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ISSN #2331-6845 

 

Anti-immigration sentiments and  
the true benefits of inclusivity 

 

By Andrea Jeddi 
Georgia State University 

adean5@student.gsu.edu    
 

The summer of 2018 has been marked by heavy-handed anti-immigration 
legislation and executive orders that will inevitably affect English Language 
Learners (ELLs) in significant ways. The author examines explanations for the 
rising wave of anti-immigrant sentiments and discusses research that affirms the 
true benefits of inclusivity. 
 
Keywords: legislation, inclusivity, anti-immigration, intersectionality, equity 
literacy, Trump 

 

When I was recently asked to report on legislation affecting English language 

learners (ELLs) in Georgia, I found that reports on this topic are generally timelines, 

beginning with the Civil Rights Act, the Equal Education Opportunity Act, and the 

Bilingual Education Act. Such reports outline court rulings that demonstrate an evolving, 

even if recursive, understanding of the rights of ELLs to an equitable education. For 

instance, the Castañeda v. Pickard (1981) ruling includes mandates for how to achieve 

equity in education for all ELLs: court-ordered ELL taskforces to determine effective, 

research-based teaching models, cost studies to determine appropriate funding levels 

to meet ELL learning needs, and evaluation measures to determine the efficacy of such 

mailto:adean5@student.gsu.edu


 
2         GATESOL in Action, Fall 2018 
 

decisions. These foundational rulings remain critical in working towards educational 

equity even if questions they posed still linger today: Educational researchers and policy 

makers continue to seek ways to assist English language learners without segregating 

them, for example (Moon, 2018).  

 Official reports, however, do not usually include explanations of how anti-

immigration federal and state laws indirectly affect ELL students’ educational outcomes. 

Laws such as Arizona’s SB 1070 (2010), targeted at immigrant families, had required 

immigrants to register with law enforcement and made the harboring of undocumented 

immigrants illegal. Despite being struck down by the Supreme Court in 2012 and never 

fully implemented, detrimental effects of the anti-immigrant sentiment that the 

controversy fanned affected Latinx health, safety, sense of well-being, and educational 

outcomes for years later (Flores, 2017; Orozco & Lopez, 2015; Santos, Menjivar, & 

Godfrey, 2013; Toomey et al., 2014). 

 In fact, much legal debate that goes on at the state and national levels affects 

students’ lives much more deeply than their ACCESS scores or the method of 

instruction chosen for them will. Those of us who teach already know this; we grow to 

love many of our students as if our own children. We take ownership of both their 

success and their failure, feeling pride in their achievements and providing solutions and 

encouragement through their frustration because we understand that struggle attends 

learning and growth. Through interactions marked by vulnerability and risk-taking, we 

get to know our students as children and adolescents who have the same innocent 

wonderment, expressive fears, animated disappointment, and excitable natures as the 

children in our own families. We love them, we care about them, and we want them to 



 
3         GATESOL in Action, Fall 2018 
 

be happy, healthy, and successful in life. In short, our shared experiences with our 

students forge bonds built around the dynamics of struggle. 

 The summer of 2018, however, marked by a deluge of executive orders and 

Federal Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decisions made with the express goal of unmaking 

decades of hard-won social justice work, has brought a new kind of struggle for our 

students. In June, the world watched in horror as more than 2,000 adolescents and 

young children were taken from their parents at the borders they had crossed to escape 

abject poverty and violence in Mexico and Central America. Images of children in 

cages, branded into our hearts and minds, led even people associated with hardened, 

unwelcoming views about otherness to openly express disquietude. In July, SCOTUS 

set down a decision to uphold Presidential Proclamation No. 9645, a travel ban from six 

Muslim majority countries, thereby enacting President Trump’s explicitly stated desire 

for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” according to 

his own website (Sotomayor, 2018). Writing the dissenting opinion for herself and 

Justice Ginsburg, Justice Sotomayor contends that the Court’s decision disregards the 

Establishment Clause, which forbids the United States government from exhibiting 

disfavor or hostility towards any religion. Justice Sotomayor catalogs numerous anti-

Muslim sentiments that President Trump has openly expressed, noting that because 

this animosity towards Muslims began well before the 2016 election, President Trump’s 

claim of (nondisclosed) national security concerns is not credible. Justice Sotomayor 

reminds us that the SCOTUS decision belies a national identity that places the First 

Amendment as its centerpiece. We enjoy thinking of our nation as one built by 

immigrants, finding great strength in diversity, and we hold our personal liberties as an 



 
4         GATESOL in Action, Fall 2018 
 

exemplar to the rest of the world to aspire towards (Sotomayor, 2018). The truth is, we 

do not yet know all ways that the Supreme Court decision and the Trump 

administration’s anti-immigrant policies will affect our students, but history has shown 

that they will not go unscathed. These decisions have and will continue to hit our society 

hard (e.g., Sadowski-Smith & Li, 2016; Sanchez, 2017), but they will be particularly 

damaging to ELL students and their families, even those far removed from border cities 

and airports. These decisions will inevitably make both teaching work and equity work 

challenging. 

 Linguicism, immigration status, race, gender, and socioeconomic status have 

always intersected to complexify the ways in which hostility is raised and leveled against 

many of our ELLs. Yet institutions that have, at least for the past three decades, sought 

to protect the civil and educational rights of ELLS now try to legitimize sentiments that 

challenge basic human rights. This fear and distrust of outsiders is not driven by 

immigration data—border crossings dropped 80% from 2000-2017 as part of a trend 

that began under the Bush administration (Lee, 2017)—nor is it fueled by real threats of 

Islamic terrorism (Horgan & Shortland, 2018).  

Researchers have offered several explanations for the rising anti-immigration 

wave. Mutz (2018) reports results from a Pew Research poll suggesting that white 

privilege—perhaps the only vestibule of power available to poor, uneducated white 

Americans—may lie beneath uncomfortable feelings towards outsiders that have fueled 

Trump’s anti-immigration agenda.  Massey, Durand, and Pren (2016) explain that our 

perception of warmth and competence of out-group members drives our behavior 

towards them. The social structure hypothesis (Fiske et al., 2002) holds that individuals 



 
5         GATESOL in Action, Fall 2018 
 

are apt to consider people possessing power and wealth to have competence, while 

“attributions of warmth help maintain the status quo” (p. 881) by positioning those we 

view as our competition as cold or unfeeling. Thus, when a public narrative posing 

immigrants as invaders and criminals (e.g., “illegal”)—as a well-established method of 

instilling fear of others—joins with politically-crafted narratives that exploit social 

stereotypes of poor migrants as incompetent and here to take our jobs, it results in 

hostility towards them and to the ill-informed policies we see today. Regardless of the 

causes, social science research supports more fluidity between borders, acknowledging 

that solutions to labor supply and demand are found between borders.  

There are real economic benefits to diverse inclusion in the form of increased 

revenue, born through increases in innovation, retention, morale, and client 

engagement (Kaplan & Donovan, 2013), and an increasing body of research suggests 

that the power of diverse groups to solve problems and make innovative decisions is so 

powerful that the diversity of group participants outweighs even the IQ of group 

members when it comes to solving a complex problem (Johnson, 2018).  Perhaps 

Americans will grow to welcome guest workers, residents, and new citizens of diverse 

backgrounds only as they gain awareness of and appreciation for the benefits of diverse 

skills, experiences, language resources, and worldviews that migrants—in reality—

provide. As ELL instructors, we are in a unique position to demonstrate the insights that 

our students offer in group dynamics while also affirming, valuing and appreciating 

them. Gorski (2018) outlines 12 strategies for enacting what he terms “equity literacy” 

(p. 19). Among these strategies, the “most fundamental of them all” involves a 

commitment to making “equity, not culture, or cultural diversity or cultural competence 



 
6         GATESOL in Action, Fall 2018 
 

the center of our conversation” (p. 17). This includes understanding of implicit biases 

and a recognition of how implicit bias affects our students. A commitment to equity 

means redressing of inequities, through the creation of a “bias-free and equitable 

learning environment for all students” (p. 20). If we are to advocate for our ELLs, we 

must reject deficit views that pervade our schools and classrooms, fueled by larger 

political conversations, instead seeking ways to facilitate the extraordinary contributions 

of thought, experience, and skills that they and their families offer.      

 


	By Andrea Jeddi Georgia State University adean5@student.gsu.edu

