Frames of Immigration Justice in U.S. University Responses to the Travel Ban
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v17i4.1705Keywords:
anti-Muslim racism; nationalism; immigration; internationalization; higher education; racial capitalismAbstract
This article analyzes U.S. university presidents’ public responses to the Trump administration’s first travel ban in January 2017. Within these responses, most presidents voiced their support for international students, staff, and faculty. However, it remains necessary to consider the discursive frames through which this support is articulated. I found that support for international members of the campus community was largely expressed in ways that implicitly naturalized the regulation of immigration according to racialized assessments of human value. This article considers the role of universities in reproducing and/or interrupting the logics and practices of white supremacy, capitalism, and nationalism, and the limits of responses to the ban that are framed through discourses of conditional inclusion and perceived contributions to the campus and country.
References
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Ahmed, S. (2007). The language of diversity. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(2), 235-256.
Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ali, S. R., & Bagheri, E. (2009). Practical suggestions to accommodate the needs of Muslim students on campus. New Directions for Student Services, 2009(125), 47-54.
Allan, E. (2003). Constructing women's status: Policy discourses of university women's commission reports. Harvard Educational Review, 73(1), 44-72.
Ball, S. (2006). Education policy and social class: The selected works of Stephen J. Ball. Routledge.
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Bolsmann, C., & Miller, H. (2008). International student recruitment to universities in England: Discourse, rationales and globalisation. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 6(1), 75-88.
Brown, L., & Jones, I. (2013). Encounters with racism and the international student experience. Studies in Higher Education, 38(7), 1004-1019.
Brunner, L. R. (2017). Higher educational institutions as emerging immigrant selection actors: a history of British Columbia’s retention of international graduates, 2001–2016. Policy Reviews in Higher Education, 1(1), 22-41.
Burke, J. (2017, January 31). America’s long history of ‘vetting’ Muslims. CNN.com. Retrieved from: http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/31/us/islamerica-excerpt-history/
Cabrera, N. L. (2014). Exposing Whiteness in higher education: White male college students minimizing racism, claiming victimization, and recreating White supremacy. Race Ethnicity and Education, 17(1), 30-55.
Campbell, H., & Murrey, A. (2014). Culture-centric pre-emptive counterinsurgency and US Africa Command: Assessing the role of the US social sciences in US military engagements in Africa. Third World Quarterly, 35(8), 1457-1475.
Cantwell, B. (2015). Are international students cash cows? Examining the relationship between new international undergraduate enrollments and institutional revenue at public colleges and universities in the US. Journal of International Students, 5(4), 512-525.
Cantwell, B., & Lee, J. (2010). Unseen workers in the academic factory: Perceptions of neoracism among international postdocs in the United States and the United Kingdom. Harvard Educational Review, 80(4), 490-517.
Chatterjee, P., & Maira, S. (2014). The imperial university: Race, war, and the nation-state. In The imperial university: Academic repression and scholarly dissent (pp. 1-50). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Cole, E. R., & Harper, S. R. (2016). Race and rhetoric: An analysis of college presidents’ statements on campus racial incidents. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.
Coloma, R. S. (2013b). ‘Too Asian?’ On racism, paradox and ethno-nationalism. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34(4), 579-598.
Hartman, S. V., & Wilderson, F. B. (2003). The position of the unthought. Qui Parle, 13(2), 183-201.
Hartman, S. (2008). Lose your mother: A journey along the Atlantic slave route. Macmillan.
Islamophobia Is Racism Syllabus. (2017). Retrieved from: https://islamophobiaisracism.wordpress.com
Iverson, S. V. (2007). Camouflaging power and privilege: A critical race analysis of university diversity policies. Educational Administration Quarterly, 43(5), 586-611.
Johnstone, M., & Lee, E. (2014). Branded: International education and 21st-century Canadian immigration, education policy, and the welfare state. International Social Work, 57(3), 209-221.
Lawless, B., & Chen, Y. W. (2016). Multicultural Neoliberalism and Academic Labor Experiences of Female Immigrant Faculty in the US Academy. Cultural Studies↔ Critical Methodologies. Advanced online publication.
Lee, E. (2007). The “yellow peril” and Asian exclusion in the Americas. Pacific Historical Review, 76(4), 537-562.
Lee, J. J., Maldonado-Maldonado, A., & Rhoades, G. (2006). The political economy of international student flows: Patterns, ideas, and propositions. In J.C. Smart (Ed.), Higher education: Handbook of theory and research (pp. 545-590). Springer Netherlands.
Lee, J., & Opio, T. (2011). Coming to America: Challenges and difficulties faced by African student athletes. Sport, Education and Society, 16(5), 629-644.
Lee, J. & Rice, C. (2007). Welcome to America? International student perceptions of discrimination. Higher Education, 53(3): 381-409.
Madge, C., Raghuram, P., & Noxolo, P. (2015). Conceptualizing international education: From international student to international study. Progress in Human Geography, 39(6), 681-701.
Martino, W., & Rezai-Rashti, G. M. (2008). The politics of veiling, gender and the Muslim subject: On the limits and possibilities of anti-racist education in the aftermath of September 11. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 29(3), 417-431.
Melamed, J. (2015). Racial capitalism. Critical Ethnic Studies, 1(1), 76-85.
Metcalfe, A. S., & Fenwick, T. (2009). Knowledge for whose society? Knowledge production, higher education, and federal policy in Canada. Higher Education, 57(2), 209–225.
Moser, S., Hendricks, M., & Vives, L. (2017). Academia's moral entanglements in the face of a racist regime. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 16(2), 175-184.
NAFSA (2017). NAFSA International Student Economic Value Tool. Retrieved from: http://www.nafsa.org/Policy_and_Advocacy/Policy_Resources/Policy_Trends_and_Data/NAFSA_International_Student_Economic_Value_Tool/
Ngai, M. M. (2014). Deportation policy and the making and unmaking of illegal aliens. In Impossible subjects: Illegal aliens and the making of modern America (pp. 56-90). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Nopper, T. (2011a). Chinese Exclusion Act. In K.R. Arnold (Ed.), Anti-immigration in the United States: A historical encyclopaedia (pp. 105-109).
Nopper, T. (2011b). The wages of non-Blackness: Contemporary immigrant rights and discourses of character, productivity, and value. Tensions Journal, (5), 1-25.
Patel, L. (2015a). Deservingness: Challenging coloniality in education and migration scholarship. Association of Mexican American Educators Journal, 9(3).
Patel, L. (2015b). Nationalist narratives, immigration, and coloniality. Decolonization: Indigeniety, Education & Society Blog. Retrieved from: https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2015/09/17/nationalist-narratives-immigration-and-coloniality/
Patel, L. (2017). The ink of citizenship. Curriculum Inquiry, 47(1), 62-68.
Patton, L.D. (2016). Disrupting postsecondary prose: Toward a Critical Race Theory of higher education. Urban Education, 51(3), 315-342.
Quintana, C. (2017, March 15). Here’s a roundup of the latest campus climate incidents early in the Trump presidency. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from:
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/heres-a-roundup-of-the-latest-campus-climate-incidents-early-in-the-trump-presidency/117219
Ramarajan, D., & Runell, M. (2007). Confronting Islamophobia in education. Intercultural Education, 18(2), 87-97.
Redden, E. (2018, February 1). A year of travel bans. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/02/01/year-later-trump-administrations-travel-restrictions-opposed-many-higher-ed-are
Rhee, J. E., & Sagaria, M. A. D. (2004). International students: Constructions of imperialism in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Review of Higher Education, 28(1), 77-96.
Rodríguez, D. (2014). Goldwater’s left hand: Post-raciality and the roots of the post-racial racist state. Cultural Dynamics, 26(1), 29-51.
Silliman, S. W. (2008). The “Old West” in the Middle East: US military metaphors in real and imagined Indian country. American Anthropologist, 110(2), 237-247.
Silva, D. F. D. (2007). Toward a global idea of race. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Smith, K. (2013). Critical discourse analysis and higher education research. International Perspectives on Higher Education Research, 9, 61-79.
Southern Poverty Law Center (2017a). Frequency of noose hate crime incidents surges. Retrieved from: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/06/05/frequency-noose-hate-crime-incidents-surges
Southern Poverty Law Center (2017b). White nationalists are targeting college campuses, and these students are fighting back. Retrieved from: https://www.splcenter.org/news/2017/05/02/white-nationalists-are-targeting-college-campuses-and-these-students-are-fighting-back
Stein, S., & Andreotti, V.D.O. (2016). Cash, competition, or charity: international students and the global imaginary. Higher Education, 72(2), 225-239.
Stein, S., & Andreotti, V. D. O. (2017). Afterword: provisional pedagogies toward imagining global mobilities otherwise. Curriculum Inquiry, 47(1), 135-146.
Stein, S., Hunt, D., Suša, R., & de Oliveira Andreotti, V. (2017). The educational challenge of unraveling the fantasies of ontological security. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 11(2), 69-79.
Volpp, L. (2002). The Citizen and the Terrorist. UCLA Law Review, 49, 1575-1859.
Wainwright, J. (2012). Geopiracy: Oaxaca, militant empiricism, and geographical thought. Palgrave Macmillan.
Walia, H. (2013). Undoing border imperialism. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Waters, J. L. (2012). Geographies of international education: Mobilities and the reproduction of social (dis) advantage. Geography Compass, 6(3), 123-136.
Wilder, C. S. (2013). Ebony and ivy: Race, slavery, and the troubled history of America's universities. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Zaal, M. (2012). Islamophobia in classrooms, media, and politics. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 55(6), 555-558.
Ahenakew, C., & Naepi, S. (2015). The difficult task of turning walls into tables. In A. Macfarlane (Ed.), Sociocultural realities: Exploring new horizons, (pp. 181-194). Christchurch, NZ: Canterbury University Press.
Ahmed, S. (2007). The language of diversity. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(2), 235-256.
Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ali, S. R., & Bagheri, E. (2009). Practical suggestions to accommodate the needs of Muslim students on campus. New Directions for Student Services, 2009(125), 47-54.
Allan, E. (2003). Constructing women's status: Policy discourses of university women's commission reports. Harvard Educational Review, 73(1), 44-72.
Ball, S. (2006). Education policy and social class: The selected works of Stephen J. Ball. Routledge.
Boggs, A. (2013). Prospective students, potential threats: The figure of the international student in US higher education. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of California Davis.
Bolsmann, C., & Miller, H. (2008). International student recruitment to universities in England: Discourse, rationales and globalisation. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 6(1), 75-88.
Brown, L., & Jones, I. (2013). Encounters with racism and the international student experience. Studies in Higher Education, 38(7), 1004-1019.
Brunner, L. R. (2017). Higher educational institutions as emerging immigrant selection actors: a history of British Columbia’s retention of international graduates, 2001–2016. Policy Reviews in Higher Education, 1(1), 22-41.
Burke, J. (2017, January 31). America’s long history of ‘vetting’ Muslims. CNN.com. Retrieved from: http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/31/us/islamerica-excerpt-history/
Cabrera, N. L. (2014). Exposing Whiteness in higher education: White male college students minimizing racism, claiming victimization, and recreating White supremacy. Race Ethnicity and Education, 17(1), 30-55.
Campbell, H., & Murrey, A. (2014). Culture-centric pre-emptive counterinsurgency and US Africa Command: Assessing the role of the US social sciences in US military engagements in Africa. Third World Quarterly, 35(8), 1457-1475.
Cantwell, B. (2015). Are international students cash cows? Examining the relationship between new international undergraduate enrollments and institutional revenue at public colleges and universities in the US. Journal of International Students, 5(4), 512-525.
Cantwell, B., & Lee, J. (2010). Unseen workers in the academic factory: Perceptions of neoracism among international postdocs in the United States and the United Kingdom. Harvard Educational Review, 80(4), 490-517.
Chatterjee, P., & Maira, S. (2014). The imperial university: Race, war, and the nation-state. In The imperial university: Academic repression and scholarly dissent (pp. 1-50). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Cole, E. R., & Harper, S. R. (2016). Race and rhetoric: An analysis of college presidents’ statements on campus racial incidents. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.
Coloma, R. S. (2013b). ‘Too Asian?’ On racism, paradox and ethno-nationalism. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34(4), 579-598.
Hartman, S. V., & Wilderson, F. B. (2003). The position of the unthought. Qui Parle, 13(2), 183-201.
Hartman, S. (2008). Lose your mother: A journey along the Atlantic slave route. Macmillan.
Islamophobia Is Racism Syllabus. (2017). Retrieved from: https://islamophobiaisracism.wordpress.com
Iverson, S. V. (2007). Camouflaging power and privilege: A critical race analysis of university diversity policies. Educational Administration Quarterly, 43(5), 586-611.
Johnstone, M., & Lee, E. (2014). Branded: International education and 21st-century Canadian immigration, education policy, and the welfare state. International Social Work, 57(3), 209-221.
Lawless, B., & Chen, Y. W. (2016). Multicultural Neoliberalism and Academic Labor Experiences of Female Immigrant Faculty in the US Academy. Cultural Studies↔ Critical Methodologies. Advanced online publication.
Lee, E. (2007). The “yellow peril” and Asian exclusion in the Americas. Pacific Historical Review, 76(4), 537-562.
Lee, J. J., Maldonado-Maldonado, A., & Rhoades, G. (2006). The political economy of international student flows: Patterns, ideas, and propositions. In J.C. Smart (Ed.), Higher education: Handbook of theory and research (pp. 545-590). Springer Netherlands.
Lee, J., & Opio, T. (2011). Coming to America: Challenges and difficulties faced by African student athletes. Sport, Education and Society, 16(5), 629-644.
Lee, J. & Rice, C. (2007). Welcome to America? International student perceptions of discrimination. Higher Education, 53(3): 381-409.
Madge, C., Raghuram, P., & Noxolo, P. (2015). Conceptualizing international education: From international student to international study. Progress in Human Geography, 39(6), 681-701.
Martino, W., & Rezai-Rashti, G. M. (2008). The politics of veiling, gender and the Muslim subject: On the limits and possibilities of anti-racist education in the aftermath of September 11. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 29(3), 417-431.
Melamed, J. (2015). Racial capitalism. Critical Ethnic Studies, 1(1), 76-85.
Metcalfe, A. S., & Fenwick, T. (2009). Knowledge for whose society? Knowledge production, higher education, and federal policy in Canada. Higher Education, 57(2), 209–225.
Moser, S., Hendricks, M., & Vives, L. (2017). Academia's moral entanglements in the face of a racist regime. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 16(2), 175-184.
NAFSA (2017). NAFSA International Student Economic Value Tool. Retrieved from: http://www.nafsa.org/Policy_and_Advocacy/Policy_Resources/Policy_Trends_and_Data/NAFSA_International_Student_Economic_Value_Tool/
Ngai, M. M. (2014). Deportation policy and the making and unmaking of illegal aliens. In Impossible subjects: Illegal aliens and the making of modern America (pp. 56-90). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Nopper, T. (2011a). Chinese Exclusion Act. In K.R. Arnold (Ed.), Anti-immigration in the United States: A historical encyclopaedia (pp. 105-109).
Nopper, T. (2011b). The wages of non-Blackness: Contemporary immigrant rights and discourses of character, productivity, and value. Tensions Journal, (5), 1-25.
Patel, L. (2015a). Deservingness: Challenging coloniality in education and migration scholarship. Association of Mexican American Educators Journal, 9(3).
Patel, L. (2015b). Nationalist narratives, immigration, and coloniality. Decolonization: Indigeniety, Education & Society Blog. Retrieved from: https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2015/09/17/nationalist-narratives-immigration-and-coloniality/
Patel, L. (2017). The ink of citizenship. Curriculum Inquiry, 47(1), 62-68.
Patton, L.D. (2016). Disrupting postsecondary prose: Toward a Critical Race Theory of higher education. Urban Education, 51(3), 315-342.
Quintana, C. (2017, March 15). Here’s a roundup of the latest campus climate incidents early in the Trump presidency. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from:
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/heres-a-roundup-of-the-latest-campus-climate-incidents-early-in-the-trump-presidency/117219
Ramarajan, D., & Runell, M. (2007). Confronting Islamophobia in education. Intercultural Education, 18(2), 87-97.
Redden, E. (2018, February 1). A year of travel bans. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/02/01/year-later-trump-administrations-travel-restrictions-opposed-many-higher-ed-are
Rhee, J. E., & Sagaria, M. A. D. (2004). International students: Constructions of imperialism in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Review of Higher Education, 28(1), 77-96.
Rodríguez, D. (2014). Goldwater’s left hand: Post-raciality and the roots of the post-racial racist state. Cultural Dynamics, 26(1), 29-51.
Silliman, S. W. (2008). The “Old West” in the Middle East: US military metaphors in real and imagined Indian country. American Anthropologist, 110(2), 237-247.
Silva, D. F. D. (2007). Toward a global idea of race. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Smith, K. (2013). Critical discourse analysis and higher education research. International Perspectives on Higher Education Research, 9, 61-79.
Southern Poverty Law Center (2017a). Frequency of noose hate crime incidents surges. Retrieved from: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/06/05/frequency-noose-hate-crime-incidents-surges
Southern Poverty Law Center (2017b). White nationalists are targeting college campuses, and these students are fighting back. Retrieved from: https://www.splcenter.org/news/2017/05/02/white-nationalists-are-targeting-college-campuses-and-these-students-are-fighting-back
Stein, S., & Andreotti, V.D.O. (2016). Cash, competition, or charity: international students and the global imaginary. Higher Education, 72(2), 225-239.
Stein, S., & Andreotti, V. D. O. (2017). Afterword: provisional pedagogies toward imagining global mobilities otherwise. Curriculum Inquiry, 47(1), 135-146.
Stein, S., Hunt, D., Suša, R., & de Oliveira Andreotti, V. (2017). The educational challenge of unraveling the fantasies of ontological security. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 11(2), 69-79.
Volpp, L. (2002). The Citizen and the Terrorist. UCLA Law Review, 49, 1575-1859.
Wainwright, J. (2012). Geopiracy: Oaxaca, militant empiricism, and geographical thought. Palgrave Macmillan.
Walia, H. (2013). Undoing border imperialism. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Waters, J. L. (2012). Geographies of international education: Mobilities and the reproduction of social (dis) advantage. Geography Compass, 6(3), 123-136.
Wilder, C. S. (2013). Ebony and ivy: Race, slavery, and the troubled history of America's universities. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Zaal, M. (2012). Islamophobia in classrooms, media, and politics. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 55(6), 555-558.
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Published
2018-10-04
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Stein, S. (2018). Frames of Immigration Justice in U.S. University Responses to the Travel Ban. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 17(4), 893–919. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v17i4.1705
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