It’s a Wednesday afternoon. Sunlight rolls through the back windows into the classroom. The city bus’ arrival and departure squeals and murmurs below. I’m circling the still empty room, placing a colorful worksheet on Long U vowel sounds at each table with clipart images of vocabulary corresponding to different spelling structures: oo, ue, ew, u_e.
Before becoming an adult ESL instructor, I never knew the letter ‘u’ would be a culprit in so many spelling and pronunciation foibles. The English language is filled with absurd patterns, and an even more absurd lack of patterns. There are so many things that are senseless and confusing. Beyond the fact that the same sound can have eight different spellings.
Since the presidential election, I’ve been facing what feels like many senseless and confusing realities. One being the man we elected to the highest office in our country has made his anti-immigrant agenda very clear this coming term, which will likely have a direct impact on the dozens of students who will soon shuffle into this classroom.
I want to invite you to spend a day in my classroom. I arrive on campus and walk up the stairs to the second floor of the continuing education building where the ESL department is. I pass students trickling out of their morning classes on the stairwell, hear their voices echo in the hallway. Some of the students I’ve taught before pass. “Hi teacher!” they greet me with wide smiles. I open my classroom and turn on some music. Some days I put on a playlist of students’ favorite songs. (How else could I learn about Senegalese rappers and Brazilian electronic music producers?) I’m teaching a Level 1 Literacy class. Usually this means the students in my class have been in the U.S. for less than a year. My roster is made up of students from the following countries: Afghanistan, Russia, Ukraine, Angola, Turkey, Senegal, Venezuela, Syria, Brazil, Guatemala, Cuba, China, Haiti, El Salvador, Mexico, Vietnam, Iran. All in one class. All speaking dozens of languages.
My students work at Panda Express. My students work in agriculture. They clean hotels. They work at the carwash, the mechanic, as a dishwasher, an Uber driver, a housekeeper, babysitter. My students are mothers. They are fathers. They are caretakers. In their home countries, they are also architects, psychology professors, professional soccer players, chefs, teachers, Instagram influencers. They are, let me be clear, human beings.
I’m not an immigration expert, but I am invested in the upcoming administration’s proposed immigration and border policies, especially for my students. One of the largest voter issues of this election centered on immigration and border policy. And we elected a man who has not only called immigrants animals, but during his first presidency presented outlandish ideas around border control, including building a “water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators” and shooting migrants crossing the border in the legs. A country whose immigrant population is 51.6 million (Center for Immigration Studies, 2024), elected a man, who at a rally in New Hampshire this fall, said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” (ACLU, 2024).
I live and teach in San Diego, the biggest border city in the U.S. Over 27% of all San Diego county residents are foreign-born, compared to 13.7% of the rest of the country (Wong & Sanchez, 2020). San Ysidro is the busiest border crossing in the western hemisphere. Every day, migrants and asylum seekers arrive at the southern border, 16 miles from my apartment, and if you believe a word Donald Trump says, you’d think I should be scared for my life.
Back in the classroom, students between the ages 18-75 begin trickling in. They cluster together, typically by language. Spanish-speakers at one table, French and Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Russian. They grab the Long U vowel sound worksheet and begin chatting together, comparing answers. They work independently for a while. I usually start class late to give students a chance to arrive. They are taking the bus. They are dropping their kids off at school. They are coming from work. Every day I have the students stand in two circles. The inside one moves like a clock to greet one another with dialogues that change every few weeks. Today it reads:
A. Hi. How are you?
B. I’m pretty good, thanks. What about you?
A. Not too bad.
B: Nice to see you.
A: Nice to see you, too.
They shake hands and laugh. A chorus of hellos fill the room. I remind students the difference between “nice to see you” and “nice to meet you” as most weeks there are new students arriving to class for the first time. Classes are open-enrollment, so for the span of a semester, a new student could potentially enroll every day, and they often do. Students do not need any kind of documentation to attend classes. Classes are free. Textbooks are free. Who pays for the lights to stay on in the building? The projector filling the screen with my color coordinated slides? The salary I make teaching a language that hopefully helps people survive, work, contribute to their communities? Well the government does, through a number of local and federal grants, or at least it does for now.
I got into this field initially through my love of writing. As an undergrad, I worked as a writing tutor and would often meet with international students to help them polish their papers before submission. Typically, what they wanted most support with was grammar. And yet, I could deftly swipe a red pen across the page, but couldn’t answer when asked, but why is this wrong? I didn’t have the language to explain subject-verb agreement, count and noncount nouns, adjective order, definite and indefinite articles, and the myriad of endlessly confusing English grammar (and spelling) rules. So I took a TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) certification course and then seven years later, circled back to grad school. It’s an interesting field, really. On the one hand, I sometimes feel like a cog in the U.S. imperialist project, propelling the long business of colonization onward via the English language. That in teaching English, I’m an active perpetrator of linguicide. That I’m assuming some kind of pseudo white-savior role. And despite contending with the ick of this, I still get paid to try to make English if not unbearably irritating, at least a little bit easier for people who are simply trying to survive in what seems like an unsurvivable world.
The stories I’ve heard in my classroom are as diverse and complex as the students themselves in regard to why they left their countries. From religious and political persecution, to war and economic instability. From marriage to education. Economic opportunity. Fleeing a country that deems their sexual orientation illegal. Human rights. Climate catastrophe. Gender inequality. Safety. Family reunification. I can’t speak for my students. I can’t make anyone begin to understand the kind of horrors that make human migration necessary.
People say migrant like it’s some kind of dirty word. But migration has always existed. Before borders. Before tribes. Before humans. Migration is one of the most natural, essential, and necessary phenomenons of existence.
If we didn’t see human beings as separate from the world around us, we would see the way migratory birds disperse seeds over 92% of Earth’s land surface, contributing to the world’s incredible biodiversity. That the pollination of nearly 75% of the world’s crops is due to other migratory species like hummingbirds and butterflies. And what about salmon? A keystone species who transports millions of tons of invaluable nutrients into freshwater ecosystems from their oceanic journeys. And to speak of resilience! Did you know the Arctic Tern can traverse up to 50,000 miles annually between the Arctic and the Antarctic? They say that in their lifetime, an Arctic Tern can fly a distance equivalent to three round trips to the moon.
This doesn’t even begin to uncover the epic migratory history of Homo sapiens or the endless stories from the students in my English as a Second Language class.
Human migration isn’t a crisis because it exists. It is a crisis because the United States and other colonial powers have spent decades destabilizing foreign countries. It is a crisis because the wealthiest echelon of humans and corporations are contributing the greatest to climate change, which disproportionately affects people living in the global south, resulting in widespread, necessary migration.
One day, likely in the near future, we will all be migrants. Elon Musk and the rest of the one percent will colonize Mars and leave the world they helped destroy behind. Won’t we be migrants then? When rivers dry? When wildfires burn? When tsunamis crest our coasts? Won’t we be migrants then? Come to my classroom and you will learn that no one leaves behind everything for nothing. You will learn that the poison in our country is not immigrants, but unchecked capitalism. And the lengths horrible people will go to amass wealth and power at the expense of others. Environmental degradation. Government destabilization. Genocide. What is the true poison? And is it being administered from borderlands or from ivory towers?
There is no shame in seeking safety. There is no shame in migration. There is no shame in wanting to live.
What can I do to convince you of someone’s humanity whose story transcends labels of migrant, immigrant, refugee, asylum-seeker? Perhaps I could tell you about my student from Afghanistan, who once wore white rubber knock-off Birkenstocks bedazzled with rhinestones to class. I exclaimed how much I loved her shoes and she beamed with joy. A week later, there was a gift bag on my desk. Inside, a large (and expensive!) bag of pine nuts and a new pair of sparkly sandals, with the tag: size 7. She told me she needed a few days to look at my feet to guess my size. And she was right. I could tell you about the student from Vietnam who waited fourteen years for her visa so she could finally come to the U.S. and be reunited with her family. I could tell you about my student from Guatemala, who often missed class because his work as a landscaper took him across town. How, one class right before Christmastime, he arrived with his hair neatly gelled, button-down shirt tucked into crisp jeans. He handed me a card and said thank you, and that he couldn’t stay for class because he had to go back to work. I opened the card later at home. Inside was $50 cash and a note that said “Thank you for teaching me. Merry Christmas.” I wept.
I could tell you about the time I taught a lesson on emotions and adjective + preposition combinations. Each emotion was represented in a realistic photo. When we got to the clip of a woman smiling with eyes closed over an abundant dinner table, one student offered: she’s hungry. No, she’s praying, another suggested. I chose the photo to represent gratitude. Grateful for. Thankful for. What are you grateful for? I asked. I could tell you about the student from Iran who offered to the class in a timid voice, “I am grateful for a country to live with no war.”
The temporary protective status of Haitians, Afghans, and Venezuelans is set to expire in 2025 and there is little confidence it will be renewed. Earlier this year, the mayor of San Diego defunded the Office of Immigrant Affairs, a department formed only recently through the work of dedicated community advocates. I’m not an immigration expert, but it seems to me there is no lack of creative solutions to solve our country’s immigration and border issues, but there is a severe lack of compassion in our lexicon. It’s like we need a new language, but our voices haven’t learned how to produce the right sounds.
Regardless of what further immigration policies come to light under the new administration, I want to suspend, if only in my imagination, my belief in the necessity of borders. To remember my ancestors, many of whom were characters in the story of human migration. To pledge allegiance not to my country or ruler, but the inherently borderless lands we all live. To fight to protect my friends and neighbors who may not speak my language or share my culture. To envision a future where no one is dehumanized for needing to leave home.
References
American Civil Liberties Union. (2024, June 6). Trump on immigration: Tearing apart
immigrant families, communities, and the fabric of our nation. American Civil Liberties Union. https://www.aclu.org/press-
Camarota, S. A., & Zeigler, K. (2024, October 31). The foreign-born share and number at record highs in February 2024. Center for Immigration Studies. https://cis.org/Report/
E360 Digest. (2010, January 12). Migration of Arctic Terns can reach 50,000 miles per year. Yale Environment 360. https://e360.yale.edu/digest/
National Geographic Society. Protect our pollinators. National Geographic Society. https://www.
Oxfam International. (2023, November 20). Richest 1% emit as much planet-heating pollution as two-thirds of humanity. Oxfam International. https://www.oxfam.org/en/
Ritchie, H. (2021, August 2). How much of the world’s food production is dependent on pollinators? Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/
Wong, T. K., & Sanchez, M. (2020, June 29). Immigrant integration in San Diego. University of California, San Diego. https://usipc.ucsd.edu/
World Population Review. (2024). Countries the US has overthrown. https://worldpopulationreview.
