Where Immigration and Education Come Together: A Conversation with Jessica Lander

Few subjects engender more reaction and discussion in our politics and our culture than immigration and education. When the two come together in our schools they sit at the precipice of both politics and our future.

We are not talking of the dreamers that have been here, but waves of new young people that are on the front lines of shaping the immigrant experience in the United States.

What’s really like for the students and the teaching that are, each and every day, helping to define and sometimes even reimagine what it means to be an American

As an award-winning teacher, this is Jessica Lander’s work in a Massachusetts public high school. She tells of her experience in her new book Making Americans : Stories of Historic Struggles, New Ideas, and Inspiration in Immigrant Education.

My conversation with Jessica Lander: 

Immigration and the False Lure of the American Dream

There is not a day that goes by that the subject of immigration is not in some way part of our national discussion. However, even with all the talk, there is little focus on either the large number of immigrants that arrive from China, or on the their immigrant experience.

We think very little about what it must be like leaving one's country, friends, family and culture behind, to begin anew as a stranger in a strange land.

Perhaps if we all understood the commitment, the bravery, the strength it takes to do that, we would be having a very different conversation about immigration.

That experience is the world that Lauren Hilgers gives up a window into in Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown

My conversation with Lauren Hilgers:

It Did Happen Here

Fear is a funny thing. In our personal life, it often holds us back from things we know we should do. In our nation's collective life, fear often makes us do crazy things...to have a kind of national emotional and moral breakdown that feeds on the sum total and power of individual fears.

Such has been the case lately in our election and in our discussions of immigrants and our fear of the other, amidst a rapidly changing world.

To better understand where we are, we need only look back to the spring of 1942. A time under FDR, when we rounded up over one-hundred thousand residents of Japanese ancestry, living along the West Coast and sent them to detention centers for the duration of the war. Each lost part of their lives and some would argue that our nation lost a part of its soul.

Richard Cahan captures the sadness of that moment in Un-American: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II: Images by Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Other Government Photographers.

My conversation with Richard Cahan:

Every Single Aspect of Today's Immigration Debate, We've Heard Before

We are a nation of immigrants. For 240 years we have opened our arms to those seeking to come to America and for many of those years New York has been ground zero. But the immigrant story, even in, or especially in New York, has not been one of ease. The process and pain of assimilation, the fear of the other, the competition for resources have always created wedges between immigrant groups and so called nativists.

So why is it that these issues seem to repeat themselves over and over, like a kind of Groundhog Day. The issues are the same, only the ethnic roots change...yet we never seem to learn the lessons.

George Washington University historian Tyler Anbinder looks at this history in City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York

My conversation with Tyler Anbinder:

Immigration Creates Heros

It’s funny how history repeats itself. In the mid 19th Century, partly in response to the Great Famine, waves of Irish immigrants came to America. Most landed in New York, to seek a new and better life. Then as now, questions of immigration, assimilation and criminal behavior filled the air. The appropriately named Know Nothing Party grew up in opposition to these waves of immigration and filled the political dialogue with fear and hatred.

But fortunately leaders emerged in the Irish community that showed them how to be Americas. One of those was Thomas Francis Meaghar. He would become not just an Irish hero, but an American hero. Sometimes forgotten he is given new life by Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times columnist Timothy Egan in The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero

My conversation with Timothy Egan:

A Look at America at its Best

Say the word immigration today, and the political implications are both ugly and controversial. On the plus side a survey out just this week shows that a significant majority of young people in the US see themselves as citizens of the world, and not just citizens of America. A full 58% feel that the US is no better than many other countries in the world.

It is against this backdrop of hope and acceptance, that Susan Eaton (Integration Nation: Immigrants, Refugees, and America at Its Best)explores real people doing real work, to fully realize the power of immigration and integration and to make us stronger in what certainly right now seems like our broken places.

My conversation with Susan Eaton:

The Making of Asian America

For reasons that are both complicated and simplistic, immigration has become the issues of our time. Fifty years ago the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act put in place the system we have today. That system has helped make us a nation of of immigrants and set the stage for the diverse Asian/American population in the US today.

Erika Lee takes us through the history of that population in The Making of Asian America: A History

My conversation with Erika Lee:

From a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League

As we debate immigration, we still always look favorably on the “Dreamers.” The young undocumented students thriving here in America. It’s easy to romanticize that experience and even draw conclusion from the success of individuals.

The greater challenge is to look at those successes and see what real world lessons we might draw that can tell us more about success and failure and social mobility here in the U.S.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta is perhaps the penultimate success story. Raised in New York's shelters, he would ultimately graduate from Princeton, Oxford and Stanford and is currently a Mellon Research Fellow at Columbia.

His memoir is Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League.

My conversation with Dan-el Padilla Peralta:

The real Chinese American experience

Several trends are shaping the world today. One is immigration and migration. The mass movement of peoples from rural to urban area and across borders, in search of a better life.

Concurrently, globalization and cultural homogenization are confusing the very idea of national identity. As the recently concluded World Cup proved, we are deeply committed to our ethnic and geographic identity, and yet it’s all within the context of an increasingly borderless and global world

Inherent in this contradiction lies many issues faced by multi racial Americans and particularly Chinese Americans, torn between two models of success

Eric Liu’s story sits at the epicenter of these ideas. Ideas that form the basis of what we really should be discussing as part of our immigration conversation and what Eric talks about in A Chinaman's Chance: One Family's Journey and the Chinese American Dream.

My conversation with Eric Liu:

How the immigrant feels

Immigration seems the issue on everyone's mind today. Yet with all the thinking and all the talking, we forget half the story. It’s not just about how the receiving country deals with new immigrants, it’s also about the immigrant’s experience and how that experience, especially for young children, will shape their lives, and in turn their contribution to and role in, the greater society of which they become a part.

When we look at the mass migration to America’s shores at the beginning of the 20th century, we get a glimpse of how that plays out.

Alex Tizon, came to America from the Philippines. He would go on to become a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and the former Seattle bureau chief for the LA Times and currently teaches at the University of Oregon.

His memoir of his immigrant experience is Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self

My conversation with Alex Tizon:

Death on the Border

In the world of extreme right wing rhetoric, particularly on the subject of immigration, it often seems that the practitioners are always upping the ante in order to get attention. Listen to any hour of talk radio and you get the idea. However, what happens when that rhetoric gets out of control. When the listeners, particularly those that are scared, marginalized or worse yet, psychotic, become easy pray to act on that rhetoric and take matters into their own hands?

Over the years we’ve seen many examples of this, and unfortunately a lot of them, for various reasons, seem to take place in Arizona.

Dave Neiwert, the founding editor of the blog Crooks and Liars, takes us inside one such group of extremists in And Hell Followed With Her: Crossing the Dark Side of the American Border For them, killing women and children in cold blood, is just the start.

My conversation with Dave Neiwert:

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