What are our ethical responsibilities toward people who migrate? How does immigration affect a sense of identity—as individuals, as communities, as nationals? To explore these complex questions, students in a January Term Paideia 450 course made a classroom of regional communities.
Visiting regional hotspots of migration issues
Decorah is neighbor to a few places that illustrate migration issues in a dynamic way. Assistant professor of social work Susan Schmidt and visiting assistant professor of political science Melissa Martinez took advantage of this proximity in January, when they took a group of students to the Iowa Dairy Center in Calmar, where they explored how immigration is relevant to the dairy industry, and to Postville, Iowa, site of the 2008 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid at the Agriprocessors slaughterhouse and meat-packing plant. The Postville raid was, at the time, the largest workplace raid in history. It resulted in the arrest of 398 employees, 98 percent of whom were Latino, and it continues to impact the town of about 2,000. “We can read all of this in a book,” Schmidt says, “but by meeting people and building relationships, we see what we have in common.” This kind of learning, Schmidt says, allows students to become more comfortable working and interacting with people from all backgrounds, ultimately humanizing people who migrate.
Just north of Decorah lies another epicenter of immigration: Minnesota. Minnesota has the highest number of refugees per capita in the country, making the Twin Cities, where many of the state’s migrants settle, an ideal place to study migration issues. PD 450 students spent a week there, visiting organizations that provide various services to refugees and immigrants as well as organizations that refugees and immigrants have created themselves. Among other places, students visited the Mexican Consulate, the Somali Museum of Minnesota, the Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans, the Immigration History Research Center, the Masjid At-Taqwa Mosque, Wellstone International High School, and various counseling and legal services and professionals, including Alison Brandell-Douglas ’09, an immigration attorney at the Federal Immigration Court in Minneapolis.
Brandell-Douglas felt the effects of the Postville raid profoundly. “I grew up in Storm Lake, Iowa, surrounded by a growing immigrant and refugee population, which greatly enriched my town and my childhood,” she says. “However, after witnessing the aftermath of the immigration raid in Postville, it was clear to me that our country and economy did not value my community, my classmates, or their parents. I felt called to work to help right this systemic injustice because I grew up surrounded by the benefits of such a diverse place.”
At Luther, Brandell-Douglas majored in chemistry and Spanish. Having since become an attorney, she provided the PD 450 class with a powerful example of the flexibility of their education. “One definition I have heard of vocation is that it’s the intersection where your greatest gifts meet the world’s greatest needs,” she says. “I loved chemistry because it was logical and systematic. Immigration law is a massive system (unjust in many ways, but a system nonetheless). Working in immigration, I get to use the logic skills developed in my chemistry education to help others understand their immigration possibilities, accompany them on their journey, and educate my community about our immigration laws. It’s the intersection where my greatest gifts meet the world’s greatest needs.”
Observing Federal Immigration Court
Students agree that witnessing Federal Immigration Court proceedings was one of the most powerful, difficult, and eye-opening experiences during the course. Beforehand, as a preparatory exercise, they filled out applications for asylum, knowing that often these forms are filled out by people who can’t yet read or write English. During their courtroom observation one Tuesday afternoon in the middle of the January government shutdown (the courtroom for people who are detained continued operation), students saw migrants cycle through in handcuffs and orange jumpsuits, using interpreters—sometimes by telephone—to engage in legal proceedings that would decide their future. “People in immigration proceedings are not guaranteed attorneys,” Schmidt says, “so we thought about what it might be like to go through that process in a different language without an attorney.”
Claire Eichhorn ’19, an international studies and Spanish double major who is considering practicing law, says, “Observing court cases . . . was an almost surreal experience. Learning in a classroom about this topic is one thing, but seeing actual court cases that would actually affect the lives of the people in that room put everything in perspective. . . . Deportation always seemed to me like a big action, when in reality, it happens in the courtroom in a matter of minutes.”
“We saw how quickly the proceedings go and how communication of what’s going on can be difficult due to language barriers and legal jargon,” says biology major Elizabeth Glennon ’19. “Some trials lasted only a few minutes, and most ended in deportations or high bonds. Seeing this court made me much more sympathetic to immigrants since the system seemed so set against them, not just in the court itself, but also in the steps leading up to it, like long holding times, restricted communication, and the majority of migrants without lawyers.”
Social work major Sanna Berdahl ’19 says, “As I was watching respondent after respondent, it hit me that while I was watching the same process over and over again and the judge was using the same words again and again, every single person there had their own lifetime of a story leading to and away from that moment. . . . Most of the immigration stories I’ve heard have either been expansively broad, such as in news stories, or minutely individual, such as a book about one person and their story. All of a sudden, in that courtroom, that broad view and the individual view intersected for me, and I was suddenly more acutely aware of the vastness and the depth of the issue at the same time.”
Learning from fellow students
Paideia courses are, by design, interdisciplinary, but Schmidt and Martinez built in extra reassurance that students in their course would benefit from multiple perspectives by creating small discussion groups in which students were evenly dispersed by major.
“Migration is a particularly appropriate topic to consider in an interdisciplinary context. It doesn’t sit in one discipline or another,” Schmidt says. “As a professor, that was a really enjoyable part of teaching this course—having students from many fields in one classroom, bringing those perspectives to the topic and asking questions from different perspectives that maybe we as professors wouldn’t be asking from our disciplines. Paideia is a unique opportunity to do those kinds of things.”
Glennon agrees: “It was interesting to see other points of view about immigration, particularly from the humanities students. As a biology major, I sometimes felt a little out of depth discussing all the cultural and social implications of migration, so it was helpful to discuss it all with people who took a less analytical approach. Respectively, I think science majors helped the class take a broader approach to the already complex subject.”
Paige Yontz ’20, a management and accounting double major, also appreciated discussion with her social work and humanities-driven peers. “It was helpful to hear a more humanistic approach to the issues at hand,” she says, noting that it was likewise valuable for those peers to hear from students in policy- and fiscally-driven sectors.
Regardless of major, students left the Twin Cities with the same takeaway. As Yontz summarizes, “The migrant experience is something that impacts us all in some way, shape, or form. Maybe it’s on a personal level or maybe it’s in the communities that we live in, but each and every one of us will experience a situation in our lives where compassion and understanding must frame our discussions and actions surrounding immigration and migration worldwide.”