Immigration Policy and Education in Lived Reality: A Framework for Researchers and Educators

Abstract

The urgency of immigration policy in the lives of immigrant students and families and educators is more evident than ever; however, education theories and educators’ practices are not keeping pace with this lived reality. We draw on scholarship that examines the lives and educational experiences of undocumented students and undocumented or mixed-status families; research on classroom, school, and district policy and practice for immigrant students; and critical sociocultural approaches and critical race theories to develop a conceptual framework for understanding the intersection of immigration policy and education in a nuanced way. We highlight conceptual insights—on people, policy, context, outcomes, and power—for making sense of this nexus. We conclude with implications for our work as researchers and educators and how we conceptualize citizenship.

Keywords

educational policy ethnography immigration policy policy analysis politics qualitative research social context

The scope and restrictiveness of U.S. immigration policy and enforcement have grown substantially in the last few years (Pierce, Bolter, & Selee, 2018). Students of immigrant-origin—both documented and undocumented immigrant students born outside of the United States and U.S.-born children of immigrants—and schools nationwide are increasingly impacted by these policies, both directly and indirectly. Detentions and deportations rose sharply under President Barack Obama, but since President Donald Trump took office, families and parents have become priority categories for immediate detention and deportation, contributing to greater numbers of family separations (Pierce et al., 2018). Arrests of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. interior have increased 25%, in some cases upending families who have been settled in the country for decades (Gringlas & Cala, 2018). Programs like Temporary Protected Status or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which allowed youth and families to live, work, and attend college legally in the United States, have been canceled. Students who revealed their undocumented legal status when they applied for DACA now live with great uncertainty about their futures (Sanchez, 2017). Furthermore, undocumented activists who are fighting to change these policies are at increased risk of detention and deportation (Sachetti & Weigel, 2018).

The continuation of xenophobic, anti-immigrant, racist, and anti-Muslim rhetoric from the 2016 presidential campaign, heightened deportation, and rapid immigration policy change have marked the first years of this presidency. As a result, kindergarten through 12th-grade students of immigrant-origin are experiencing fear, anxiety, and difficulty concentrating; bullying and hateful speech from peers; and for some students in undocumented and mixed-status families, the tragedy of having a close family member deported (e.g. Costello, 2016; Gándara & Ee, 2018; Rogers et al., 2017).

Educators confront dire questions of how to educate and care for students living with these traumas, including how to protect sensitive student information, what assurances they can give to parents that undocumented children are safe at school, how to prevent schools from becoming hostile environments (a violation of civil-rights laws), and how best to guide students in decoding political polarization and promoting respect in the current political climate (Costello, 2016; Harris, 2017; Rogers et al., 2017).

As a field, our theories and school policies and practices are not keeping pace with the realities of immigration policy and their impacts on the lives of immigrant-origin students and families, educators, and school communities. Since the 1982 Supreme Court ruling Plyler v. Doe affirmed students’ right to a free, public education irrespective of their or their guardians’ legal citizenship status, it may have seemed that immigration policy was irrelevant to students’ schooling experiences and an issue legally separated from schools. Some teachers have avoided discussion of students’ citizenship status in schools due to fears of violating Plyler (López & López, 2010; Mangual Figueroa, 2017). And while recognizing that schools are an important site of immigrant reception (Rumbaut & Portes, 2001) and civic education for all students (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004), scholars have not typically conceptualized immigration policy as intertwined with schools. The inadvertent implication of such omissions is that immigration policy and citizenship status are viewed as not relevant to learning, other educational outcomes, or students’ school experiences. However, this historical moment and its impact on students and schools requires that we think differently about the relationship between immigration policy and school policy and practice.

To sketch out a conceptual framework for understanding the intersections of immigration policy and education in a more complex and nuanced way, we synthesize research findings on immigration and education utilizing a sociocultural and critical policy and race studies lens. Our review focuses on recent scholarship examining the lives and educational experiences of undocumented students and undocumented or mixed-status families (e.g., Gonzales, 2016; Mangual Figueroa, 2017; Patel, 2013). At the nexus of public education and immigration policy spheres and without full legal rights or many economic resources, these students and families are likely to be among the most vulnerable to and impacted by immigration policies and racialized school practices (López & López, 2010). We use insights from critical, sociocultural policy approaches and critical race theories to frame existing findings and to help capture the complexity of the people, contexts, and power-laden relationships and practices that constitute the nexus of immigration policy and education (e.g., Ball, McGuire, & Braun, 2012; Levinson, Sutton, & Winstead, 2009). In attending to immigration policy, we draw inspiration from Anyon’s (2005) seminal essay “What ‘Counts’ as Education Policy?” in which she argued for recognizing the impact of tax, wage, housing, and other policies on the lives of children of color and the success of schools that serve them.

Our goal is that this framework provides a new analytic tool—which integrates immigration and education research findings with critical policy lenses—for educators and policymakers to respond to the experiences of students and families marginalized and harmed by U.S. immigration policy and schools’ responses to it. In what follows, we outline this framework, describe its elements and the research and theory on which those elements rest, and discuss implications for researchers and practitioners at this pivotal moment.

The Framework

Our framework highlights five interwoven components. Each of these components is essential in considering the enduring tensions and contemporary overlaps between immigration policies, which demarcate who belongs within and who is excluded from the national polity, and educational policies, which are expected to serve all children living within U.S. borders. As depicted in Figure 1, we center (1) people—particularly undocumented, immigrant-origin students and families and their unique, intersectional experiences of oppression—as they interact with and relate to family members, educators, school staff, and other education stakeholders. (2) During everyday interactions, these actors experience, contest, and co-construct the intersections of education and immigration policy, including official policy, policy enactment, practices that function as policy, and policy discourses (the official or normative values and meanings expressed in policy), in ways that expand or limit citizenship. (3) These processes occur across and are shaped by multiple, overlapping contexts at local, state, federal, and international scales, that are themselves the consequence of social, economic, and political forces and cannot be partitioned among school, home, and community in the daily lives of immigrant-origin students and families. (4) We recognize that these people, policy processes, and contexts contribute to multiple consequences that emerge over time to influence various facets of schools, society, and immigrant-origin students’ and families’ lives.

Figure 1.

The immigration policy and education in lived reality framework.

(5) Lastly, power, a key feature of policy, is central to analyzing each of the above elements (Levinson et al., 2009). Power shapes individuals’ and groups’ experiences and perspectives and must be analyzed along the multiple axes—including legal status—that may marginalize immigrant-origin students and families. Power is endemic to relationships in schools and society and structures opportunity and resources across contexts. Because it is interwoven in each of the framework elements, power is depicted as permeating the framework and is discussed below in relation to each component, rather than as a separate section.

Immigrant-Origin Students, Families, and Educators as Policy Actors

Students, families, and teachers are frequently positioned as objects or “targets” of policy. In placing undocumented students, families, and educators (of immigrant-origin or not) in the center of our framework, we aim to recognize their agency in relation to education and immigration policy. Indeed, many undocumented students have shown extraordinary activism around immigration reform and undocumented students’ educational rights (Negrón-Gonzales, 2014). Even young children from mixed-status families make choices about what to say and how to participate in school based upon the risks they face given their and their loved ones’ legal status (Mangual Figueroa, 2017). In centering immigrant-origin students and families, we hope to challenge current and historical discourses that dehumanize immigrants (Santa Ana, 1999), recognize immigrant-origin students and families as essential participants in formal policy deliberations (Dorner, 2011), and denaturalize deficit assumptions about immigrants that are common in educational research, policy, and practice (Arzubiaga, Noguerón, & Sullivan, 2009).

In a moment of significant heterogeneity in immigrant backgrounds and experiences in the United States (Suárez-Orozco, Yoshikawa, & Tseng, 2015) and ongoing systems of race, class, and gender domination, recognizing immigrant-origin students and families as both marginalized and privileged by interwoven systems of power is essential (Patel, 2013). Intersectionality theory (e.g., Crenshaw, 1989) highlights that immigrant-origin students’ and families’ viewpoints, opportunities, experiences, resources, and engagement with immigration policy and education are shaped by interlocking social hierarchies of race, gender, class, age, legal status, language, and sexuality. Even within a single family, individuals may be differently situated by legal status, language, race, sexuality, ability, and gender; for example, undocumented students are vulnerable to detention and deportation in ways that their U.S.-born siblings may not be. And while recognizing the power and bravery of immigrant-origin student activists (many of whom are undocumented Latinx youth who have succeeded by mainstream school standards) is essential, intersectionality theory reminds us that this narrative must not obscure the unique experiences of non-college-going youth, Black or Asian immigrant-origin students, and undocumented parents.¹

We also draw attention to the myriad adults who play a role in the lives of immigrant-origin students and whose actions lie at the juncture of immigration policy and education. Some educators have drawn on commitments to community building and their knowledge of students’ language and culture to create inclusive learning environments for immigrant-origin families (e.g., Bartlett & García, 2011). And in the ongoing crisis of parent and child detention and family separation, some educators have partnered with trusted figures in undocumented immigrant communities, lawyers, and nonprofits knowledgeable about immigration law to support their students. For instance, one elementary school principal worked with a local community member to alert undocumented parents about the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents near her school and to communicate that agents would be barred from school grounds (Crawford, 2017).

Many educators, however, hold ideologies, pedagogical theories, and assumptions about students that actively undermine learning opportunities and belonging for immigrant youth (e.g., Valenzuela, 1999). School-based staff may foreground, conflate, or erase students’ immigrant identities. Dabach (2015), for example, found that educators conflated language learner classifications with immigration status, leading to “linguistic profiling” in which teachers made explicit statements about students’ ability to vote and engage in other civic behaviors based upon their fluency in English. Additionally, teachers feeling torn between helping families and the perceived legal and social liabilities of doing so can inadvertently limit undocumented students’ access to school resources and support (Gallo & Link, 2015; Jefferies, 2014).

Immigrant parents have contested policy on both the national stage and in their everyday lives. They play key roles in making and enacting sanctuary policies from the ground up, a continuation of growing migrant and immigrant civic participation in immigration policy issues (Gonzales & Sigona, 2017). University faculty, business people, social service providers, immigrant advocates, and other groups are also increasingly involved in policy and education for immigrant-origin students (e.g., Hamann, 2003).

In centering the experiences of immigrant-origin students and families, attending to the roles of educators and other actors who shape students’ and families’ everyday experiences, and highlighting the interlocking systems of power that impact how they engage with and are affected by immigration and education policy and practice, this framework brings us closer to understanding the intertwining of immigration policy and education as it is lived.

Immigration Policy as Official Policy, Policy Enactment, Practice, and Discourse

Contrary to conventional thought, immigration policy shapes education, and vice versa. First, at a very basic level, official immigration policies have shaped who is present or absent in U.S. classrooms. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished a system of nationality-based quotas that had severely limited legal immigration from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, contributing to growing racial and ethnic diversity in the United States and its schools.² The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 militarized the Mexico-U.S. border, incentivizing migrants to settle in the United States for longer periods rather than risk repeated border crossings and contributing to a growing presence of undocumented students in schools (Massey & Pren, 2012).³ Meanwhile, DACA and in-state tuition laws, such as California’s Assembly Bill 540 (AB 540), allowed long-term residents, regardless of their legal status, to pay in-state tuition at a state’s public colleges and universities. These policies increased college access for some undocumented immigrants, while not necessarily making 4-year colleges sufficiently affordable (Abrego, 2008).

Second, while subject to official policies, teachers and administrators make consequential, real-time educational decisions about whether and how to enact immigration policy in schools and classrooms. Policy enactment—how people understand and carry out official policies—reflects on-the-ground actors’ knowledge, interpretations, negotiations, and activities in day-to-day life (Ball et al., 2012). The result is that official policy is frequently enacted in ways that substantially differ from setting to setting and from policymakers’ stated intentions. These enactments or practices become the policy as it is experienced in daily life (Levinson et al., 2009).

The difference between official policy and policy enactment is evident in research on the Plyler v. Doe decision. For example, in direct violation of the Plyler ruling, school staff responsible for verifying students’ residency at the time of enrollment have asked for forms of identification that inadvertently reveal parents’ legal status (for example, a driver’s license in places where undocumented individuals cannot obtain one) (López & López, 2010). Other educators and administrators have enacted Plyler in ways that treat undocumented status as something that cannot be known or spoken about at all, a stance that some schools interpret as necessary to comply with the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (López & López, 2010). In response to these divergent enactments, officials at the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Justice have offered schools additional guidance on implementing Plyer and relevant civil rights laws; for example, advising state and local education agencies to avoid enrollment practices that “may chill or discourage the participation” of students based on their or their family’s immigration status (Ali, Rose, & Perez, 2011).

Indirect challenges to Plyler have also come through practices and policies that limit services predominantly directed toward undocumented and mixed-status families in their communities (Olivas, 2012). These local enactments of Plyler depended on individuals’ or groups’ interpretations of the ruling’s practical implications and their locally specific responses to undocumented and mixed-status families, neither of which are inevitable or uniform across sites.

As immigrant-origin students and families traverse home-school-community contexts and immigration policies wind their ways through school systems, the distinction between immigration and education policy may be blurrier than policymakers and researchers typically conceptualize it to be. The impacts of immigration policy on immigrant-origin families and students carry into school interactions (e.g., Gringlas & Cala, 2018; Rogers et al., 2017), and undocumented immigrant parents also interpret school practice in light of immigration policy. For instance, undocumented parents who fear disclosing personal information to the government may choose not to volunteer in their children’s classrooms if they are informed that they must complete a background check before doing so (Mangual Figueroa, 2013). In immigrant-origin students’ and educators’ everyday lives, immigration policy becomes intertwined with education policy and practice in ways that are not easily disentangled and that may not be easily recognized by educators.

Furthermore, teachers’ practices can constitute unofficial immigration policies that open or foreclose belonging through words and deeds. For instance, Mangual Figueroa (2011) showed how educators’ assignment of “citizenship” grades as a marker of good behavior and active participation in school communicated beliefs about who does and does not belong in school to mixed-status families, who understood citizenship to be a high-stakes, legal construct that can lead to detention or deportation. These grades were not related in educators’ minds to students’ legal status; however, in the lives of mixed-status immigrant families, these grades were understood as a kind of unofficial school immigration policy—or authoritative statement about students’ belonging. In this way, educators’ communication of their beliefs about citizenship and their school practices represented a third way immigration policy and education can be intertwined.

Fourth, policy can also be understood as a discursive process where ideologies about immigrants, immigration, and citizenship are expressed and contested (e.g., “DREAMers” vs. “anchor babies”) (Rosen, 2009). Policy debates impact immigrant-origin families’ lives, even if a policy is not yet enacted or does not legally pertain to their particular circumstances. The 2016 presidential campaign rhetoric contributed to fear and anxiety among immigrant-origin children and families (e.g., Costello, 2016; Gumbel, 2016), while some universities and K–12 schools have developed policies to express support for immigrant-origin families, such as by declaring their schools “sanctuaries” (Patel, 2018).

Finally, power relations permeate all these forms of immigration policy. Within our socially and economically stratified society, differing resources, political influence, legal status, or authority shape policy negotiations among unequally situated groups and individuals (Levinson et al., 2009). For instance, following the 2016 presidential election, Turner, Timberlake, Beneke, and Velazquez’s 2019 analysis using racial capitalism theories found that one principal was hesitant to openly support immigrant students because she feared backlash from parents perceived to be powerful. She instead issued a vague statement about “student stress” and pledged to “ensure that school is a safe place for everyone.” Her actions appeared to undermine district leaders’ earlier public statement in support of immigrant families. Effective policy analyses acknowledge and theorize the power relations that shape immigration and education policy and practice.

Multiple, Interconnected Contexts

Scholars have long recognized immigrants’ experiences and futures are shaped by their “contexts of reception,” from institutionally mediated interactions in classrooms and school systems to structural inequalities and opportunities (Portes & Rumbaut, 2006). We build on this insight to conceptualize people, immigration policy, and education as situated within and influenced by multiple, dynamic contexts that are interconnected across geographies and scales (e.g., local, state, federal, global).

Immigrant-origin students’ contexts are increasingly varied. Immigrant-origin students and families are locating in new destinations in the United States (e.g., Wortham, Murillo, & Hamann, 2002) and lead increasingly transnational lives (Abu El-Haj, 2015). Their experiences traverse and engage home, school, and community spaces and are shaped by the multilevel policy terrain (e.g., state, national) in which daily experiences are embedded. For example, states and localities have passed laws to regulate undocumented immigrants’ access to public services; local jurisdictions have enacted inclusive “sanctuary” laws and restrictive day laborer ordinances (Varsanyi, 2010). Scholars thus increasingly recognize legal status as interplaying with geographic membership and informal modes of social belonging in communities to shape spaces of both inclusion and exclusion (e.g., Gonzales & Sigona, 2017).

Immigration policies also “travel” across contexts and are profoundly transformed at local levels, as suggested in the Plyler examples. For instance, some sheriffs have chosen not to comply with requests by ICE to detain individuals who are booked in jail and suspected of being undocumented (Burnett, 2018). At the same time, a growing number of sheriffs have actively partnered with ICE through programs like 287(g), which was restarted by Donald Trump after he took office in 2017 and delegates elements of immigration enforcement to local authorities. In an example of systems of power at work, the program can be a source of revenue and political gain for some rural sheriffs’ departments (Owen, 2018) but has led to greater racial profiling, civil rights violations, and family separations (e.g., Weissman, Headen, & Parker, 2009).

Immigration policy and education practice are in turn situated within broader, power-laden social, economic, and political contexts. Racial ideologies, for example, interact with gender, class, and linguistic ideologies to privilege white norms of achievement, limit immigrant-origin students’ educational experiences (e.g., Flores & Rosa, 2015; Lee, 2005; Turner, 2015), and shape immigration policies (e.g., Ngai, 2014). Attention to the systemic power relations in which immigrant-origin students and families live, policy is formed, and schooling occurs provides a check on the potential for overly optimistic views of individual agency and overly individualized explanations of policy or consequences. Rather than assuming the nature and boundaries of these contexts a priori, the framework encourages us to understand context from the standpoints and experiences of immigrant-origin students and families as well as educators. This requires easing the typical distinctions between in- and out-of-school domains and across levels of social organization and governance and building new understandings of context that more effectively capture immigrant students’ lived experiences. Relational and constellational (Hart, 2006) and comparative ethnographic (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2016) analytic models provide useful starting points for such efforts.

Multiple Consequences Over Time for Immigrant-Origin Students, Schools, and Society

The consequences of immigration policies are extensive, may unfold across the lifespan, and ripple across schools and society. First, immigration policies can powerfully shape immigrant-origin students’ daily lives, including their educational experiences, psychoemotional states, livelihoods, and belonging. Yoshikawa’s (2011) longitudinal study of mixed-status families showed that the health and socioemotional development of U.S.-born citizen-children of undocumented parents was negatively impacted in early childhood. In contrast, and later in life, DACA and in-state tuition policies have improved access to higher education and positively influenced student attitudes, participation, completion of their educations, and contributed to feelings of greater social legitimacy for undocumented immigrant students who are eligible under these laws (Abrego, 2008; Gonzales, Terriquez, & Ruszczyk, 2014).

Restrictive immigration policies, and the threat of such policies, have emboldened anti-immigrant bullying in schools and stoked fear, anxiety, and uncertainty among students from undocumented or mixed-status families, as noted earlier. Undocumented students’ concerns about legal barriers they will confront after they graduate frequently “lower the aspirations and impede educational attainment of even the most eager students” (Abrego, 2006, p. 217). Undocumented children and families may withdraw from school experiences and conventional forms of parent participation like attending conferences and volunteering in school if they fear that educators and immigration enforcement authorities are working together (López & López, 2010; Mangual Figueroa, 2017). This differential participation may be perceived as disinterest, thereby exacerbating deficit model perceptions and practices (López & López, 2010).

Second, policy consequences need to be understood as unfolding over time and across the life span. Legal status can shift over time. Furthermore, in the life of noncitizen immigrants, the same policies may lead to both inclusion and exclusion. For instance, Plyler and California’s AB 540 have contributed to undocumented students’ relative sense of belonging in schools but also to students’ disillusionment, particularly as they graduate and find that Plyler or AB 540—which pertain only to their status as students—no longer ensure their inclusion. They face the reality of blocked opportunities under immigration policies that deny them legal status, political participation, and legal work (Abrego, 2006; Patel, 2013). This underscores the “liminal legality” many noncitizen immigrants face and its impact on their life courses (Gonzales & Chavez, 2012; Menjívar, 2006).

Over time, the nasty contradiction between undocumented students’ officially sanctioned inclusion and their legal, political, and economic exclusion from broader society, along with opportunities to develop leadership experience and civic skills in U.S. schools, has helped catalyze undocumented students’ civic and political engagement as they become young adults (Gonzales et al., 2014; Negrón-Gonzales, 2014). These consequences of immigration policy, education policy, and education practice are easily overlooked in studies that focus on short-term effects of a single policy, often at a discrete point in time.

Third, immigration policies as they intersect with education affect everyone—U.S.-born students, authorized immigrant students and families, schools, and society—albeit in very different ways. For example, Capps and colleagues (2015) report that effects of deporting undocumented parents on their children may include “psychological trauma, material hardship, residential instability, family dissolution, increased use of public benefits, and, among boys, aggression” (p. vi). Recent proposals to make green card holders ineligible for federally subsidized meals or to make it a deportable offense to access these programs would likely impact whole families, including authorized citizens (Batalova, Fix, & Greenberg, 2018). These proposed policies illustrate how distinctions between immigrant-origin individuals are increasingly blurred and threaten the economic opportunities and safety of people across legal statuses, including minoritized U.S. citizens. Moreover, responses to several surveys suggest that the rhetoric and anti-immigrant policies of the 2016 presidential election and Trump presidency have made schools more contentious environments for teachers and nonimmigrants, particularly children of color who view attacks on immigrants as part of a broader attack on people of color (Costello, 2016; Rogers et al., 2017). With increased polarization, teachers have also found it harder to talk about the high-stakes issues that they and their students face, which means that the very students who need teacher support are the least likely to receive it (Rogers et al., 2017).

These consequences reflect power inequalities that play out in other parts of the framework, not the least of which is the power of federal and local government agents to forcefully detain undocumented families and the furthering of racialized ideologies among educators and policymakers such as deficit model thinking about immigrant-origin students and families. At the same time, confronted by these inequities, immigrant-origin students and families have mobilized in new forms of political engagement and movement building for immigrant rights.

Conclusions

This framework brings together research findings and new policy theories to help researchers and educators conceptualize the broad interweaving of immigration policy and education. First, rather than a top-down view of official policy and legal statuses, our framework centers diverse policy actors, particularly immigrant-origin students and families. Second, this framework emphasizes how immigration policies are negotiated and experienced through these actors’ sense-making, discourse, practices, and policy enactment. These are the processes by which immigration policy and education collide. Third, the framework recasts notions of context that are singular, bounded, and static to view policy and immigrant-origin students’ lives as situated within and shaped by complex, multiscalar, and interconnected contexts. Fourth, the framework identifies varied consequences of these processes for individuals, schools, and society and the ways these consequences may shift and develop over time. Finally, the framework centers power as an essential analytic to understanding the lives and educational experiences of undocumented immigrants and to thus recognizing and responding appropriately to the ways immigration policy and schooling collide in daily practice. The framework calls for researchers and practitioners to challenge and rethink common categories, boundaries, assumptions, and policy models and requires an expanded scope of research and educational approaches beyond traditional classroom instruction when thinking about the complexities and nuances of immigration policy and education.

This framework and the research and theory upon which it is based also offers an important view of citizenship as a process, one that is deeply entwined in according and denying belonging, access, and engagement in education (Abu El-Haj, 2015; Ong, 2006). In this “processual” view of citizenship (Ramanathan, 2013), citizenship is not solely determined by official immigration policy, though that is uniquely important. Citizenship is contested and negotiated in and through immigration policy, policy enactment, educational practice, and policy as discourse that occurs in schools and across contexts and that afford varying opportunities for inclusion of immigrant-origin students and families. For researchers and practitioners, this means viewing citizenship as an ongoing process shaped by people, including immigrant-origin students and families, and educators, located at intersecting axes of power as they interact in policy development, enactment, and contestation.

To be sure, educators and researchers cannot grant full citizenship status to undocumented or temporarily documented students or their families. Yet as we emphasize here, the consequences of immigration policy as it intersects with education are not inevitable. Educators, researchers, and policymakers might use elements of this framework to reflect on and guide their work. For practitioners, the framework can be used as a tool to detect areas of potential concern in their schools and environments and to identify leverage points to influence immigration policy, schooling, and student flourishing. For example, practitioners may consider how immigrant-origin students are impacted by ICE raids in workplaces and neighborhoods or anti-immigrant policy in another state, even if their immediate families are not detained. Understanding the impact such policies can have on students’ feelings and safety, practitioners might, in the short term, evoke alternative discourses (e.g., with sanctuary declarations and public statements of immigrant belonging), and change their own practices (e.g., make information available without requiring students to disclose legal status; advocate with local politicians). Or in examining enactment of policy (e.g., in-state tuition policies), practitioners might find careful and creative ways to enact these policies so that they support (or do no harm to) immigrant-origin students. Practitioners might also reach out to new kinds of allies, such as counselors and community leaders trained in trauma-informed practices, who can help teachers understand and respond to students’ experiences and fears, and the resulting behaviors that teachers often misinterpret (Rojas-Flores, Clements, Hwang, & London, 2017).

For researchers, the framework outlines topics, methodologies, and theoretical engagements that might offer the most leverage in better understanding the lived consequences of official policymaking, diverse policy enactments, existing school programs and practices, and the social inequities fueled by heightened anti-immigrant sentiment and action enmeshed in resurgent white supremacy and inequality. The framework points to the need for further research that centers undocumented students’ and families’ experiences (including through participatory methodologies); that maps and analyzes the constellations of policies, social forces, systemic inequities, and face-to-face relations that differentially shape the ways that immigration policy and schooling come together in different contexts (including “sanctuary” environments); and that draws on the insights of critical race, feminist, and affect theories to center power in analyses of complex, interlocking systems of oppression-shaping processes and consequences of immigration policy as it impacts the daily lives, and processes of inclusion and exclusion, of immigrant-origin students and families, educators, and school communities.

This historical moment presents us with a grave ethical obligation to bring together our collective knowledge and to critically examine the frameworks we have been using, implicitly or explicitly, and our own roles in how the current status quo is perpetuated and maintained (Nader, 1972) while we also learn from, stand by, care for, and act with immigrant students and families and other minoritized people being harmed by the current regime. This obligation is firmly aligned with educators’ and researchers’ responsibility to join the ongoing struggles of communities of color to achieve emancipation through education and the realization of the constitutional guarantee—outlined in the 14th Amendment—of equal rights for all. This might include rallying collectively with broader movements related to racialized inequity and education against ongoing challenges to the 14th Amendment, immigrant raids, and family separations; expert testimony in immigration-related court cases; and working with groups organizing in the field of immigration policy. Neither the research agenda nor the practical agenda for immigration policy and education is complete. We offer this framework as an initial guide to the work and the possibilities ahead.

Footnotes

Notes

Authors

ERICA O. TURNER, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Education 227, 1000 Bascom Mall, Madison, WI 53706; erica.turner@wisc.edu . Her research examines how diverse groups make sense of, experience, and contest inequity in education policy and practice.

ARIANA MANGUAL FIGUEROA, PhD, is an associate professor at the City University of New York, Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue New York, NY 10016; amangualfigueroa@gc.cuny.edu . Her research has two current foci: ethnographic studies focusing on how children make sense of legal citizenship status in their everyday lives and mixed-methods collaborations examining the impact of current immigration policy on educators’ practices in U.S. schools.

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