Immigration Debated: Central African Immigrant Youth’s Discourses of Fairness and Civic Belonging in the United States

ABSTRACT

For the past several decades, public attitudes toward immigrants in the United States have centered on questions of legality and documentation, as well as economic and social impacts of immigration, whether real or imagined, such as employment and criminality. How immigrants, writ large, perceive of and contribute to these debates is insufficiently understood and has been underexplored in research. In this article, we analyze the responses of Central African newcomer immigrant and refugee adolescents in the United States to anti-immigrant political discourse in the year and a half after the 2016 Trump presidential election. Through critical discourse analysis of focus group interviews with these youth, findings are interpreted through an integrated Western and postcolonial philosophical framework of fairness as it relates to legality, race, and inclusion. We conclude by offering implications for schools and their constituents, including civic education that occurs across the curriculum and affords students opportunities to grapple with global challenges related to distribution of power and resources, rights and responsibilities, and justice and injustice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spencer Foundation [C2740].

Notes on contributors

Liv T. Dávila

Liv T. Dávila is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Policy, Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Her research explores multilingual immigrant and refugee children and youths’ school experiences, with a focus on their language and identity development. She engages with applied linguistics, literacy studies, and educational anthropology to analyze how language learning and use in schools and communities are influenced by global phenomena, including migration, racism, and racialization.

Noor Doukmak

Noor Doukmak is a PhD candidate in the Department of Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Her doctoral research examines the opportunities and challenges of community-organized education through a critical ethnography of a diverse Muslim homeschool co-op. By engaging with school choice, intersectionality, and critical multicultural education, she explores how parents design an educational alternative in light of the inequities and deficiencies they perceive in public and private schools