The Trump administration’s emphasis on immigration has often stoked partisan political battles. Those debates, as loud as they are, sometimes obscure the fact that immigrants are about 14% of the U.S. population.

Immigrants are adjusting and adapting to life throughout the country and most of them are legal residents or naturalized citizens. As we have explored through our research, this includes newcomers settling in the South, in rural areas and all over the heartland.

The successful incorporation of immigrants into U.S. communities is important not only for newcomers themselves, but for everyone – in terms of avoiding the social and political conflict that can accompany demographic changes.

As scholars studying how immigrants establish lives in these new destinations, our research casts light on national and local policies that support this process, and those that don’t help at all.

A New Destination

Consider what’s happening in Dayton, Ohio, a city that, like many Midwestern towns, has struggled with population loss in recent decades.

Immigrants began settling there in the 1990s, with most coming from Latin America and Asia. Many of these newcomers, who now account for about 5% of the city’s population, are refugees from places like Uzbekistan, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The local government has embraced the immigrants and the demographic changes they bring through its Welcome Dayton initiative that we have been following as it unfolds. The municipal program, working with a staff of just three people, helps immigrants get jobs, learn to interact with community institutions, build trust with local police and get accustomed to life in a strange land. It even holds an annual soccer tournament for immigrants.

The initiative started with a small group of religious leaders, academics and government officials motivated by moral and humanitarian concerns to help immigrants successfully settle into Dayton.

But there are also practical reasons for cities like Dayton to encourage immigrants to stay, be part of the community and put down roots.

Shrinking No More

Across America’s so-called Rust Belt, where once buoyant industries have given way to widespread unemployment, populations are shrinking and economies are suffering. Dayton is an example: Its population sank from a peak of 262,300 in 1960 to 141,527 in 2010.

Census data from 2017 indicate that the number of local residents has become stable.

Many signs point to immigrants having made that happen, chief among them that the U.S.-born population has continued to decline. Between 2009 and 2013, it fell by 8.6%, about 13,000 people. During the decade leading up to 2016, the foreign-born population had roughly doubled to about 7,000, according to a Dayton Daily News analysis of census data, making the city home to one of the nation’s fastest-growing immigrant communities.

The city’s economy is benefiting from the newcomers, who are more educated, on average, than its U.S.-born residents. Immigrants also tend to be more entrepreneurial than people who were born here, making them almost twice as likely to start their own business. According to research by Duke University economics professor Jacob L. Vigdor supported by a pro-immigration group, the arrival of immigrants has been a boon for manufacturing jobs and housing markets in many places like Dayton.

We’ve seen this with our own eyes as new businesses have popped up on streets that had only a row of empty storefronts 15 years ago.

The 4.8% share of Dayton residents born in other countries remains below the national average. But that still marks a big change from 2000, when only 3% of the people in Dayton were immigrants.

In our view, these new residents are making a positive difference as they pay taxes, join religious congregations, and become local leaders. In turn, this is reflected in the fact that most city residents say they would be supportive if an immigrant family moved in next door.

Research indicates that Dayton’s experience is pretty common. Cities that welcome immigrants and refugees tend to see benefits like economic growth and a stronger sense of civic pride as urban blight recedes.

Fear and Anxiety

Stricter immigration enforcement has changed things across Ohio, like the rest of the country.

In fact, one of the most striking preliminary results of our current survey of Dayton’s immigrant community, which we began in 2017, is their growing fear. Even newcomers who have legal status – which most in Dayton do – fear they could be attacked, detained or deported anyway.

These jitters can make it harder for immigrants to develop connections with their neighbors, as some avoid going out in public to forestall any trouble.

In part, these concerns arise from the increasing frequency of hateful speech and actions. Immigrants we interviewed described encounters with people who hurled racial slurs like “dead Muslim” or “terrorist” or being told to “go back home.” Their children have experienced bullying at school. Posters and pamphlets from white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which plans to hold a rally in the city, are popping up more.

Other forms of backlash are more subtle, but also send a message of rejection that immigrants hear loud and clear.

Some of this rejection comes from suburbs around Dayton. For example, two state representatives from nearby suburban districts objected to a Dayton Public School Board motion – largely symbolic – that affirmed the district’s commitment to being a “safe and welcoming” place for all students regardless of immigration status, national origin, sexual orientation, race or religion.

In response, Welcome Dayton and other community institutions have taken steps to support the immigrant community in this time of increased division and politicization. There are new efforts around “know-your-rights” trainings, and a rapid response team to accompany immigrants to their legal hearings or care for children left behind after a parent is deported.

Interestingly, more people are volunteering to tutor immigrants in English, and engagement in similar initiatives has increased. As far as we can tell, Dayton as a whole continues to welcome the immigrants who are settling in the city.

Miranda Hallett and Theo Majka are Faculty Research Fellows at the Human Rights Center. 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Visitors get specialized immigration assistance at Welcome Dayton’s special events like this Women’s Day celebration in 2017. AP Photo/John Minchillo

Standing outside of the Butler County Correctional Facility in 20°F weather, I couldn’t help but think for a moment of the hieleras, frigid holding cells where men, women and children are often held for days by immigration authorities on the Southern border, with only a thin foil blanket for warmth against the cold concrete. Migrants and refugees detained there often spend hours or even days in these cells. After an hour of standing at the vigil, I got to jump in my car and blast the heat until the feeling returned to my fingers. I got to call my mom and talk to her about how excited I was to see her over break. The thousands of migrants and refugees detained in detention centers like Butler County aren’t so lucky. 

On Dec. 10, in honor of International Human Rights Day and the 71st anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we gathered together in solidarity for those detained in inhumane conditions and separated from their families. 

Though it’s no longer on the front page of every newspaper, the humanitarian crisis at the border has not gone away. The current administration has bragged about a 75% drop in migrants apprehended at the border, a result of forcing would-be-asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their claims of asylum to be processed, while going without basic human needs like clean drinking water and sufficient clothing. All asylum seekers are at risk of being targeted for extortion, kidnapping, and rape at the hands of cartels and other criminal actors. 

Seeking asylum is a legal process that is guaranteed by several international human rights laws, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and multiple federal laws in the U.S. However, recent enforcement policies by the Trump Administration has made it almost impossible to claim asylum in the past three years. Due to obstacles faced by asylum seekers in Central America, the borderlands, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers, and the immigration courts, it is extremely difficult to enter the US legally. Many of these changes have happened quietly, without the usual fanfare that surrounds the President’s controversial policies, like building the wall or the 2017 travel ban. As Alysa Medina, a law student who spoke at the vigil asked, “Have these policies ended? Or has the media just turned away?”

The truth is the latter. Twenty four people have died in ICE custody since 2016. The conditions in detention centers remain abysmal, and families are still being separated. In the face of this disturbing reality, it is easy to feel helpless,but there’s a lot a single person can do, and a lot more that can be done by working collectively. Below are a list of resources with actions you can take or organizations you can support  right now and into the future:

LOCAL

• Advocates for Basic Legal Equality (ABLE) works directly with civil rights cases across Western Ohio, including with a focus on Agricultural Worker and Immigrant Rights that affect migrants in the Dayton area most directly. As a nonprofit, their goal is to help their clients “achieve self reliance, and equal justice and economic opportunity.”
• The Miami Valley Immigrant Coalition is an interfaith group focused on humane immigration reform through the values shared by people of different faith backgrounds. They directly address issues faced by migrants in Dayton through education, direct service, and providing resources to the Dayton community. 

NATIONAL

• Catholic Social Teaching argues “we are one family under God,” and in response to this teaching, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops provides resources under its program, Justice for Immigrants. Ranging from stories of migration to guides on dealing with immigration enforcement, this project emphasizes the inherent dignity of immigrants in the Catholic faith.
• Certain constitutional protections, including due process and equal protection, apply to citizens and immigrants alike, and the American Civil Liberties Union has taken on protecting the civil rights of immigrants in both the public and private sphere. 
• Supporting immigrant and refugee neighbors is at the heart of Welcoming America’s mission. Their website provides a list of concrete action items you can do to help immigrants right now, from writing your representatives to hosting community dialogues. 
• The Nation’s Take Action Now initiative provides weekly action items on various critical issues. Signing up for the newsletter allows subscribers to receive three meaningful actions to take each week. 
• Focused exclusively on immigrant rights, the The National Immigration Law Center & Center for Law and Social Policy has been dedicated to protecting and defending the rights of low-income immigrants since 1979. 
• Amnesty International provides an international perspective to Refugee and Migrant Rights as well as being one of the largest organizations providing research, government advocacy, human rights education and activism around all issues of human rights, including migration. 
• For even more specific and effective ways to take action for immigrants, Ms. Magazine compiled a list of 10 action items in response to reports from the border that demand attention. 

Bridget Graham is a sophomore Human Rights Studies and Political Science major and an intern for marketing and social media at the Human Rights Center.

I attended a powerful session at the Social Practice of Human Rights Conference on “Human Rights in Central America,” moderated by UD’s Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work, Miranda Hallett. Drawing on a wealth of knowledge, experts steeped in the complexities of Central American experience of migration discussed this current political moment and the movement needed to address these complex issues. Here are my four key take-aways derived from listening to Mileydi Guilarte from Counterpart El Salvador, Jeanne Rikkers from Cristosal, and Abby Wheatley from Arizona State University.

Mileydi Guilarte from Counterpart El Salvador, Jeanne Rikkers from Cristosal, Abby Wheatley from Arizona State University, and Miranda Hallett from the University of Dayton.

First, the situation along our border is not a national security crisis but instead a humanitarian crisis caused by various U.S. policies and practices, rooted in the political directives taken by both current and past administrations to increasingly militarize the border.  The “Prevention through Deterrence” approach is not new. It is at least a couple decades old and uses death as a way to deter people from crossing the border. The result is a “weaponized desert,” which has left a trail of border deaths counted above 7,000 migrants by authorities to potentially above 10,000 migrants by advocacy organizations accumulating since 1998 to the present. This deterrence policy is further evident through the attempts to penalize humanitarian aid workers who provide water for migrants crossing through increasingly desolate desert regions and by the increase of border patrol checkpoints, which now can be spotted as far as seventy miles away. 

Second, it seems apparent to me that both past and current presidential administrations have concentrated their border enforcement efforts on the detention of migrants recently arriving to seek asylum. This detention policy is being used as secondary deterrence policy. Evidence supporting this includes the expansion of family detention and the administration’s determination to attack the Flores settlement agreement. This agreement has been in place for over two decades and includes provisions which set limits on the length of time children can be incarcerated, requires the government to implement standards relating to the care and treatment of children, and obligates the government to place children in the “least restrictive” environment based on their age and needs. Additionally, within the past year, the Supreme Court determined that immigrants in detention no longer had the right to petition for a bond hearing every six months. Further, the location of detention centers are increasingly far from cities, making it difficult for family members to visit detained migrants or for them to obtain legal counsel. Even more concerning is that policies increasing the criminalization of border crossers are becoming more prevalent, whether through zero tolerance policies or the addition of both federal and misdemeanor charges for entry without authorization or multiple entries.

Third, I was taken by the message that a holistic solution to the humanitarian crisis is required. Rejecting the idea of a simple policy solution to the crisis, the holistic solution needs to take into consideration the historical impact of U.S. intervention in the Central American region, including U.S. exclusion of certain groups of migrants based on race. The reality is that the displacement of Central American migrants is due to various traditional push factors including, but not limited to: chronic violence, corruption, organized crime, lack of economic opportunity, political instability, but also to newer push factors such as global climate change and the growing environmental crisis facing many countries. Examining these push factors in depth will help to create a more holistic solution.

Finally, I was struck by the urgent need to reform our current asylum system, which severely limits the recognition of human suffering for migrants from this region. The interpretation of our understanding of asylum in the U.S. must be widened to include more vulnerable migrants, not further restricted as it has been consistently by adverse Board of Immigration Appeals determinations and administrative restrictions under Attorneys General appointed by President Trump. Furthermore, immigrant advocates and asylum lawyers must fight back against the current asylum system, which is plagued by the perverse demand to erode the complexity of one person’s story into a short narrative that will “win a person’s asylum case.” A reformed asylum system must see each migrant as a full person, a person who has extracted themselves at great peril and with tremendous suffering out of a region entangled in violence. Advocates must work to build comprehensive views of human families caught up in this crisis with a long term aim of helping to build power in immigrant communities. This can be done in part by creating spaces wherein migrants can tell their whole story, seek solace from others who have shared aspects of their journey, and enable themselves to become advocates for long term solutions to this humanitarian crisis. 

In conclusion, I believe that immigration activists, advocates, and attorneys must continue to respond to this issue as the humanitarian crisis that it is. We must focus on challenging the national dialogue surrounding asylum and continue to create spaces where we can share knowledge with the general population surrounding the difficult political, economic, and historical issues driving migration, while understanding the complexity of experience of migrants seeking refuge in the U.S. From these spaces and armed with a new depth of knowledge, new coalitions of immigrants and allies must urgently push forward together to demand solutions that embrace human dignity and include expanded protections for vulnerable populations both in their migratory journey and their legal pursuit of asylum.

Stay tuned! We will be featuring more reflections, photos and videos from SPHR '19.

In May 2019, I traveled to Florence to participate in a conference hosted by the Center on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS) on the Contentious Politics of Solidarity. Hosted by Donatella della Porta and Elias Steinhilper. The conference was an occasion to discuss the ways in which recent migration flows in Europe since the summer of 2015 have promoted acts of solidarity in host countries. As time has passed, however, support for migrants has become challenged, as Professor della Porta described, to the extent that acts of solidarity have become criminalized, stigmatized, by mainstream media, political parties, and politicians. Scholarship must now turn to how solidarity initiatives have mobilized in response to repressive tactics. The conference brought together scholars of social movement and civil society to discuss how we might bridge disciplines to study the interactions among NGOs and social movements --voluntary action, advocacy, or protest--in moments of crisis.

With my collaborator Nina Hall of John Hopkins SAIS, I presented work in progress related to studying resistance to solidarity in digital spaces. In the last few years, we have seen how a number of humanitarian campaigns led by various authorities--state, UNHCR, and civil society—have attempted to foster solidarity between receiving countries and refugees. From Ireland to Italy, Sweden to Slovakia, new civil society, and volunteer, initiatives sprung up to assist refugees. In many countries, there was a strong sense of solidarity, and empathy, towards the thousands fleeing persecution from Middle East and North Africa. These acts of solidarity and rhetorical endorsements moved into digital space in the form of hashtags such as #WelcomeRefugee, #RefugeesWelcome, #Letthemstay, #WithRefugees.  

Yet, Nina and I found that the sentiment of fostering solidarity towards migrants and refugees was not shared by all. Some people felt concerned, and even threatened by the flows of migrants and asylum seekers into their countries. We found that a variety of arguments were being advanced in digital spaces through the circulation of hashtags such as #FuckRefugees, #FuckOffRefugees, #Rapefugees, #NotWelcomeRefugees, and #RefugeesNotWelcome. These hashtags circulated and appeared to be directly responding to the pro-solidarity hashtags discussed above. As one tweet in 2016 summed up, “Fuck refugees not #WithRefugees We don't need more scroungers, rapists and terrorists. We should look after our own poor! #fuckrefugees.”  

In light of ongoing discussions on how to curb hate speech, we focus on the social media debates around accepting migrants and refugees.  This is part of a body of work that studies the backlash against refugees both on-line and offline. In particular, as some research suggests that Facebook enables online hate speech to shift into real-life violent crime against refugees; the mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand is a most recent example on this link. Our work lays bare the ways in which twitter is a critical space for solidarity contestation where anti-solidarity discourses often respond directly to pro-solidarity campaigns (by invoking the same hashtags). We see descriptions of the refugee situation (#refugees, #refugeecrisis, #Syrianrefugees) as well as mentions of the pro-refugee hashtags like #RefugeesWelcome and #WithRefugees alongside anti-refugee hashtags (#fuckrefugees and #RefugeesNotWelcome). Some policies are mentioned (#muslimban and #shiftingburden) that might be used by either camp. National contexts are reflected in references to particular politicians (Trudeau, Obama, @MayorofLondon, Trump) as well as their slogans (Trump’s #maga). A worrisome range of offensive speech is on display in addition to the anchoring hashtags: the #fuckrefugees hashtag is accompanied by additional uses of the #fuck connected to categories, politicians, opposition groups (Liberals), as well as other (liberal) movements like Black Lives Matter. Racially specific language like #NoKebabsallowed also makes an appearance here. White supremacy sentiments and organizations are invoked heavily. Groups like Red Nation Rising, a conservative affiliation in the US and European Brotherhood make an appearance along with injunctions to #Defendeurope. There are explicit references to Hail Odin, White Supremacy, White Europa, and White Colonies. These references reveal public attitudes that circulate, connected or disconnected from informal groups or political parties.

Following our presentation, the question of the ethical implications of our project was raised. Does our research give undue attention and significance to online hate speech in ways that may assist anti-solidarity forces? Citing her discussions with pro-solidarity activists, my collaborator Nina Hall discussed the limitations of studying only progressive pro-solidarity movements; indeed, understanding the anti-solidarity networks and online spaces of hate speech is critical for today’s advocates. Our work is concerned with the arguments made by anti-solidarity and anti-migrant forces to make legible their grievances, dominant narratives, along with the misinformation that feeds some of these arguments. We found that there were a wide-range of frames used--cultural, economic, gender, security, and legal—with some being more popularly adopted and diffused than others. We note that engagement with international refugee laws and policies is minimal while claims to specific national contexts and local concerns is dominant. It may be that pro and anti-refugee solidarity groups are talking past each other, not to each other. As another conference participant pointed out, our work will help pro-solidarity groups adjust their communication strategies to take into account what works and doesn’t work when communicating the needs of migrants and refugees. Future work will continue to explicate the nature of arguments against migrants and refugees, better trace the diffusion across the Northern American and European contexts, and offer tips to NGOs and advocates on responding to anti-solidarity sentiments. 

Photo credit: https://refugees-welcome.blogs.uni-hamburg.de/

Dr. Alexandra C. Budabin is a Senior Researcher at the University of Dayton Human Rights Center. She is conducting research on transnational advocacy around gender-based sexual violence with Dr. Natalie F. Hudson. She is a Co-I on the research project "Commodifying Compassion: Implications of Turning People and Humanitarian Causes into Marketable Things", funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research 2017-2020.