Our Students Didn’t Cross The Border — The Border Crossed Them

Musings on Immigration & Education Post-Trumpocalypse

This has been a rough couple of months, y’all.

We’ve all felt it, but it’s hit some much harder than others.

While some of us are just now realizing what jeopardy tastes like, just now learning that our rights are anything but inalienable, that our needs are disposable and our bodies’ sovereignty questionable, there are others who have been living on the razor’s edge of jeopardy, that are now being pushed over the edge.

I’m a school psychologist in training, so I spend a lot of my time working in public schools and reading/writing about psychology and education. To be an educator/ mental health practitioner/ person working in public schools in the wake of the Trumpocalypse has been riddled with contradictions; It’s been painstakingly depressing and powerfully fueled with optimism; it has fostered a sense of isolation but also a sense of community; it has triggered waves of hopelessness, powerlessness, and cynicism, but also ignited a renewed sense of commitment, responsibility and passion.

I’ve been thinking about immigration a lot since I moved here, and especially during the course of the last presidential election. The intergenerational immigration struggles my family has faced have pretty much shaped not only my physical experiences of multiple places I have had to make into homes but also the emotional context this has been embedded in, a context which colors my relational narratives.

My grandparents from my mother’s side moved from Yugoslavia to Austria, then Germany, and finally the U.S., where they became “naturalized” (I still remember the first time I heard that this is an actual word that is used in English to describe the citizenship process and I am still just as mad and disgusted as that first time I heard it) citizens after about a decade. My dad was an immigrant in Germany and then the U.S.. My mom immigrated to Greece, where she got her papers after about 10 years. I moved to the States 4.5 years ago from Greece, but due to the fact that I have dual citizenship from a systems-level perspective my immigration has been a pretty smooth process.

That doesn’t mean it has been easy; while I don’t necessarily struggle with English (at least openly, because I’m a perfectionistic robot that usually censors the outward expression of said struggles by remaining silent and/or laconic), and while I am not necessarily perceived as not belonging, I have a very real internalized struggle with juggling languages and cultures and otherness. And let’s be honest, my deepest fear is that there will come a time when that struggle ends — when I can think of any English word without Google Translate, when I know how to navigate systems, when I assimilate.

So, while my working class family’s history, as well as my own, has been defined by the experience of immigration, I have still experienced it with a great deal of privilege. I have talked about this in length in another piece, too. Basically, because of the way my image is reflected back to me, as someone who is somewhat invisibly a non U.S.-born citizen, a non native speaker, with white Western European looks, and with papers I haven’t had to work for, I have had privileges other immigrants who come to this country do not, and I’ve been able to feel unafraid in the pursuit of my professional dreams because of that.

A lot of families move to the U.S. to realize the American dream, believing that if they work hard, they will succeed. The values of meritocracy and promise of social mobility have been widely hailed as pillars of liberal democracies, but in reality they tend to conceal the systemic barriers to success and depoliticize the conversation.

“Belief in a just world” is a theory which posits that people feel the need to believe in a world that is fair, in which they have control over their life and get what they deserve. In the context of a meritocratic society, the responsibility and attributions for the cause of one’s social standing lies with the individual (e.g. being lazy or “not having what it takes”). Therefore, even a system based on social inequity might be considered just by those that are disadvantaged because of it, especially if it’s cloaked in institutional egalitarianism.

Immigrant students, many of whom are students of color, have to deal with all of these valuing-the-individualization-of-achievement narratives as well as minority generalization narratives; they see their cultures’ intra-group differences minimized and the inter-group differences maximized. In this context, exacerbated by the current political climate, it’s understandable that immigrant students can be at increased risk of dealing with stress before and after entering the school context.

Apart from the aforementioned racial/ethnic or religious discrimination they may face, they are also often struggling with language acquisition, learning a different school system, acclimating to a new cultural environment (culture of school, neighborhood/community culture, American culture, etc.), and managing acculturation, which can look many different ways for each person. Add to these previous/current trauma, add the potential isolation they may be experiencing in this new place and it is no surprise that we often see kids with symptoms of what would clinically be described as depression, anxiety, or PTSD.

Attending school, let alone focusing on academic achievement is not realistically at the level of urgency physical and emotional safety have in their hierarchy of needs. And this emotional safety is something that not only doesn’t get addressed often, but it can be something that is not always considered to be in the school’s authority to address, and help-seeking can often be perceived as stigmatizing. Add more barriers re: absence of culturally sensitive services in schools (e.g. access to interpreters), resource/time limitations and it’s not hard to see that there is a lot of systemic work yet to be done in order to make it safe for students to reach out.

So, what can we do to remedy this? How can we help students when they see/hear about/experience ICE raids in their community? How can we help them when they see DREAMers being deported? How can we talk to them about double digit multiplication or phonics when their cortisol levels are through the roof, when they’re ready to fight, flight or freeze?

I think an important note to make here is that while these children’s lives have been constructed by their surroundings, their lives also construct their surroundings. Knowing the reciprocity of this relationship is vital not only to recognize and reject the white savior complex that motivates some white educators but also to highlight these students’ agency and resiliency.

First off, one needs to look at the macro level and how education itself is structured as a process and how its content is disseminated in public schools.

According to Foucault, “every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it”. By privileging certain discourses and legitimizing particular forms of knowledge, we are doing a disservice to our students. By means of systematically critiquing how Western Eurocentric ideology permeates the construction and transmission of knowledge and power in our society; by looking at the links between ideology and power and how these are embedded in the language we use; by taking a hard look at the structural determinism often present in our educational systems can we become more aware of our role within schools and challenge its limitations.

At this point, it would also be helpful to know that according to the National Association of School Psychologists, there are currently 87% of school psychology practitioners that identify as white (down from 94% in the 1990’s) and 86% are monolingual English speakers. These numbers alone are an indicator of how far we have to go until the school psychologist body is as diverse as the student body we work with (which is by the latest count over 50% students of color and projected to increase even further).

And speaking of diversity, I often see this term thrown around to indicate social justice — I’ve heard people insinuate that the number of students of color present in a school somehow signifies that it is a socially just school. Research has shown that just the nominal presence of “diversity” in policies, training and awards caused men to be less likely to believe gender discrimination exists and white people to be less likely to believe that racial discrimination exists. Especially in Portland, Oregon, one of the whitest cities in the U.S., this is one of the gravest mistakes one can make. Anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli describes language such as “multicultural diversity” as an instrument for liberal democracies to parade “social difference without social consequence”. Making minorities into chapters or footnotes in the dominant culture protagonists’ stories is not the gateway to actual pluralism.

In my practice I tend to refer back to Critical Race Theory (CRT) a lot to evaluate my own work/ thought process. Solórzano, Villapando and Oseguera indicate five main components of CRT:

• the centrality of race and racism
• the need to challenge the dominant ideology
• a commitment to social justice
• the importance of centering the lived experiences of people of color
• focusing attention on history and context

So the way I see these taking form in the school context is having the hard conversations about race and leaning into the potential discomfort; challenging the individualization of achievement narratives and color-blind approaches to education that disproportionately weigh standardized scores and conflate equality and equity; by my own praxis of advocating for social justice in and out of the schools; by not contributing in the white-washing of not only history but the curricula content in general; and by amplifying marginalized voices, such as immigrant families’ whose children are referred for special education services.

CRT also talks about “counterstories”, alternative narratives to the dominant paradigm. For example, instead of engaging in the“good vs. bad immigrant” discourse let’s talk instead about who these dichotomizations serve, and how they have been strategically used to justify discrimination against the “bad immigrants” and exact gratitude from the “good immigrants”. Instead of the “illegal aliens” discourse, that insinuates that certain people broke the law of their own “free will” and are thus undeserving of human rights, let’s instead talk about how this concept of illegality was created in the first place and how the very existence of these people is criminalized. How Western ideology and practices, such as neoliberalism (which played a major role in me being here in the States right now), leave people with no choice but to move — yet we see more of those scapegoating and victim-blaming tactics instead of any sense of state accountability.

We covet the product of immigrant labor but not the people producing it — we see it in the neglect re: precariousness of labor conditions juxtaposed to the fervor with which profit is protected and the commodification of labor defended; we see it in the free range of capital across borders juxtaposed to the restrictions on human bodies. By multiplying and disseminating our counterstories we can start deconstructing narratives such as that of the “bad hombres” coming to steal american jobs or that of the U.S. being this benevolent state/land of opportunity. Counterstories will help us see each other, and we need to dispel all of those myths, created in the White House and elsewhere, that are trying so hard to doubt these stories’ authorship.

So, whether you’re working in a school, or any kind of institution, take a moment and think:

• What ideological values are guiding your choices?
• How do these choices affect your work?
• What messages of empowerment or disempowerment are you communicating through your actions (or inaction) and/or words?
• And what are you going to do (actively, intently, meaningfully) to make sure the spaces you inhabit are genuinely accessible and safe for all folks?