By Esther Sun | New York Amsterdam News | Word In Black
(WIB) – When Evelyn first arrived in the U.S. on a student visa for her postgraduate studies, she hoped that the concentration of talent and resources in academia would allow her to pursue her passions: research and teaching.
Originally from Venezuela, Evelyn, who goes by a different name in this article due to uncertainty about her long-term status, is now a faculty member at an academic institution on the East Coast. She received Temporary Protected Status in 2021 when the Biden administration first began granting the status to Venezuelans and was able to renew her status.
But after the Trump administration abruptly decided in February to end the TPS program for Venezuelans entirely, she was at a loss for what to do.
Over the first several months of Donald Trump’s second term, upheavals in federal immigration policy have created uncertainty and fear for hundreds of thousands of non-citizen immigrants across the country. Under the administration’s pursuit of mass deportations, fears of ICE raids have kept students from attending school and led schools to take measures to prepare students for such encounters with immigration enforcement. But these changes in immigration policy aren’t just affecting students in cities like New York, where four in ten foreign-born residents are not citizens. The changes are also affecting educators.
After the announcement of the TPS termination, the institution where Evelyn currently works agreed to sponsor her for a work visa until the end of her temporary contract. However, the policy change has given rise to immense uncertainty in her life as she looks toward the future.
“Every few months, I’m like, ‘Okay, maybe I have to pack my bags and leave,’” said Evelyn. “It doesn’t provide you with any kind of existential, emotional stability to really think of yourself as somebody who can make an impact long-term wherever you are.”
Filling a Crucial Gap
The challenges that non-citizen educators like Evelyn face in higher education and academia also permeate K-12 public education in New York City.
Sara Lopez Amezquita, an assistant professor of English at Queens College, oversees Queens College’s English Education program that trains and certifies English and Language Arts teachers for middle and high school. She is also a co-principal investigator CUNY’s Initiative on Immigration and Education, which supports immigrant students and educators through training, resources, and policy advocacy.
“If we localize it only in Queens, 76 percent of our students in Queens have some type of immigrant origin,” Lopez Amezquita said. “So if we wanted to understand their context and how their life functions, it is really important that their teachers understand both their origins and then also how their immigrant experience may shape their lives, whether it is because they have immigrant parents, immigrant grandparents, or because they themselves are immigrants.”
According to New York state guidance, non-citizen educators who can receive permanent state certification to teach in NYC public schools include green card holders, DACA recipients, international teachers with work authorization, and other “lawfully present” residents.
Furthermore, although undocumented student teachers are unable to conduct fieldwork and student teaching in NYC public schools, they are allowed to do so in charter schools, private schools, and some schools outside of the city. They are also allowed to take state certification exams and receive initial certification, which is valid for five years.
For Professor Lopez Amezquita, the role that non-citizen immigrants play in K-12 education is especially important in light of the city’s urgent need for more teachers.
In 2022, city public schools saw the highest teacher attrition rate in the past decade, with the Independent Budget Office estimating that the city would need to hire nearly 18,000 teachers over the next five years to meet class size restrictions.
“On the one hand, we have this context of … a need for teachers,” Lopez Amezquita said. “There’s this desire to have more teachers who understand our students and who understand our students from an early age. But then, on the other hand, there’s this significant amount of people who really are both aspiring teachers and who are already teachers in their communities.”
She pointed to members of the UndocuEdu team at CUNY-IIE and also community members in nonprofit community organizations such as Minkwon and Flamboyant that have literacy coaches.
“Sometimes these immigrant educators are not traditional teachers, and that could be partly because of their immigrant experience, and it can also be partly because they are better fit to meet the students where they’re at,” Lopez Amezquita said.
New Fears Under Trump
In light of the Trump administration’s push for mass deportations, Lopez Amezquita said that in recent months, she has seen fear and a need for support among aspiring educators who are undocumented at Queens College.
She called the situation “heartbreaking.”
Just in the past few weeks, she has had multiple students disclose their undocumented statuses to her after they had conversations about immigration in the classroom or email her about their need to secure a full-time job due to their parents’ undocumented statuses.
“Every couple of weeks, I have [coordinators] from the Immigrant Student Initiative at Queens College messaging me and saying, ‘Hey, can you help this person?’” Lopez Amezquita said.
Students in the teaching program have also expressed fears to her about even attending classes for fear of ICE.
While CUNY does not require students to disclose their immigration status, Lopez Amezquita believes based on her experiences that around 30 percent of the graduating class of teachers at Queens College may have non-citizen status or come from mixed-status families in a way that is “impacting their teacher education.”
For Lopez Amezquita, this proves to be a challenge in a city and state that greatly need these graduating educators. Queens College certifies the most public school teachers, counselors, and principals in the city out of any institution.
In response to a request for comment regarding the concerns of non-citizen educators, the United Federation of Teachers deputy press secretary Alison Gendar noted that city public schools are still off-limits to federal law enforcement under state guidance, which the union sent to all members in January.
“We have confirmed with state officials that the state guidance remains in place for our schools and has not changed since pre-COVID,” she wrote. “ICE agents cannot enter a school with an ICE issued administrative warrant. The only time they can enter is with a judicial warrant, which has to be signed by the courts. These warrants are rare.”
But even for Evelyn, who has legal status in the U.S., the recent changes in immigration policy and the uncertainty regarding her future status have made her role in higher education feel particularly insecure and unvalued.
“It makes it hard sometimes to stay motivated and to really think of yourself as somebody who can contribute or can make a change if you’re constantly feeling like you’re not really welcome here,” Evelyn said. “‘We want your labor, we want you to do all this for us, but we’re going to keep you in this precarious situation so that you keep working harder.’”
“Spaces Where They Belong”
The special ability for immigrant teachers to connect with immigrant students has been particularly true for Areli Morales, a second grade teacher in NYC.
A DACA recipient, Morales was born in Mexico and immigrated to New York at the age of six. She is now the author of a children’s book, “Areli is a Dreamer,” about her immigration story.
“Because I’ve experienced being an immigrant, I know what it’s like to be in a child’s shoes,” Morales said. “Because I grew up undocumented, I knew how scary it was to talk about my experience, and I always try to think, like, never forcing a child to talk about their experience until they’re ready, but just creating those spaces where they belong.”
When she was in elementary school, Morales said, she did not have teachers who looked like her or had similar immigration experiences. This changed later on in high school, when she had an English teacher who wasn’t an immigrant herself, but often talked about her family’s experiences immigrating to the U.S. and the struggles and triumphs that came along with that process.
“When she spoke about that, I felt this connection and I felt more open to talking in class,” Morales said. “I used to be a very shy student, but then in that class I felt like, ‘Okay, this person understands me. This person knows something about what it’s like to be an immigrant.’”
In the classroom, Morales works to include diverse experiences in her curriculum, using culturally relevant books and finding ways to discuss not just immigration, but a variety of experiences in an effort to foster empathy in her students.
At P.S. 212 in Queens, Lopez Amezquita said, second grade students decided to create a guide on how to welcome a new immigrant student. Her team at CUNY-IIE has shared this guide with education stakeholders at the federal and local level, including the state Department of Education.
“They’re like, ‘Oh, but it was the teachers, right?’” she said. “And we’re like, ‘No, it was the children.’”
It showed her how immigrant teachers were able to teach their students that talking about immigration is “normal and important” and that “sometimes it shapes their lives in ways that both impacts them positively and can impact somebody else positively.”
“If children are thinking so very deeply and so very critically about how to welcome a new immigrant student, they’re also taking the news very seriously,” Lopez Amezquita said.
This post appeared first on New York Amsterdam News.