Next Steps for Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal

The final meeting of the group reading Undocumented, by Aviva Chomsky, met on Thursday, July 27.

Next Steps for Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal

At the last meeting for the book Undocumented, we looked at and discussed a series of political cartoons and read Sarah Stillman's piece, The Mothers Being Deported by Trump. Here are our next steps:

What will we do as a result of reading this book and participating in the book group?

• Have conversations with our colleagues about issues related to immigration
• Include more content about immigration in our teaching and give students space to talk about how immigration has affected them
• Look for places in our teaching where we can reframe the narrative around immigration
• Look for more research to counter racist assumptions around immigration
• Follow how rhetoric is used to cast immigration and sanctuary in a negative light and counter this negativity
• Getting to know our colleagues to see if they are involved outside of school and if not, make suggestions about how they can get involved
• Have conversations with people to help push their thinking
• Get more involved with the Caucus of Working Educator’s Immigrant Justice Committee
• Take notes from the book for myself and then use them in conversations to counter stereotypes or fallacies
• Get more involved in my daughter’s school
• Work within my political organization – DSA – to push for Medicare for All that includes undocumented immigrants
• Have more one-on-one conversations in school to make sure everyone has had the chance to be trained since the professional development session around immigration and immigrants will not reach all school personnel and will miss many (security, police, lunch aids, administrative support, cafeteria, cleaning staff, substitutes, bus folks) who interact in multiple ways with students
• Continue to work with New Sanctuary Movement (NSM) and the Pennsylvania Immigrant and Citizenship Coalition (PICC)
• After the professional development session check in with building representatives to make sure all staff have the opportunity to learn the material and offer to teach people like the secretary
• Eventually remind the SRC that all staff are important to schools and to the education of children and so all staff need to learn and be involved in professional development
• Have a more intentionally open mind to listen more to immigrant families about what would be useful to them in the schools
• Continue to teach about immigration and immigrants and to challenge students to challenge the sound bites
• Look for more ways to support at-risk immigrants
• Continue to share information