After a year of watching thousands of people suffer a genocide fueled in large part by U.S. dollars and technology, the usual order of life on university campuses has been upended. Students, staff and faculty have protested, picketed, rallied, and exercised a long tradition of “expressive activity” that has come to define the unique space that inhabits university life. To say that this is a novel upsurge would be to ignore the student mobilizations throughout the years, against the massacres in Vietnam, apartheid in South Africa, and racisms past and present in our backyard. Each of these struggles have become part of the glossy photos memorializing universities’ nostalgic past, and seeming proof of their reputations as bastions of free expression, even in the face of government oppression.
All manner of concerned voices have turned out to protest the countless atrocities roiling the globe, each protestor possessing different privileges and access to the halls of power. Coalitions have formed and frayed, and debates have raged over the proper strategy to bring attention to the tragedies we are witnessing and abetting with our tax dollars and silence.
One group that has formed an intimate connection to the struggles for Palestinian liberation and peace for Israel [as well as war, famine and violence all over the globe] – are international students. Their families often remain deeply connected to the regions that are only pictures that we scroll past on a news app for the rest of us. Their loved ones send them videos of not only the horrors they are experiencing, but also the news coverage and outrage unfolding everywhere else. Yet these students and their positions face an uneven set of responses, about whose suffering merits outrage and compassion. For many students – depending on where their ancestral homes sit in the U.S. global order of allies and enemies – the “rational”, quiet, scheduled, approved, and non-disruptive forms of dissent on university campuses are simply a form of silencing.
International students, like many other students, have raised their voices, at risk of suspension and other disciplinary actions in an era of increased campus suppression. But they face an additional risk in doing so. Their status in the country is tied to their status as a student, and once they have lost that student status, they run the risk of losing their permission to live – and sometimes work – in the country. What befalls these students afterwards is a cascade of sometimes uncertain consequences, including loss of work and a requirement to leave the country. They may (or may not) become a priority for removal, or they may just become another one of the 11 million people living in the shadows. Perhaps if they have the resources and ability to do so, they will go back to where they originally called home.
What does this mean for university administrators and their role in immigration enforcement? Only the U.S. government has the ability to deport, and deport it does, in racially and gendered ways that leave families and communities torn apart. But the U.S. government has a range of accomplices in doing this work, who need not even intend this handy alliance. The increased “devolution” of control over immigration enforcement has increasingly rendered state and local law enforcement as deputies to federal efforts near the border, and far into the interior. But the increasing privatization of the immigration regime has meant that not only have private detention centers increasingly stood to profit from the surge in detainees all over the country, but also all manner of private actors have been dragged into the mechanics – the banal bureaucracy – of immigration enforcement. This means that even (aspiring) sanctuary campuses, in sanctuary counties and cities, are implicated.
Employers are perhaps the clearest example of accomplices to immigration enforcement, as they, since 1986 have been handed the responsibility to verify the work authorization of their employees, a shift that even many conservatives bemoan. There are plenty of stories of abusive employers who have used this power to retaliate and clamp down on labor mobilization, often in carefully calculated and cruel ways. But more often than not, employers are simply engaging in their own official mandate to do the government’s bidding, or risk their own sanctions and penalties. Indeed, even “good employers” become an arm of the immigration state, while also enjoying the enormous power that they are afforded in this role. Employees and students need only consider the possibility and threat of losing their immigration when deciding whether to act on moral conviction and exercise their freedom of speech.
The banal reality of immigration enforcement is less spectacular than the raids that were popular in decades past, which dragged hundreds of undocumented workers into deportation proceedings and sometimes even cattle areas while they awaited being hauled off to detention – often without legal representation or any real possibility of relief. But the mundane administrative bureaucracy of immigration enforcement has been far more effective, and a handy tool for Democratic administrations seeking to seem softer on immigration. The millions of “non-immigrants” working and studying in the U.S. are in plain view of the immigration state (with the help of their employers, universities, and other sponsors) and are subject to some of the same methods that have been honed on the millions of undocumented in the shadows.
In this regard, international students rallying have an allyship with the undocumented and DACA-mented student activists throughout the country. This is true especially for those non-White and Muslim students who have been targeted by all manner of law enforcement assuming their presence a threat. Black and Brown men also face a fundamentally more severe treatment of policing – campuses are not immune to these effects.
While the situations of our non-citizen students differ, their future in our country and our campuses is similarly uncertain. High profile undocumented activists have historically been targeted by federal immigration enforcement, as was the case of Daniela Vargas who was detained soon after calling out the injustice of the ICE raids in the South following the inauguration of Donald Trump. Dairy workers in Vermont too suffered retaliatory arrests during this era, which was ultimately challenged successfully in court.
The chilling effect of immigration enforcement on immigrant students is severe, as even the Presidents Alliance for Higher Education has noted. This is especially the case for those engaging in civic engagement and political struggle. But these effects are part of a well-oiled bipartisan machine. The potential to be swept into deportation proceedings is ever present for all but those immigrants who have naturalized. Universities rely increasingly on an international student body and workforce – at Cornell University this is a quarter of the total student population, who are also hailed as a source of diversity, and are a significant source of recruitment for many programs. Many others are also international faculty, who will often rely on the university for their potential path to a green card, until when they too are vulnerable.
What do universities owe these international students and workers? What is the proportionality of the consequences they face when the university deems them noncompliant, often through a seemingly innocuous stream of bureaucratic warnings and interventions, in the name of equity and student safety? Whose safety will we champion behind the veil of civil discourse?
Shannon Gleeson is the Edmund Ezra Day Professor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and holds a joint appointment with the Brooks School of Public Policy.
Source: CounterPunch
