‘Access without Fear!’: Reconceptualizing ‘Access’ to Schooling for Undocumented Students in Toronto

Abstract

This paper uses Chela Sandoval’s (2000) concept of meta-ideologizing to examine how definitions of ‘access’ are reframed to further the goals of social justice activists. Meta-ideologizing refers to re-operationalizing liberal, widely-accepted terms to fit the needs of a community. The paper draws from 14 semi-structured interviews with individuals pivotal to the passing and implementation of Toronto’s ‘Students Without Legal Immigration Status Policy’, also known as a ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy. It also employs data from literature developed by stakeholders as well as the author’s experiential knowledge. It examines how organizers have reframed the concept of ‘access’ by extending its focus beyond entry into schools and including the need for undocumented migrants to be safe and have access to other social services. It also analyzes the ways bureaucratic logic can invisibilize the gains made by developing procedures that reify illegalization.

Keywords

education immigration race social justice social movements social policy undocumented status

Introduction

In 2007 migrant justice organizers in Toronto celebrated the passage of the Toronto District School Board’s (TDSB) ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ (DADT) policy.¹ Intended to guarantee access to schooling for all children and youth regardless of their immigration status, the policy’s implementation has nonetheless been stymied by conflicting understandings of the concept of ‘access’. Migrant justice organizers worked against the constraints of a narrow definition of this term by meta-ideologizing – using commonly-accepted terms and re-operationalizing them according to a political agenda (Sandoval, 2000). These organizers sought to reframe ‘access’ to schooling from a right to enroll in TDSB schools to a right to full participation in educational programs without any impediments due to fear of deportation or restrictions on other services. Their efforts have not been entirely successful; while meta-ideologizing served as a tool to dismantle some barriers, TDSB administrators have resisted the broader definition of ‘access,’ and developed procedures that circumvent the DADT policy.

There is scant information on the ways illegalization is experienced and resisted within the Canadian context. While valuable work has been published recently on this phenomenon (Fortier, 2013; Abji, 2013; Villegas, 2012; Goldring and Landolt, 2013), there is much to be done. This paper provides additional analysis regarding the methods employed by grassroots organizers to resist illegalization of undocumented communities and the effects on the latter.

This paper reports on findings from 14 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders involved in the development and deployment of policy regarding access to schooling for undocumented students; literature developed by stakeholders regarding access to social services by undocumented migrants; and experiential knowledge as a liaison between the TDSB and local organizers during meetings aimed at implementing the policy. Participants include grassroots activists, social service agency representatives, and schooling bureaucrats. These individuals reported divergent frames to understand accessibility. Through meta-ideologizing, grassroots organizers demanded a reframing of ‘access’ to include safety and availability of other services vital to doing well in schooling. Conversely, TDSB administrators maintained an understanding of the undocumented population through a frame that centered potential criminality and abuse, and as a result developed mechanisms aimed to ‘safeguard’ the institution. Together, these findings show both the potential and the limits of meta-ideologizing for social justice work. They also contribute to existing debates in the sociology of education and stratification, particularly in relation to the relevance of immigration status on educational outcomes and the role of different actors, frames and interventions.

Research Questions

This paper is guided by two primary research questions:

Who have been/are the social actors in the movement for access to schooling for undocumented students? How do they conceptualize ‘access’ and what boundaries are enacted and maintained in those conceptualizations?

How do undocumented migrants and their allies actively resist and erode the boundaries that exclude them from the schooling process?

In the following pages I provide the conceptual framework used to address these research questions. Then, I review the literature on the mutability of citizenship and its effects on undocumented migrants in Toronto. Within this discussion, I provide additional context to understand the specifics of the location and the ways political organizing on this topic have developed. After that, I briefly discuss the methodology of the project, including the types of data and method of data collection and data analysis. Finally, the results section is organized in three subsections. The first provides a short description of the goals of the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Coalition. Secondly, I discuss a distinction between ‘access’ and ‘enrolment’. This subsection demonstrates a divide in the framing of ‘access’ between community organizers and social actors in the school board. In the final section I demonstrate the tensions between the previously examined frames, particularly as it relates to affecting change within a large bureaucratic structure. I pay particular attention to the ways illegalization is maintained through practices and procedures in spite of the presence of a ‘progressive’ policy. I conclude by discussing how meta-ideologizing is a useful tool for grassroots organizers to shift discourse and increase local support. However, once policy gains are achieved, these gains may be limited by bureaucratic logic and the prevalence of illegalizing discourse.

Conceptual Framework

In this paper I link illegalization, framing theory, and meta-ideologizing as a conceptual framework to facilitate an analysis of the ways a dominant concept, ‘access’, is used by migrant justice organizers to counteract the production of illegality and critique the tensions between ‘accessible’ policy and conceptions of citizenship. Below I briefly describe framing theory and the ways it allows for an analysis of dominant logic. Then I present meta-ideologizing as a useful tool to understand the development of counterframes embedded in a social justice framework. Finally, I discuss the ways undocumented migrants experience illegalization and how the former concepts provide the means to understand differential meanings of the word ‘access’ as well as how to understand grassroots moves to disrupt dominant ideology.

Erving Goffman’s concept of framing has been widely used since first published in 1974. This paper utilizes the work of Goffman’s contemporaries, primarily those invested in employing framing theory as a political tool towards social justice. To Benford and Snow (2000: 614) framing refers to ‘an active processual phenomenon that implies agency and contention at the level of reality construction. It is active in the sense that something is being done, and processual in the sense of a dynamic evolving process’. Furthermore, it is ‘contentious in the sense that it involves the generation of interpretive frames that not only differ from existing ones but that may also challenge them’ (Benford and Snow, 2000: 614). Sidney Tarrow’s (2005: 61) synopsis of Snow et al.’s (1986) work on framing distills frames as ‘schemata of interpretation’ which ‘are present in all societies to organize experience and guide interpretation’. As such, frames shape people’s perception of the world and how they imagine possible solutions to social problems. The study of framing, particularly within the study of social movements, includes the ways dominant logic presents an event or phenomenon as well as the methods employed by social actors to transform, bridge, or otherwise affect frames (Helbling, 2014; Benford and Snow, 2000). However, the concept of framing, although widely used in social movements literature, is not premised on a politics of social justice (Benford and Snow, 2000). For this reason, I employ the concept of meta-ideologizing to understand how actors deconstruct and reconstruct meaning.

Meta-ideologizing challenges the accepted conceptual and practical parameters of words and provides an avenue to erode the borders imposed by partial definitions. According to Chela Sandoval (2000: 100), ‘meta-ideologizing’ refers to the ‘operation of appropriating dominant ideological forms, and using them whole in order to transform them’. While meta-ideologizing occurs in the domain of hegemonic terminology, it is a strategic move to decenter the dominant. To Sandoval (2000: 126–7),

this self-conscious production of another level of signification parasitically based on the level of dominant ideology serves to either display the original dominant ideology as naïve – and no longer natural – or to reveal, transform, or disempower its signification in some other way.

There is a degree of pragmatism in the retooling of hegemonic ideologies in order to broaden spaces of resistance rather than developing new terms. Critical theorists have argued that while the process of deconstruction is important, it must also be accompanied by the development of new possibilities (Dei, 1996; Sandoval, 2000). Thus, the process of redefinition, while deconstructing normative understandings of a concept, also provides new ways of interpreting ideas that include transformative solutions.

Grassroots organizers working in the realm of migrant justice have good reason to seek to meta-ideologize. Given the narrow definitions of eligibility written into law and policy as well as the broad sensationalized fears regarding undocumented migrants, meta-ideologizing can serve as a tool to critique and erode the illegalization of undocumented migrants. This process is highly imbalanced, particularly as, according to Tarrow (2005: 62), ‘movements are never free to frame their campaigns as they wish, for they compete at a structural disadvantage with rulers and the media’. In this way, meta-ideologizing can be particularly useful as it presents the opportunity to reformulate dominant frames already widely employed.

Immigration status is a prominent form of defining eligibility to social services. In Canada, undocumented migrants are illegalized through a series of negations to citizenship including gradations of non-citizenship² (Goldring et al., 2007; Goldring and Landolt, 2013). For Nicholas de Genova (2005) the production of ‘illegality’ operates at the levels of discourse and materiality. At the institutional level, the production of ‘illegality’ occurs through the creation of policies determining who is considered a legitimate subject and deserves rights and representation within structures. In contrast, illegalized migrants often find themselves outside the scope of policy and with little availability to social services and entitlements. As such, immigration status serves as a demarcating line that defines not only the availability but also the quality of social services, and this divide is normalized within hegemonic discourse.

Discursively, illegalization emerges across different scales: at an individual level where a frontline worker can decide how to interpret policy; institutionally through developing eligibility parameters of procedures and policies; and at the state level where populations can be marked as il/legitimate based on their in/ability to furnish particular documents. As Chavez (2008: 25) states, ‘being an unauthorized migrant, an ‘illegal,’ is a status conferred by the state, and it then becomes written upon the bodies of the migrants themselves because illegality is both produced and experienced’. This discourse produces material effects, as illegalization in Canada can mean lack of access to health care and avoidance of these spaces for as long as possible, making eventual access more costly (Oxman-Martinez et al., 2005), being shut out of schools and other vital services (Keung, 2013b; Nyers et al., 2006; Villegas, 2013, 2014), and being forced to take on precarious work and living conditions (Magalhaes et al., 2009; Goldring and Landolt, 2011). It can also mean more subtly avoiding certain individuals or spaces because of a fear of being asked about one’s immigration status (Villegas, 2014).

The lens of illegalization does not only present the opportunity to interrogate the ways that migrants experience exclusion from the nation. It also provides a way of investigating the ways migrants and their allies navigate and contest this field. Linking illegalization to meta-ideologizing and framing theory facilitates an understanding of how organizers resist illegalization and formulate responses through the development of new frames that subvert the dominant logic.

Literature Review and Context

The criteria used to define the availability of social services often employ conceptions of formal and informal citizenship. However, rather than a simple dichotomy between inclusion/exclusion, the availability of social services is a complex phenomenon contingent on the type of resource (schooling, health care, housing, etc.) and the governing bodies and their jurisdiction (federal, provincial, municipal, multi-jurisdictional, etc.). Furthermore, in the context of Canada, given a large spectrum of immigration statuses that can change across time (read as precarious immigration status) (Goldring et al., 2007; Goldring and Landolt, 2013), there are myriad permutations that define the availability of services in accordance to one’s specific immigration status. As Goldring and Landolt (2013) explain, precarious status migrants in Canada can experience multiple statuses in their lifetime. Often, these shifts lead to increased precarity. For example, a refugee claimant has access to social services that can be later denied if their refugee claim is declined. Given the fluidity of immigration status, these complexities lead to varied formulations of availability that are contextually and temporally dependent.

As Bosniak (2008: 1) describes, ‘citizenship as an ideal is understood to embody a commitment against subordination, but citizenship can also represent an axis of subordination itself’. While institutions may define the parameters of entry or eligibility through conceptions of formal citizenship, they do not go uncontested. Glenn (2011: 2) reminds us:

Considering what is at stake, it is not surprising that some of the most galvanizing social movements have been organized by those who are excluded and who want to gain entry and expand rights. Conversely, many social movements have also been started by individuals whose interests are served by restricted membership that shore up boundaries and define rights narrowly.

This struggle is fundamentally about power. The power to define and distinguish a member and non-member as well as the structural rewards and penalties that come from social exclusion and exploitation that is facilitated through the distinctions between citizen and non-citizen. It is also about the power to contest and redefine what constitutes belonging and how to broaden these parameters.

In Toronto, public institutions have deployed an increased rigidity in definitions of eligibility to social services. As such, undocumented migrants have often found themselves outside the conceptual limits of citizenship and experienced exclusion or differential inclusion from social services (Bhuyan, 2012; Sidhu, 2008, 2013; Villegas, 2013). At the same time, there is a long and rich history of migrant justice mobilizations in Toronto, including demands to end all deportations and ensure a safer environment (Abji, 2013; Fortier, 2013; Walia, 2013). These projects encompass calls for the inclusion of undocumented students in schooling (Sidhu, 2008, 2013; Villegas, 2013, 2014), and availability to ‘violence against women’ shelters (Bhuyan, 2012, 2013), health care services (Villegas, 2013), the Toronto Police Services Board (Peat, 2008) and municipally controlled services (Keung, 2013a; Siematicky, 2011). Each of these campaigns have experienced various levels of success, and in the remainder of this section I describe the K-12 schooling context for undocumented students.

Contextualizing Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Contestations in Canada have been developed across jurisdictional spaces including the national, provincial, municipal, and institutional levels. These campaigns of resistance serve to challenge the discourse regarding citizenship as well as the ways it is experienced at each jurisdictional level. Thus, while perhaps limited, broader conceptions of citizenship can be developed in relation to a single space (the city, the school board, etc.) and its respective institutions (libraries, public health clinics, schools, etc.).

To Krista Johnston (2012: 131), the city has been a key site of resistance for migrant justice activists. This location, she argues, ‘is a sphere where state politics are certainly felt and seen, but where there is also the potential for opposition and contestation’. Johnston (2012: 130), speaking about members of No One Is Illegal –Toronto (NOII), describes their engagement at the city level as aimed at highlighting the ways undocumented migrants are illegalized in Canadian society. She states:

demands for rights to the city are advanced in ways that claim access to city programs and social services, while also advancing a more general sense of claiming the city … in targeting the state and the city as legitimate places for access and status, groups like NOII are therefore making the ‘ubiquitous border’ visible, serving to politicize and contest the myriad sites and practices of border control. (emphasis in original)

These campaigns have shown the ways that borders expand beyond ports of entry and how they formulate differential belonging.

Undocumented migrants in Canada find themselves in a context of increasing precarity and austerity.³ At the same time that public institutions, including school boards, experience funding shortfalls and demands for increased ‘fiscal responsibility,’ migrants find it increasingly difficult to have and maintain stable immigration status (Goldring and Landolt, 2013). Furthermore, the trope of immigrants ‘abusing’ social services remains a present feature in dominant discourse.

The city of Toronto contains two large public school boards: the Toronto District School Board and the Toronto Catholic School Board. The former is the focus of this paper as it is the largest school board in Canada with over 246,484 students in 588 schools and about 36,500 employees (Toronto District School Board, 2015).

Schooling in Toronto operates under a complex interplay between provincial jurisdiction and local board policies.⁴ While Section 49.1 of Ontario’s ‘Education Act’ clearly stipulates that undocumented migrants cannot be barred from schooling, school boards have utilized their discretion in shaping implementation on the ground (Sidhu, 2008). This has often resulted in a process that is very difficult to navigate or where undocumented students are denied outright enrollment into K-12 schools. As such, many school boards operate in violation of the Education Act, and Ontario’s Ministry of Education has yet to take action beyond periodic reminders of Section 49.1 in the form of memos.

The enrolment of undocumented students into schools has been a contentious issue since the 1960s (Villegas, 2014). In 2006 this issue gained broad public notice when two children, Kimberly and Gerald Lizano-Sossa, were apprehended by immigration authorities inside their school. At this point, grassroots organizers known as the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) Coalition, as well as classmates and teachers of the Lizano-Sossas, initiated a campaign to address access and safety of undocumented students at the Toronto District School Board level. The DADT Coalition was not initially involved in a campaign to ensure access to schooling and had instead focused on demanding a DADT policy at the Toronto Police Services Board⁵ and another for services delivered by the city⁶ (neither schooling nor policing fall solely within municipal jurisdiction).

The Coalition’s efforts became the catalyst for the development of the ‘Students Without Legal Immigration Status Policy’, also known as the Toronto District School Board’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy (DADT). This policy stipulated that the Board would ‘admit’ undocumented students and ‘protect the rights of children and their families by not asking for, reporting or sharing information about any student’s or a student’s family’s immigration status’ (Toronto District School Board, 2007a: 2). However, the TDSB and the DADT Coalition had widely divergent understandings of the barriers faced by undocumented students and the ways to address these issues. According to the Board, the ‘objective’ of the ‘Students Without Legal Immigration Status’ policy was ‘to establish the Board’s commitment to providing a safe and welcoming environment for its students regardless of immigration status’ (Toronto District School Board, 2007b: 1). However, the translation of a ‘safe and welcoming’ environment from policy to practice has been lacking, particularly as the TDSB has failed to address the directives set forth in the policy (Villegas, 2014). In fact, eight years later, a collective of undocumented students and their allies attended a TDSB committee meeting again to discuss barriers to schooling based on immigration status and demanding full implementation of the DADT policy (Toronto District School Board, 2014, 2015).⁷

Methodology

Data for this paper stems from individual and group semi-structured interviews, published literature (including meeting minutes, pamphlets, and public memos, etc.) and my experiential knowledge as a liaison between NOII and the TDSB in the efforts to implement the DADT policy. Data for this project is shared with a CERIS⁸ and Social Science and Humanities Research Council-funded project.⁹

A total of 14 individuals were interviewed between 2009 and 2012. There were seven individual and three small group interviews (two consisting of two participants each and the other of three participants). Interviews were held in a location of the participants’ choosing including personal offices, conference rooms within the University of Toronto, a local library, and a pub.

All participants played prominent roles in instituting the DADT policy. Individuals contacted within the TDSB served as public leaders at different levels of the TDSB bureaucracy including two trustees, two heads of TDSB departments, one long-time member of TDSB committees, and one principal. Participants from outside the TDSB included allies and activists working to push for the introduction, passing, and implementation of the DADT policy. They consisted of two members of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Coalition, three members of NOII, two members of the leadership at teacher unions working at the Board, and one teacher.

As Chase (2003: 289) states, ‘our task as interviewees … includes listening for gaps, silences, or contradictions, and reiterating the invitation through questions that encourage fuller narration of the complexities of her story’. With this in mind, all interviews were open-ended semi-structured and allowed participants space to direct and expand on their responses in a way they found useful. All interviews were recorded and ranged between one-and-a-half to three hours. They were subsequently transcribed and coded using Nvivo. Codes were developed at multiple stages: while designing the research project, during data collection, and while re-analyzing data. All participants were given either gender ambiguous or commonly-associated female pseudonyms. This was done not only to increase participants’ confidentiality but also as a counter-hegemonic move against male protagonism that is so often employed in research and activism.

Grey literature – texts, pamphlets and other materials not published through commercial publishing – was collected at several events and meetings regarding DADT. Participants also made numerous materials available during interviews. Materials included pamphlets, media releases, callouts, public memos, and personal email communications. Another important source of textual data was the Toronto District School Board’s website. It provided the current policy regarding access to schooling for undocumented migrants, as well as procedural changes affecting it. The website also made meeting minutes for committees within the Board available. TDSB documents served to fill in some of the chronological gaps from the interviews and at times provided a written example of the ways Board staff prepared arguments for wider consumption (primarily catering to trustees). All documents were coded using Nvivo.

These findings cannot be considered generalizable to a broader population. They describe the understanding and attitudes (often quite divergent) of participants located in prominent positions within organizing spaces and power brokers at the TDSB. Finally, in regard to my own social location, my point of departure for this paper stems from my personal experiences as a racialized and previously undocumented migrant tasked with working with the TDSB and NOII towards fulfilling an implementation plan for the DADT policy.

Results

The Goals of the Movement

There is a lack of conceptual clarity in the ways policy implementation addresses the root causes of social exclusion. Specifically, research and liberal discourse regarding the ‘availability’ of social services for undocumented migrants often invoke the word ‘access.’ As a result, the conceptual boundary of access has often been limited to ‘entry’, ‘enrollment’, or the right to use a particular good. This narrow scope has at times been challenged through demands to ‘broaden access,’ including further eligibility to health services (Villegas, 2013; Magalhaes et al., 2009), additional rights under the law (Johnston, 2012), and the possibility of advancing beyond secondary schooling (Villegas, 2014). While these are important moves that can benefit undocumented migrants, they maintain a limited conception of access that is primarily interested in expanding eligibility.

Initial drafts of the Don’t, Ask, Don’t Tell policy and subsequent literature developed by the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Coalition demonstrate a strategy that would make the city of Toronto a safer space for undocumented migrants.¹⁰ In 2005, a flyer by the Coalition identified five ‘campaign areas’ for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policies. They consisted of housing, education, emergency services, health care, and food banks/social assistance. The flyer also contained four embedded demands including ‘an affirmation that city services be accessible to all city residents, regardless of immigration status’ (Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Coalition, 2005). In this way, the Coalition troubled the normative understanding of immigration documentation as the basis of eligibility to social services while at the same time mobilizing a reframed understanding of citizenship that includes all people regardless of immigration status.

The goal of the DADT policy was conceptualized as a method to erode barriers experienced by undocumented migrants. This goal was not limited to a single institution; rather, it was part of a larger move to develop spaces of non-compliance to immigration authorities and by extension a safer space for undocumented migrants. As such, the DADT policy proposed at the TDSB was part of a larger agenda that included a push to develop similar spaces in policing, health care, shelters, food banks, and municipal services (Abji, 2013; Fortier, 2013; Villegas, 2014). Danielle, a longtime member of the Coalition and NOII, historicizes the effects of incorporating the organization No One Is Illegal into the debate:

[The] Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell [campaign] shifted and it was a huge shift … Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell had been imagined as this campaign to provide access to services for people without status, but when it was reformulated as a No One Is Illegal campaign, it was imagined as a means to organize people locally in order to develop community power that could ostensibly grind the wheels of Immigration Canada to a halt by having people in various spaces throughout the city refuse to cooperate with immigration law. We would be able to build a long and broad movement that would be about status for all but under the guise of access for all.

Danielle’s quote demonstrates how reframing an issue can inform future action. While the Coalition had primarily called for an increase in service eligibility, the inclusion of NOII provided the terms for a prolonged and further-reaching movement. In this way, mobilization within the Toronto District School Board was conceptualized as a mechanism to organize for change from the grassroots up, rather than a policy-driven top-down approach. Furthermore, the proposed change at the Board was no longer considered the end goal but rather a stepping stone to a larger objective: ‘status for all’.

The TDSB was a pivotal institution for the Coalition. As the biggest school board in the country, it occupies an important place in the community and carries a significant level of recognition and power. The Coalition demanded the Board work alongside numerous community partners to develop strategies to support undocumented students. Furthermore, with sufficient community partners, a reconceptualization of ‘access’ could be effectively broadened and the processes of advancing a better context of reception for undocumented students would become less onerous for each particular institution. Meta-ideologizing, as an activist tool, facilitated not only the reframing of ‘access’ to fit a resistance agenda, but also of the TDSB from an impartial structure charged with schooling students to a community pillar actively pursuing student wellbeing. As I address in the sections below, what was to come was an impasse with the ways members of the Board framed schooling, as well as the watering down of goals through bureaucratic logic.

Reconceptualizing ‘Access’

The DADT Coalition and NOII have consistently displayed a broader understanding of the barriers experienced by undocumented students and the need for a more holistic method to address the problem. First, they argued that ‘access’ is dependent on actual and perceived safety. Secondly, they contended that ‘access’ cannot be seen as a singular move that is fulfilled through enrolment. To that end, members of the Coalition charged the Board with developing processes that consider and address migrants’ status-related needs and anxieties. This includes the full implementation of the DADT policy passed in 2007 as well as taking undocumented migrants into account when developing new policies and procedures. As such, organizers argued, the TDSB cannot be considered ‘accessible’ to undocumented migrants if procedures reify borders or place migrants in dangerous situations.

The use of a broader understanding of ‘access’ by the Coalition mirrors Sandoval’s (2000) work on meta-ideologizing, as ‘access’, a term often used apolitically, or with less political purpose, was reformulated by organizers as a method to insert themselves into Board decisions and deploy a political strategy that appealed to liberal values regarding children and access to schooling while working towards a larger, more critical goal. Whereas individuals within the TDSB’s bureaucracy framed the Board as responsible to the governmental and ideological constructions of citizenship, belonging, and deservingness, through policies and procedures, the Coalition demanded a directive that placed the Board as responsive to a community. For the Coalition, this community also encompassed undocumented migrants – a move that mobilized a reconceptualization of citizenship that included all stakeholders of the school board.

Safety has been at the forefront of campaigns initiated by the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Coalition and the subsequent work of NOII. Living with undocumented status carries numerous vulnerabilities and anxieties. As such, NOII initiated a number of campaigns under the slogan ‘Access without Fear.’ This rallying cry became a collective action frame (McAdam, 1995) by highlighting injustice and agency. Overall, it challenged hegemonic understandings of access and citizenship in at least two ways. First, it demanded that all people have the right to feel safe in their communities. Secondly, it emphasized the ways that immigration-status-related fears affect whether a social service is perceived as ‘accessible’. According to DADT Coalition members, regardless of the policies in place or any other feature that stipulates that undocumented migrants can employ a particular social service, if this population cannot feel adequately safe in entering such a space and requesting service, then the space cannot be understood as accessible. As such, documents or individuals demanding information about a person’s immigration status cannot be seen as fostering accessibility and instead serve to reinforce border zones that place undocumented migrants outside an organization’s boundaries of inclusion.

In the context of schooling and undocumented students, participants who worked in schools identified widespread effects of a lack of feeling safe, including sporadic attendance and limited engagement. These effects are enhanced in periods when immigration enforcement is understood to be more active or when deportation orders have been issued for a particular family. According to Natalie, a principal in the city:

I can’t say that it’s a trend, I can say that there are bigger issues this year than there have been in the past. I would say starting in the middle of last year I noticed an increase in the number of students struggling with concerns about being deported. Not that it never happened before but much more frequently, and some will not attend because they’re afraid, but some just won’t be able to produce work or engage in their learning because recently if you’re afraid you’re going to be sent back to a country that you left for whatever reasons of safety or whatever it is, it’s hard to worry about what you learn in math that day or whatever the subject is that day, so that’s the concern.

Natalie’s school was located in a section of the city heavily populated by recent migrants, primarily from the Caribbean. In this quote, she not only speaks to an increased number of students in her school being affected by immigration enforcement but also the effects they face in the classroom. These effects occur not only when there is a deportation order but also when a student feels vulnerable because of her/his or their family’s immigration status and the possibility of detention as a result of profiling. The results of these moments of increased anxiety regarding one’s vulnerabilities as an undocumented migrant can cause decreased focus in the classroom, sporadic attendance, or forced movement ‘underground.’ Alex, a teacher within the TDSB, described a few of the ways that her students were affected. She said:

I don’t think that the DADT policy is implemented very well or a lot of teachers don’t know about it. A lot of students, number one, [do not] have any idea about it. I know students, I have been hearing stories of students who basically go underground … for like a good week or two weeks or something and then they showed up at school. So we wouldn’t see [them] for two or three weeks … nobody knows their whereabouts. As a teacher or a principal or any administrator in the school, we wouldn’t know, we couldn’t contact them, there’s nothing we could pretty much do … they’re afraid of school.

To Saul, an organizer with NOII, ‘access’ was diluted if it did not encompass safety. She said:

I guess the interesting thing about that piece is thinking about access not just in terms of paperwork and having a seat in the classroom but knowing you’re not going to be pulled out of the classroom or that, you know, changes in your immigration, often that you are totally ignorant of, but you get a letter in the mail and that sort of being a basis for being pulled out of the community.

Saul’s statement speaks to the precarity experienced by migrants in Toronto and the possible changes in their status that can lead to their removal from their communities. In this way, we can see that reframing an expanded concept of access by members of NOII is radically different from the Board. Included in this practice is the employment of slogans like ‘Access Not Fear.’ Such statements clarify the need for an expanded concept that goes beyond entry or enrolment. These slogans critique limited understandings and mobilizations of access and demand additional discussions regarding the value of employing such a term without nuance.

Safety in schools was not a sufficient goal. As Pedro Noguera (2006: 130) reminds us, ‘employment, housing and health care may not be regarded as educational issues, but in urban areas where poverty is concentrated and the poor are isolated, such issues invariably affect schools and learning’. This means that for schooling, access must include recognition of the various factors that affect the ability to succeed academically¹¹ and the possibility to engage in subsequent schooling. As such, members of the Coalition argued that the responsibility of the school board must expand past enrolling and teaching students and include working on their behalf beyond the confines of the school site. And, while this should be mobilized for all students, undocumented students face additional barriers accessing basic and essential services (particularly when considering the intersections of race, gender, class, and immigration status). Overall, this new frame sees the relationships between students, school employees, community members, and all other relevant social actors as occupying temporal and spatial dimensions beyond hegemonic limitations (school hours, school calendar, etc.). Speaking to these points, Gloria, a long-time migrant justice organizer stated:

I think access to all services shouldn’t be based on immigration status … You know, we shouldn’t be at a point now where the school board is starting to talk about some of the implementation steps they agreed to years ago. We should be at a point where the school board is saying ‘it’s not enough for our students to just have access in the door to education. They don’t have access to health cards, that means they can’t have the quality of education that students with citizenship have.’ The school boards should be pressuring the ministry of health around OHIP, the school board should be looking at access to other services and be playing an active role, being a leader as the largest school board in Canada, and advocating, not dragging its feet when media spotlights are on them.

Gloria’s intersectional argument takes into account the multiple structures that affect student success. As such, her reference to the need for a health card recognizes that students must have healthy bodies in order to learn. This discourse also takes into account other social services that are essential to students but exclude them through bordering practices. To this end, ‘access’ to schooling for the Coalition spanned beyond enrolment and included the availability of all services that affect academic outcomes.

Since the Coalition initiated their campaign on schooling in 2006, there has been a clear disconnect between their understanding of ‘access’ and that of TDSB administrators. However, by reformulating liberal values regarding schooling and children, the Coalition was able to retool the framing of eligibility of schooling for undocumented children during the policy development stage. However, while the passing of the DADT policy was seen as a major victory by members of the Coalition, they would find it difficult to see change on the ground given the difference between having a policy in the books and practical implementation.

Impediments to Change

Individuals within the Board argued they could not become involved in issues outside their jurisdiction and resisted the expansion of the parameters of their ‘responsibility’ beyond student enrollment and safety in the classroom. At TDSB meetings, many administrators argued that they were in the business of schooling and other entities were responsible for social needs such as housing and personal safety. Their unwillingness to work beyond the confines of hardened institutional boundaries is thus a significant point of dissonance between a grassroots political strategy that recognized the interconnectedness of various local institutions and the need for solidarity across social spheres. This is despite the fact that schools and school boards often sit in or participate in networks and partnerships with other social service organizations and, in the case of the TDSB, often house social workers and immigration settlement workers within their schools.

There is also little evidence of the TDSB taking undocumented migrants’ vulnerabilities into consideration in the development of new policy or in the limited efforts to implement the DADT policy. This is particularly salient when it comes to safety, as new procedures place undocumented migrants in greater degrees of danger (Villegas, 2014). This discrepancy demonstrates a disconnect between the goals of organizers and the perceptions of bureaucrats within the Board. As Saul, a member of NOII, stated:

As I started to get involved in No One Is Illegal one of the key discussions was, ‘ok this policy has been passed but how do we make it real?’ and always having in the back of minds, knowing that these deportations are happening every day so there is getting in the door but also keeping people in communities as being an important thing that we’re committed to.

To members of the DADT Coalition, it was imperative that the Board consistently inform new migrants about the presence of the DADT policy and that the enrolment process occur in a less stressful environment. However, both of these goals have gone largely unaddressed. The Board developed posters for school offices across the board but few participants, including all who worked in schools, had seen them. Furthermore, through the deployment of Operational Procedure PR 518 the Board now limits the enrolment of students that are not classified as citizens or permanent residents and often directs families to its head office. As such, the framing of the topic remains at odds. Grassroots activists demand a reconceptualization of ‘access’ to encompass a sense of security as well as widespread information about the availability of schooling. Simultaneously, school board administrators illegalize undocumented migrants through a criminalizing frame that supports concerns that migrants may cheat or abuse the system, prompting the development of ‘safeguards’ to protect the institution.

Policy roadblocks can be framed as processes enhancing efficiency, standardization, or as present to benefit the community in question. In relation to Operational Procedure 518, according to the Pink Panther, a longtime member of OSSTF District 12:

The way it’s explained to me and the way they are trying to do it now and whatever bias you think might exist or exists at the school level, just to take that out of the equation they are trying to say they are sending everybody out to central office. That’s what they are trying to do so they know they can deal, they know the staff, they have a small group of trained, whatever, sensitive people to deal with so they are trying to take away, that’s what I’ve been hearing has been happening.

This protocol, while displaying caring on the surface, does not take into account the anxieties that migrants can experience in disclosing their immigration status to multiple individuals. As Menjivar and Kil (2002) remind us, the use of benevolent rhetoric is a discursive maneuver often used against undocumented migrants. In this instance, the additional bureaucratic layer may serve to discourage undocumented migrants from enrolling their children.

Many participants who played pivotal roles at the Board did not know about the existence of PR 518. Others like Sal, a long-time member of OSSTF District 12, felt it countered not only the policy passed at the Board, but also the demands of members of the Coalition who worked alongside undocumented community members to draft the initial proposed policy to the Board. In relation to the Pink Panther’s narrative above, Sal replied:

[It] is unacceptable of course, and I don’t like the idea that these families would be sent to the central office because when you look at, that’s a very heavy, you said scary,¹² a very heavy extra step. Makes you wonder ‘why am I going there?’ … the policy is supposed to work at the school level and you should only have to go elsewhere if you run into a very unusual situation that requires problem solving at a higher level, and I’m not even sure that [even then] the families should have to go up there … I think it’s the school official that should go up there and say, ‘look, what do we do here?’. And the higher level [individual] can in some protocol offer a caring message and can say ‘we want to get you into the school but we have a situation we have to solve … to help us help you’, you know, that kind of thing. You have to disarm the referral … but you know, whether by ignorance on the ground or bothered by that sneaky discrimination that’s so easy to get away with when you’re on the power side of the counter and bothered by the lack of leadership by the Board to care as much as I do and that’s happening.

Sal recognized that demands to disclose information about an undocumented person’s immigration status and the subsequent requisite to go to the Board’s head office affect ‘access.’ In contrast, the Board’s limited implementation of staff training at all schools as mandated by Board policy and the subsequent deployment of Operational Procedure PR 518 demonstrate an inability to recognize the safety concerns that must be embedded within an ‘access’-related policy. Absent such recognition, policies meant to erode border-zones that exclude undocumented migrants will prove ineffective. Thus, while organizers and allies deployed a conceptualization of ‘access’ that was broader in scope, institutional actors employed a different frame that limited accessibility to enrolment while embedding numerous barriers to the registration process. As such, while meta-ideologizing can be a powerful tool to redeploy dominant terminology and subvert it to the needs of the oppressed, it can also carry limitations, particularly when engaging with dominant institutions. When new frames developed to promote equity are not adopted by the institution or become enveloped in bureaucratic logic, they can become non-performative (Ahmed, 2006). In the context of the TDSB, the passing of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, while reframing the eligibility of schooling, has not manifested in accessible schools. Rather, hegemonic ideas about migrant illegality persist and bureaucratic logic demands additional processes to ‘protect’ institutions. As a result, undocumented migrants still experience refusal of enrolment, are asked about their immigration status, and are often forced to enroll in a different location than citizens and permanent residents.

Conclusion

The demands and political organizing behind the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Coalition worked to mobilize a reconceptualization of ‘access’ as a broad notion that demanded increased commitment and engagement by numerous institutions. To many individuals within the Toronto District School Board, the idea of access to schooling for undocumented students was understood solely as the ability to enter or be registered into the school space. Thus, the concept of ‘access’ was often employed as synonymous with ‘enrolment.’ This definition, however, can lead to a severe over-simplification of the population, their vulnerabilities, and the issue at hand. Primarily, it can lead to a perception of the problem as occurring at a fixed moment in time: the moment of school registration. Under such a rubric, the problem of access is resolved as soon as undocumented migrants can register at a TDSB school. However, by discursively linking the concepts of ‘access’ to ‘enrolment,’ the first is constrained by the conceptual parameters of the latter. The conceptual dilution of ‘access’ can invisibilize the structural boundaries that make schooling inaccessible for undocumented students.

‘Access’ as a concept is complicated and wide-ranging. However, by problematizing simplistic parallels linking ‘access’ solely to ‘enrolment’, calling for a broadening of the concept, and displaying the interconnected nature of student wellbeing, members of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Coalition have mobilized and revitalized campaigns. While the work of redefinition can be seen as semantics, framing theory has shown that language affects our understanding of social phenomena, and the deployment of newly imagined language has served to develop transformative possibilities. Thus, by appropriating a widely-used concept like access, and broadening it in ways that are coherent within the boundaries of meaning for the word, members of NOII continue to pursue the development of enhanced spaces of solidarity with undocumented migrants. At the same time, these moves can stimulate significant pushback, particularly from institutional actors who may be unwilling to move beyond strict and narrow definitions. In this way, while meta-ideologizing can serve to broaden the conceptual boundaries of members of a movement and at times serve to develop and move policy through a bureaucracy, there can still be difficulty in implementing this vision.

For an activist organization, highlighting the limitations of the DADT policy, particularly when it is touted as an ‘accessible’ policy, can demonstrate new ways of imagining an accessible environment and its connection to immigration status. As such, in this paper I have shown that meta-ideologizing can serve as an important tool in countering dominant discourse and practice. However, while these tools can serve to erode the discursive boundaries to citizenship, there are many other ways in which hegemony can be reformed or reproduced – mostly clearly in this case through the unwillingness to implement the DADT policy and the development of Operational Procedure 518. In this way, we must consider meta-ideologizing as a discursive tool that necessitates continuous work. Questioning the understanding of ‘access’ and how to deploy it in practice and policy is but a single step. At the same time, we cannot minimize its value in developing better and more responsive mobilizing efforts. This discursive labor can serve to move beyond limited and humanitarian perspectives. Finally, while the DADT policy has yet to be fully implemented as intended and the mobilization at the police services board was unsuccessful, recent developments at the municipal level display ongoing resistance that is bolstered by redefined concepts.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge Paloma Villegas, Patricia Landolt, and Luin Goldring for their invaluable help in completing this project and preparing this publication. A special note of gratitude is also necessary for the kind and productive comment anonymous reviewers.

Funding

This work was supported by funding from the Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement and Social Science and Humanities Research Council.

Notes

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