in Guatemala in
the summer of 2018. José, 14 at the time, was
taken from his father at the border. Juan
and José would endure 124 days of separa-
tion before they were reunited. There was
no information about José in his father’s
case file, and it would take a social worker to
track the father down to a detention facility
located 1,500 miles from where the son was
being held.
“Nobody warned of the impact on chil-
dren,” one anonymous official told Soboroff.
Given that family separation was adopted
as a merciless form of deterrence, this ex-
cuse makes no sense. The entire policy waspredicated on how traumatic that “impact”
promised to be. The subtitle of “Separated”
is “Inside an American Tragedy,” but what
Soboroff memorably depicts isn’t just tragic
but brutal. Any soaring rhetoric about
yearning to breathe free has been traded in
for the crudest of threats: If you try to come
here, just look at what we’re willing to do.JENNIFER SZALAI BOOKS OF THE TIMESYour Tired? Your Poor? Forget About It
Two new books describe how the United States government has weaponized immigration laws.
Threat of Dissent:
A History of Ideological
Exclusion and Deportation
in the United States
By Julia Rose Kraut
Illustrated. 344 pages. Harvard
University Press. $35.
Separated:
Inside an American Tragedy
By Jacob Soboroff
388 pages. Custom House.
$29.99.
C6 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 2020
SALZBURG, AUSTRIA — A visit to the
Salzburg Festival has been a summer tradi-
tion for Jos Baeck for nearly half a century.
“This year we said that even with corona
we’re coming to Salzburg,” said Mr. Baeck,
71, on a recent afternoon in this city’s his-
toric center. He had traveled from Belgium
with a friend who has been attending the
festival even longer.
“The festival is very important to us,”
said Mr. Baeck.
He added, referring to the festival’s long-
time president: “You need to admire Helga
Rabl-Stadler. She persevered.”
As cultural events worldwide were called
off because of the coronavirus pandemic,
the Salzburg Festival surprised many on-
lookers in late May by announcing that it
would go ahead with a scaled-down pro-
gram to celebrate its centennial. The festi-
val, which runs through Aug. 30, began last
weekend with new productions of operas by
Mozart and Richard Strauss, and the world
premiere of a play by the Austrian writer
Peter Handke, who won the 2019 Nobel
Prize in Literature.
Visitors from 78 countries made up the
festival’s audience in 2019, according to a
festival spokeswoman; this year’s edition is
smaller and less international in scope.
Americans, Russians and visitors from
many Asian countries, who usually make
up a significant portion of the audience, are
largely absent, because they are barred
from entering the European Union or would
have to quarantine on arrival.
But while the 2020 Salzburg Festival may
not have such a global audience, it has com-
manded the world’s attention by forging
ahead against all odds.
New regulations notwithstanding — in-
cluding compulsory masks, half-full the-
aters and no intermissions — it often felt
like business as usual: a bustling festival for
a wealthy and elegant audience amid the
grandeur of the Alpine landscape.
“Salzburg is like a rock in turbulent wa-
ters,” said Frank Sellentin, 57, who has at-
tended the festival since 1993. He added
that the event could serve as a model for
cultural activities in Berlin, where he
works. “Art must remain a part of life. If cir-
cumstances demand that it be presented
differently, you need to at least try to figure
out what that could look like.”
There was something gently surreal to
the combination of opulent evening gowns
and surgical masks. According to an an-
nouncement before each performance,
masks can be removed while the show is in
progress, although keeping your face cov-
ered at all times is recommended. Many au-
dience members kept their masks on.
Even with a drastically reduced number
of tickets — 80,000 instead of 242,000 —
very few performances are sold out. In the
festival venues, every other seat is left free.
At one performance, a woman in back of me
was furious that she could not sit alongside
her partner. “This is a mistake,” she hissed
before trying unsuccessfully to pry open the
roped-off seat.
On Saturday, in 90-degree heat, the festi-
val opened with a new production of “Elek-
tra.” Richard Strauss’s one-act 1909 opera
was given a visually bold and psychologi-
cally probing staging by the Polish director
Krzysztof Warlikowski.
At the center of this “Elektra” were two
remarkable Lithuanian sopranos. Ausrine
Stundyte, making her festival and role de-
but in the punishing lead, was an uncom-
monly vulnerable Elektra; Asmik Grigo-
rian, whose sensational Salome here in 2018
shot her to instant stardom, co-starred as
her sister, Chrysothemis.
Along with the conductor Franz Welser-
Möst, who has led the Cleveland Orchestra
for the past 18 years, Mr. Warlikowski suc-
cessfully explored the hidden layers in
these characters. Instead of a shrill harpy,
Ms. Stundyte’s Elektra was a broken, often
insecure, figure. Ms. Grigorian’s character,
by contrast, was surprisingly tough. In a
twist by Mr. Warlikowski, Chrysothemis as-
sisted her brother Orest in killing their
mother and her lover and then washed the
bodies for burial.Immediately after the premiere, all 110
performers in the Vienna Philharmonic,
which had been accompanying “Elektra,”
took tests for the coronavirus, a process
they are undertaking regularly during their
stay in Salzburg. All tested negative, ac-
cording to Mr. Welser-Möst, who explained
in an interview that his experience working
at the festival has been instructive as he
looks ahead to his next season in Cleveland.
“Elektra” was one of seven operas origi-
nally announced for the festival’s centenni-
al this year (the other six have been post-
poned until next summer) and the produc-
tion was well underway when the scaled-
down 2020 festival got the go-ahead. Things
looked wildly different for the festival’s sec-
ond opera premiere, a hastily assembled
“Così Fan Tutte” that came together in just
one month.
Christof Loy, the director, worked with
the conductor Joana Mallwitz to prepare a
shortened version of the score that would
work as an intermission-less performance.
Sunday night’s premiere clocked in at little
more than two hours.
Mr. Loy’s minimal production played out
on a stark white set, but the direction was
thoughtful and robust. Make no mistake:
This was a fully staged production, one that
both looked and sounded remarkable. Noth-
ing felt like a compromise.
“Così’s” plot, in which two men disguise
themselves to test their fiancées’ fidelity,
can often come across as both improbable
and cynical. But Mr. Loy amplified the emo-
tional stakes by revealing the complex pas-
sions that animate the characters.
Crucial to the success of his concept were
the involved performances he coaxed from
a fine cast of exciting young Mozart singers.
Elsa Dreisig and Marianne Crebassa were
radiant as the two sisters whose steadfast-
ness is put to the test by their boastful fi-
ancés, compelling sung with both ardor and
swagger by Andrè Schuen and Bogdan
Volkov.
Leopold and Christine Sever had driven
from Klagenfurt, Austria, 125 miles away, toattend the premiere on Saturday. “As you
see, we’re taking the necessary precau-
tions,” Mr. Sever, 72, said, indicating a plas-
tic visors that he and his wife had just re-
moved to take a selfie.
“But we absolutely wanted to see this,” he
said, adding that they were longtime
Salzburg attendees. Neither expressed any
concern about safety. “Everyone is respect-
ing the distancing measures,” added Mrs.
Sever, 69.
The Salzburg audience skews toward the
older crowd that is one of the demographics
at highest risk from Covid-19. Nevertheless,
the sense of security expressed by the Sev-
ers reflected the mood over the opening
weekend.
“We are here and things work,” said Igor
Levit, the German pianist who is perform-
ing a complete cycle of Beethoven’s 32 sona-
tas throughout the festival.
“Every single human being in the hall
knows the risk and responsibility that they
have,” Mr. Levit said after Monday night’s
concert, the second of eight. He had tackled
the wide-ranging program with character-
istic technical brilliance and emotional en-
gagement.
“This can work in a society that takes the
minimum of responsibility,” Mr. Levit said,
praising Germany and Austria’s approach
to handling the virus and taking aim at the
United States for its bungled response.
He added that the Salzburg Festival was
“a very privileged environment,” which
seems beyond dispute. Still, the situation
here, as in the world at large, remains
highly uncertain. On Monday, Markus Hint-
erhäuser, the festival’s artistic director,
seemed still to be holding his breath.
There’s no guarantee that the festival will
make it to the end of August, he said in an
interview: A flare-up of the virus could stop
it in its tracks.
“But without exaggeration,” he added,
“this weekend is already written in the his-
tory of the Salzburg Festival.”
“Nobody believed that this was possible,”
he said. It’s hard to disagree.It’s (Almost) Business as Usual at Salzburg
A bustling event for a wealthy
audience is underway in
Austria, despite the pandemic.
CHRISTIAN BRUNA/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCKTop, left to right: Elsa Dreisig,
Marianne Crebassa, Bogdan
Volkov and Andrè Schuen
during a dress rehearsal for
“Così Fan Tutte” on July 28.
Above, Ausrine Stundyte, right,
in the title role, and Asmik
Grigorian, as Chrysothemis,
during a dress rehearsal for
“Elektra” on July 27.BARBARA GINDL/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGESREPORTER’S NOTEBOOKBy A.J. GOLDMANNCLUE OF THE DAY
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