Dr. Laura Emiko Soltis

Executive Director, Freedom University

Excerpt from Global Salon Lecture at Smith College

October 18, 2019

 

Before I jump into my lecture on undocumented student access to higher education in the United States, I want to first share a story about the last time I spoke on a college tour – when I was trolled by an anti-immigrant reporter in the audience… and sang him a song. While this reporter’s actions eventually led to the publishing of my name and photo in anti-immigrant and white supremacist circles in Georgia, I honestly think it’s a good story, and one that I want to transform into a teaching moment to highlight issues of race and concepts of illegality in U.S. immigration history.

So, following a lecture and panel presentation on the undocumented student movement at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, a student reporter named Kyle from Campus Reform, a “conservative watchdog” website dedicated to exposing “leftist indoctrination on college campuses,” immediately raised his hand at the beginning of the Q&A dialogue. The reporter snarkily directed a statement to myself and the three undocumented student presenters: “I was just wondering if Freedom University recognizes the legal legitimacy of borders, immigration law, or those agencies that enforce those laws and borders.” 

As you may know, Freedom University is an underground freedom school in Atlanta that provides free college preparation classes and social movement leadership training to undocumented students banned from the top public universities and in-state tuition in Georgia. In addition to our classrooms at Freedom University, we also participate in speaking tours across the country, and give presentations at high schools, universities, and places of worship, and engage in lively dialogue with our audiences. At this particular event, I had just delivered a lecture on the history of educational segregation and the laws impacting undocumented students in the U.S. South. I was followed by three Freedom University student speakers, who shared their powerful testimonies of growing up undocumented and fighting for their right to higher education in Georgia, a state notorious for its discriminatory laws toward immigrants in the United States and its recently elected Governor who campaigned on the platform of rounding up “criminal illegals” in his pickup truck. 

The undocumented students on the panel were caught off guard by the reporter’s question. They looked over at me and nodded for me to answer. So I responded to the reporter honestly in my capacity as an individual, as a professor of human rights and immigration history, and as a U.S. citizen. 

First, I addressed the irony of the question, given that we were all gathered on stolen Wahpekute Dakota indigenous land in Southern Minnesota – just as we similarly situated today on Pocumtuc Terrority here in Western Massachusetts. Next, I noted that laws are social constructs that reflect power dynamics in our society and that immigration laws, in particular, have historically served the interests of powerful people who seek to secure a supply of cheap, exploitable labor. I also sang the reporter a verse from the folk song “This Land is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie. 

Following the Q&A, many of the audience members came up to greet us. Several folks thanked us for the professional way we responded to the reporter’s question. While I was familiar with Campus Reform, their previous articles on Freedom University, and their efforts to expose the “liberal abuse against conservatives” on college campuses, many in the audience were not. They were surprised, then, to read the publication of the article, which was titled “Director of illegal alien ‘University,’ says nation states ‘should not exist’ and citizenship is ‘completely arbitrary,’” and which was filled with false quotation marks and gross misrepresentations of the panel they had attended. Luckily, due to the history of misreporting on Freedom University and the actual abuse, intimidation, and threats of violence we have endured by conservative activists and white nationalists over the past nine years, we make audio recordings of our talks and publish transcripts in cases of inaccurate media representation.

As the transcript made clear, the true context of my response was not a simple assertion that “nation states should not exist.” As a professor and scholar of human rights, my job is not to tell students what to think about nation-states or any other subject. Rather, my job is to inspire students to ask questions and think critically about the world. But I also don’t pretend that teaching is a neutral enterprise. As Brazilian educator Paulo Freire describes in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” 

Rather than teaching history from the perspective of the powerful, the privileged, and the victors of wars and conquest – which is the most common way we learn history as students – I prefer to teach history as Howard Zinn did: from the perspective of the powerless, from the viewpoint of the conquered, the enslaved, the poor, and the excluded. Hearing this history can be jarring for some students, and particularly so for those who occupy a position of relative privilege. This is why I was not surprised by the reporter’s defensiveness and his misrepresentation of our panel. However, I was admittedly disappointed that he left out the lyrics of the Woody Guthrie song from his publication. 

A lot of us as kids were taught the song “This Land is Your Land.” But the version many of us sang in school was missing Woody Guthrie’s most powerful verse, which I sang to Kyle:

 

(sings)

As I went walking I saw a sign there

And that sign said, “No trespassing”

But on the other side, it didn’t say nothing

That side was made for you and me.

 

Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land is Your Land” in 1940, but the lyrics from his often-censored verse are just as relevant today as the day they were written, and I sang them to the reporter because I believe they can inform our public dialogues about the legitimacy of national borders. But before any informed discussion about the legitimacy of national borders, it’s important to recognize that nation-states are relatively modern inventions in human history. The first modern nation-states were established only 371 years ago by the Treaty of Westphalia. To put it in perspective, there are Greenland sharks swimming along in the ocean today that are older than the oldest nation-states.

I also believe the reporter’s question is a great starting point for a brief lesson in U.S. immigration history. So let’s take Kyle’s question: Do you respect U.S. immigration laws and the agencies that enforce these laws and borders? 

 

It depends which one.

 

Do you respect the immigration laws that made it legal for 600,000 enslaved human beings to arrive between 1619 and 1860 on land that we now call the United States, to work against their will and build the foundation of the U.S. economy, a contribution for which they have never received payment or reparations?

Do you respect the Page Act of 1875, the first restrictive immigration law to be passed after centuries of open borders for European immigrants, which barred the entry of Chinese women because the 14th Amendment ratified seven years prior recognized African-American citizenship and birthright citizenship?

Do you respect the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Asiatic Barred Zone Act of 1917 that effectively barred Asians from immigration and set the precedent for the Supreme Court to rule in the 1920s that people of Asian descent are “racially-ineligible” for citizenship in the United States?

Do you respect the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which created race-based, national origins quotas modeled after the ethnic distribution of the 1890 census to preserve the white majority of U.S. citizens at the time? Or the establishment of the Border Patrol that same year, which was tasked with preventing the entry of Asians and the importation of alcohol?

Do you respect the Bracero Program, the labor importation program created in 1942 as a special wartime measure during World War II to secure cheap, exploitable labor of Mexican migrant workers, but was extended until 1965 after more than 4 million contracts were given to Mexican workers who crossed the border effortlessly to provide cheap labor for the U.S. agricultural industry?

Do you respect the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which restricted migration from Latin America for the first time and created modern “illegal immigration” by criminalizing the migrant labor between the U.S. and Mexico that had existed for more than a century? Was it a coincidence that the U.S. Congress effectively created undocumented labor -- this new category of cheap, exploitable labor -- the year after the Civil Rights Act was passed, when Black people, who had previously occupied the majority of agricultural and domestic jobs that undocumented workers would soon come to occupy, gained more rights protections under U.S. law?

Do you respect contemporary immigration laws? That’s up to you. But do you recognize that the history of contemporary U.S. immigration laws are also interconnected with the laws that created the system of mass incarceration in the late 1960s, and that they work together to criminalize, incarcerate, and detain people of color without ever having to use the language of race? Together, these laws serve the dual-purpose in our labor market of 1) warehousing and disenfranchising Black people in the post-Civil Rights Era, as Michelle Alexander argues in her book The New Jim Crow, and 2) controlling newly-created undocumented laborers with the threat of detention and deportation, as Aviva Chomsky argues in her book Undocumented. 

I propose that the question “do you respect immigration laws?” is not the question we should be asking. Rather, the more important question is one of ethics: “Are immigration laws just?”

This is what the immigration debate should be about, because as history has shown us, what is legal is not always just. And if laws are not just, history has also shown that they can be changed through the collective efforts of organized people.

Are current immigration laws just if a growing number of people coming to our borders are exiles of the climate crisis, as 98% of deaths due to climate change are occurring in developing countries?

Are current immigration laws just if 4.1 million U.S. citizen children live in fear that an undocumented parent may be deported at any time?

Are current immigration laws just if the U.S. government accepts undocumented people’s taxes, but denies them political representation? Undocumented immigrants contribute $12 billion in taxes each year through the ITIN system, and have paid $100 billion into the Social Security system over the last decade, even though they are not eligible to receive its benefits. This is taxation without representation: the very charge of tyranny that sparked the American Revolutionary War. 

I ask these questions honestly and earnestly as a U.S. citizen, and as the daughter of a Vietnam War Era veteran and the granddaughter of a World War II veteran. I also ask these questions to my fellow citizens who also happened to be born within the boundaries of this nation-state. Yes, I said citizenship is arbitrary in my presentation in Minnesota because it absolutely is: we have no say in what geographic location we are born on this earth. As Michelle Alexander reminds us, “[N]one of us born here did anything to deserve our citizenship. On what moral grounds can we deny others rights, privileges, and opportunities that we did not earn ourselves?”

To my undocumented students, and to undocumented people everywhere, this final verse from Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land belongs to you:

Nobody living can ever stop me,

As I go walking that freedom highway;

Nobody living can ever make me turn back

This land was made for you and me.