On Monday, Oct. 27, the Bates Initiative for Government Studies (BIGS) and Raíces Unidas partnered to host a faculty panel on the current state of U.S. immigration policy. Connecting politics, history and Latin American society, the panel facilitated understanding the full context of current U.S. immigration policy, at the Bates, national and international levels.
The event was also supported by the Latin American and Latinx studies department, which provided snacks and coffee. Attendees were primarily students, largely from BIGS, Raíces Unidas, and some classes related to immigration. The event was organized, in part, as a response to rising concern about immigration policy. It focused on current U.S. immigration policy’s context, highlighting “history, politics, and human impacts” according to the event’s description.
Leveraging on-campus expertise, the panel provided insight into the nuance and breadth of immigration policy, with Professor of Politics Clarisa Pérez-Armendáriz, Assistant Professor of History Erik Bernardin and Associate Professor of Anthropology Joyce N. Bennett each drawing from their respective disciplines to illustrate relevant background.
Dr. Pérez-Armendáriz highlighted the immigration and immigration politics within Latin America and their intersection with U.S. policy. While there has been a significant amount of migration in Latin America, the majority of migration within the Western hemisphere is within Latin America, not to the U.S., as some narratives might suggest. In her remarks, Dr. Pérez-Armendáriz also described that, for the most part, the countries of Latin America have been extremely welcoming to immigrants, with a focus on policy that aims to help immigrants reside and work.
There are, however, difficulties in making this a reality, as the U.S. implements a criminalization approach to immigration with a heavy focus on concern over national security. In this case, Dr. Pérez-Armendáriz discussed how issue linkage becomes salient; even if governments or officials are not in support of immigration control, priority issues are linked to cooperating with the U.S. (accepting deportees or serving the U.S. deportation agenda), making it politically expedient to make that a priority. In Ecuador and Chile, this is visible in cases of elected officials running with a platform that supports immigration restrictions.
Dr. Bernardino then spoke to the U.S.’s criminalization of immigrants across history. He highlighted criminalization as a continual issue of the 21st century, where immigrants have been called immoral and described as criminals to justify extrajudicial killings.
However, Dr. Bernadino noted, this is not an exclusively modern issue. In the 20th century, he shared, the U.S. used similar rhetoric to depict Mexicans as criminals on social welfare. Additionally, in the 1880s, he describes how the same moralistic rhetoric was used to discuss Asian immigrants.
With these cases, Dr. Bernadino discussed the ways in which harmful rhetoric shapes and illuminates social ideas about what it means to be a so-called “good” or “deserving” person means, especially along lines of race, gender and sexuality. This criminalization of people, he said, serves as a way to dehumanize immigrants and continue the exploitation of their labor. This can be seen when examining the selective enforcement of immigration policy, where democratic-leaning cities are targeted as supposedly crime-ridden, while republican-leaning states continue to rely on immigrant labor.
Dr. Bennett situated these histories and politics within a broader understanding of immigration and lived experiences within human existence. She drew on her anthropology background to contextualize immigration as a human phenomenon that has existed across time.
In the current iteration of immigration, Dr. Bennett shared, states are determining ideas of what is acceptable based on relatively new borders which fail to accommodate for the human phenomenon of migration. She highlighted how statehood imposes ideas of where people should be. As an example, she brought up Guatemala, which has high rates of migration within the country as well as some migration out of the country.
The panel concluded with a series of audience-led questions that interrogated the impact of organized crime, the nature of immigration as a human phenomenon and understanding the nuances of racialized immigration.
BIGS Co-President Karan Kuppa-Apte (Class of ‘27) shared that “It was delightful working with Raíces Unidas to make this panel happen. Our goal was to promote civic education and engagement on campus by bringing people together and unpacking the historical, political, and human aspects of this broad topic.”
His comment also made reference to rising national anxieties about the Trump administration’s work to restrict academic freedom within higher education, “I’m also deeply grateful to our speakers for sharing their perspectives despite recent concerns about freedom of speech in higher education.”
This event highlighted the interconnected corners of campus that bring Batesies together in and outside of coursework. A strong academic foundation grounded the panel, from the cross-department faculty expertise to support from multiple related classes and the Latin American and Latinx Studies department. The Raíces Unidas and BIGS work to bring student organizations together facilitated the integrated interdisciplinary perspective offered, spotlighting extracurricular engagement with pressing concerns in a collaborative spirit.
