Abstract
Eva Rodriguez and Susan Longerbeam describe their challenging story of how navigating US Immigration illuminated the necessity of active support amidst randomness in their work with students.
“You are not flying today.” The stern, uncompromising tone of the London security officer left us cold. We were about to board our plane for home. Incredulous, a sense of doom washed over us. The rest of our group departed—and then we walked away from the gate. Thus we began to tell our story, countless times over the next 36 hours, to airline and immigration officials. But each official offered us random, conflicting, and confusing information. Random information stood in the way of us solving our problem and getting home. Randomness at Heathrow mirrored randomness in US immigration. It was May 2011, a pivotal, confusing time (Arizona had just passed Senate Bill 1070 in 2010, a strict anti–illegal immigration measure, most of which was declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court, but not until 2012). We were mothers of small children, Eva of a 2 year old, Susan an 8 month old. Our children were waiting for us—we had been gone for two and a half weeks—and we could not bear to be away any longer. At the time, Eva was a Latina graduate student and student affairs professional and Susan a White American professor on a study tour. Eva was carrying a Mexican passport for our return flight to Arizona. The threat, a realistic possibility, was that Eva could be forced onto a flight to Mexico instead of the United States, where her family resides.
Prior to departing for our study abroad, Eva left her permanent resident card at home for safekeeping. Our university administrators advised students to travel with only passport documents, with the assumption that all would use US passports—another instance of random, confusing information. Students who do not fit our assumptions risk receiving more confusion than do students for whom higher education programs were designed. Unlike most US study tours, our participants were 80% first–generation to college; 60% were Navajo, Latino, or African American. Most, like Eva, were using a passport for the first time abroad. Leaving the United States was no problem for Eva, but returning was a problem we only discovered on the day of our return. We did not know how we would return home to our children, and feared that, at best, we would be stuck in London for days to weeks (leaving Eva was never a question for Susan). It was not clear how we would get home.
Susan: The tickets agents in Paris initially refused to issue Eva boarding passes to London or Phoenix. After I complained, the French solution was to create a fictitious flight for Eva to Mexico City, through Phoenix. I recognized then, and many times over the next two days, my white American privilege that gave me the agency yet mistaken belief that if I could just explain our story well enough, we would find our way through the confusion and be cleared for home.
Eva: I was holding a stuffed French bear I purchased for my daughter. In that moment, I felt speechless, vulnerable. Susan was speaking on my behalf, and I was grateful. I felt stripped, and my appreciation for her grew by the minute. Susan was willing to stay behind with me. She told the agent in Paris: “If she is not traveling then none of us are. Are you going to hold us all back?” Reality struck in London when I was unable to board the plane. All the other students were boarding, wondering what was happening, and I was unable to act. At that point, I figured the process was going to be daunting, and resolution would take an eternity.
Susan: My fear was US immigration would send Eva to Mexico City, far from her daughter. So we searched for those who could offer active support, to navigate the confusion. My heart dropped into my belly, from the beginning when they ordered us not to board the flight, through the end when they took my passport in security. My US passport! The document that defined my citizenship and offered our path home.
Eva: I feared I was not going to see my daughter for a long while—I really did not know what the law was and had no idea what would happen next. I held on to my faith and prayed all would be over soon and I would be able to hold my daughter in my arms once again.
We were searching for a path but instead encountered officials who gave us random, conflicting information. For instance, we were told at various points: we must leave Heathrow for the US consulate and then wait for Eva's resident card to arrive by mail; we would be detained at US airport immigration, then released after some time; Eva would be sent to a detention facility. What we needed was active intervention and support on our behalf.
Active Support Mitigates Encounters with Randomness
Our experience in airports and with immigration officials was not unlike students who must navigate difficult, confusing and disparate policies, practices, and pedagogies along their path to a degree. Our struggle to get home reminded us of the very college students with whom we work. Students often encounter random, unpredictable situations when navigating coursework and administrative processes at any institution. They, as did we, encounter conflicting information. Further, students who come from underserved populations often encounter randomness in university processes and curricula, relative to students from majority populations. Some students experience the need for active support more than others.
Randomness is corrosive because it interferes with learning. In The Art of Changing the Brain, neuroscientist James Zull explains that we need to find patterns in order to add new information to our existing knowledge and to make meaning of our experiences. Random situations result in confusion and unease because they are devoid of patterns necessary to learning. Our encounters with the randomness of US immigration policy and practice were unnerving. As educators, we want to create conditions under which students have ways to access patterns and create meaning—key components of learning. Just like students on campus, we struggled to find the predictable patterns throughout our airport encounters in order to make meaning of our experience. When we could not determine the outcome, and we faced an uncertain one, our ability to create meaning from the available information was compromised; feelings of having lost control interfered with our learning and thus our navigation home. While randomness eroded our confidence and threatened our perseverance, active support bolstered them.
Yet realistically, we cannot remove all randomness for students—they will inevitably face confusion on the path to their degrees. So what is the antidote—how do we support their learning amidst uncertainty? The antidote to randomness is active support. Active support mitigates randomness because it eases the challenge in the messy process of learning in a chaotic world.
Active Support Mitigates Confusion
In our situation, active support came from people who went out of their way, stretching rules, extending boundaries, responding to us with heart—people attempting to mitigate confusion. In Latino cultures, these people are sometimes referred to as angels: active agents, the opposite of passive rule followers. They intervene, validate, and empower with information. Angels are highly significant in Mexican culture, embodying the Divine on Earth. Homero Aridjis says angels offer comfort and guidance—and more profoundly, their deeper meaning is in challenging us to understand our worlds beyond what we perceive in the physical realm. Angels teach us to make meaning of our experience. They actively reach out, extending a hand to reach an outcome, to fix a problem, putting the human situation first and protocol second. Sometimes Mexican and Mexican American college students will say to faculty or staff when they have surpassed ordinary care: “Eres mi angel” (“You are my angel”).
What educators on campus can do for students is what some airport officials did for us. In “Validating Culturally Diverse Students,” Laura Rendón says validation entails intentional, active support, along with a belief in students’ innate capacity to learn. Sometimes validation means going above and beyond, stretching protocol, responding to students as individuals, and interpreting policy compassionately. It might look like a professor accepting revisions and late work without penalty, and an administrator stretching protocol by accepting petitions and making personal phone calls on students’ behalf. Active support means deliberately bending the arc of the rules to benefit students.
In our journey, sometimes we encountered randomness, and sometimes we encountered angels. With each new person we approached, we wondered which it would be. Once we were forbidden to fly, our confusion made us feel exposed, afraid to call or text our families overseas. We felt watched. We asked one another in the hotel room near Heathrow late the first night: “Do you believe in angels?” We did.
Encounters with Angels
Our first angel was Maggie, whose demeanor changed after we told her about our waiting children. She took action, despite her initial reservations. She stretched the rules and apprehensively called the cell number for Chen—a name that evoked power at Heathrow. “He will meet you in the chairs over by the window.” After what seemed an eternity, our second angel arrived, an unassuming man, soft spoken, plain suited, no badge, and presumably with US immigration. He asked Eva to step away with him (after reassuring Susan they would be within sight), opened his jacket to a recorder, and asked her a few identity questions. Next, Chen calmly gave the airline clearance, but not before he told us our biggest problems were ahead. Even from those who offered a pathway, the refrain was “It will be worse at immigration in the United States.” As we finally boarded a plane to fly back to the United States, we anticipated “worse ahead,” wondering how we would navigate airport immigration in the United States.
Our experience with actively supportive airline and immigration officials aided our clarity in both making meaning of our experience, and in finding a pathway home. Higher education research is replete with evidence for the effect of active support on learning. Interactions that positively influence student learning may be expressed differently across cultures—as encounters with angels, or as George Kuh, Gregory L. Heileman, Chaouki R. Abdallah, and Terry Babbitt write in About Campus, encounters with “well–trained, interpersonally competent employees” (p. 22). No matter the cultural expression, the spirit and outcome of active support on student learning is positive.
Active Support as a Study Tour Theme
Ironically, active support was a theme of our study tour course. Northern Europeans generally viewed student support in the United States as overprotecting. Throughout our study in five Northern European countries (at 11 universities and higher education organizations), we heard a simple declaration in response to our queries about how students receive support, one that implied they can navigate on their own: “They are adults.” Our study tour helped us gain a comparative appreciation for holistic student support, rooted in the US student affairs profession. Though Northern Europe has committed to higher education as a public good—reflected in low to no tuition—they appeared underprepared for youth approaching college, many of whom are first–generation immigrants.
The Need to Integrate International with Domestic Education
Part of our university's error in making assumptions about passport documents is rooted in a broader problem in higher education, in which we conflate domestic students into unilateral citizenship categories. These kinds of assumptions add to the randomness that interferes with student learning, as occurred on our study tour. Indeed, international, domestic, and citizenship identities, issues, and concepts are not as separate as we sometimes present them. For instance, the Navajo students in our study group shared their nuanced perspective on US citizenship. Navajo students presented US citizenship from their perspective as tribal members, citizens of both the sovereign Navajo Nation and the United States. The Navajo students experienced applying for and using their US passports more complexly than did other participants. Active support for Navajo students means recognizing and validating their citizenship experience.
We must attend to the nuances inherent in our global world. To do otherwise adds to the confusion for students who cannot find themselves in the curricula or the campus. To promote student learning and foster critical inquiry, we need to actively support students and their learning by engaging domestic issues simultaneously with international ones. Random, arbitrary divisions between domestic and international issues makes learning experiences more difficult, especially for underserved students, for whom programming such as study abroad is rarely designed. Some students—such as international and domestic students of color—must work harder to learn in our higher education institutions. A false dichotomy between international and domestic concepts in higher education programming and curriculum fails students because it deprives them of the required concepts to make meaning of their lived realities. From transatlantic slavery to borders crossing peoples, US domestic concerns have always been global ones as well.
Our Story Ending
As we awoke in our London hotel the second day, we searched for clarity. The meaning we finally arrived at was “we simply are not carrying the resident card; instead Eva has her Mexican passport.” It did not matter to US immigration we were professionals in public employment with the goal to educate students in a global world. But it was very difficult to achieve this clarity amid inconsistent, confusing information.
We finally landed in Los Angeles—the City of Angels—late on the second day. As we disembarked, we approached the “Non–US citizen” line, where the agent sternly confronted us: “How are you related to one another?” Susan quickly replied, “I am faculty for our university sponsored study tour.” He dismissively waved us to a nearby area, this time a private one behind glass doors.
We were summoned to a window where once again we told our story. After hearing about Chen, our last angel stared at us; she seemed to be making a decision. Finally, she lightheartedly quipped she did not know there was a US immigration position at Heathrow: “I want that job!” she jested, then uneventfully cleared us for passage into the United States. This simple outcome diverged from our expectations—and was our last encounter with randomness.
Eva: I've always resorted to “everything happens for a reason” and I don't believe our long journey back to the United States was an exception. I had the opportunity to realize angels do exist and God acts in mysterious ways.
I was blessed with having my professor (my angel) stay behind and help me with the situation. I do realize race and status played a part. I am certain I would have gotten home regardless, but I feel the situation would not have been resolved as fast as it was (at that time, however, it seemed like an eternity).
When I first heard about study abroad, as an undergraduate, I did not think I could do it, it was not for me, and my parents would not have allowed it. When this opportunity came up, I considered it, but again decided it was not a possibility for me. My good friend confronted me with: “You can do it!” I did it for myself, and to share with students and convince them study abroad is a life changing experience they must seek. I enjoy influencing Latino students to study abroad, and they are now breaking barriers, engaging in experiences that previously seemed impossible, unreachable. I jokingly tell my story and tell them to make sure they have all their documents, regardless of legal status, with them when they travel.
Working in higher education has been rewarding. I enjoy impacting students in a positive way. I am delighted with my career and daily interaction with Latino students. I will continuously seek opportunities to be the angel guiding them through their college experience.
The US immigration story is random and painful for many, especially now for Mexican and Central American families. The randomness we felt in our relatively short immigration story was enough for our lifetimes. But throughout our ordeal, our clarity was guided by hopeful encounters. We relied upon many people—while navigating towards those who actively intervened on our behalf. Our renewed commitment to college students is strengthened by our memory of the stark contrast between confusing encounters with passive officials and hopeful encounters with proactive advocates. We must be angels to students, to mitigate their inevitable encounters with randomness. The end of our story is simply this: not altogether different from undergraduate students, we ultimately presented ourselves simply as moms of Sophia and Leo, lacking documents, gratefully encountering angels.