Abdiaziz (l), 14, from Somalia, and Elio, 17, from Guatemala at Boston's International Newcomers Academy. Both boys endured harrowing journeys to find refuge in the U.S. Photo credit: Emily Kaplan
The morning after Election Day 2016 at Boston International Newcomers Academy, a public high school comprised entirely of immigrant students, teachers were shocked.
“We were very surprised,” says Tony King, the school’s headmaster. Faculty spent the day trying to answer students’ questions. Many feared they would no longer be welcome in this country, and that they would be deported along with their families.
“In the lunchroom, it was really quiet,” King says.
The school’s 500 students represent forty countries and speak more than twenty-five languages; half have lived in the United States for fewer than eighteen months. Many of the students, while troubled by the election results, said they believed Trump’s victory was inevitable.
“They had been watching the news on Univision and seeing all those rallies and thinking, ‘Of course he’s going to win,’ ” King recalls.
To understand their reaction, it helps to know the circumstances of the students’ lives. Many are refugees from war-torn, impoverished nations. Some crossed American borders illegally, by boat or on foot. Nearly all speak assuredly of the American Dream, of the potential to rise to prosperity through hard work and force of will.
But the students also see that the United States is just as susceptible to populist tyranny and tin-pot despotism as the developing nations in Africa and Central America that they fled.
The students see that the United States is just as susceptible to populist tyranny and tin-pot despotism as the developing nations in Africa and Central America that they fled.
Elio, a seventeen-year-old who made a solo journey from Guatemala—trudging through deserts by night and hiding at the bottom of a cement truck by day—says the racial hierarchies he has observed since arriving in Boston in January are not that different from those in his native country. Just as the Guatemalan government persecutes a vulnerable indigenous minority, he explains, some politicians in the United States—including the President—codify Islamophobia through legislation and immigration bans.
Elio, whose last name is being withheld for his protection, has noticed that, at school and at work as a dishwasher at a local pizza shop, darker-skinned immigrants are discriminated against by their lighter-skinned immigrant peers.
And yet while the social hierarchies he encounters in the United States may be dishearteningly familiar, Elio says the particulars of his everyday life would have been unrecognizable to him back in Guatemala.
“The people here have so many different haircuts,” he says in Spanish. The students milling around in the halls are different. They are taller, their clothes have unfamiliar patterns, they are assertive in ways he finds foreign. And then there is the sheer diversity of the student body: the number of languages spoken, the spectrum of skin colors.
The school is, in many ways, a microcosm of a globalized world—only perhaps a bit more tolerant, more welcoming. The only language you don’t hear much in these hallways is English; the only common identity is having come from somewhere else.
The school is a microcosm of a globalized world—only perhaps a bit more tolerant, more welcoming. The only language you don’t hear much in these hallways is English; the common identity is having come from somewhere else.
To many, the school’s insularity is welcome. “I don’t know other schools, but this is the best school,” says Marceline Desroches, twenty, from Haiti. “Because even if you don’t speak English, [if] you have a problem, you can ask someone who speaks the same language as you.” Also, she adds, “the teachers never say, ‘Oh, you don’t understand? I give up!’ ”
Boston International Newcomers Academy was founded in 2003 in response to the rising number of immigrants in the Boston public schools, as well as the district’s recognition of these students’ unique needs. Headmaster King estimates that about 60 percent of his students speak Spanish, and a large majority of that group is from the Dominican Republic. There are also multiple students from Cape Verde, Haiti, Somalia, Vietnam, and India.
The school has two parts: Boston International, a traditional high school that serves only English language learners, and Newcomers Academy, which accepts recent immigrants, many of whom received little or no schooling prior to arriving in the United States. (Elio is one such student: In Guatemala, he attended school only on Saturday and Sunday mornings; even as a young boy, he spent his weekdays working in cornfields to support his family.)
Most students stay at Newcomers Academy for one academic year—or less, if they arrive after the start of the year—before transitioning to Boston International. Because it is difficult to predict how many students will arrive, when, and from where, the process of staffing and allocating classroom space is challenging.
King explains that typically two teachers (who ideally speak different languages) will coteach in one classroom at the beginning of the year; when more students arrive, classes will separate and fill empty rooms as needed. He places a high value on hiring a diverse staff whose identities and native languages enable them to empathize with students. He considers it a measure of success that 95 percent of students can turn to at least one staff member who speaks their native language.
Particularly in the current political climate, as many students experience acute anxiety about their immigration status, the school’s faculty are trying to provide extra support. Samantha Basile, who teaches technology and English as a second language, invited Boston police officers to her classroom to answer students’ questions about legal papers, visas, and deportation. In April, the school hosted a Know Your Rights Day, when students were grouped by country of origin to receive advice from immigration lawyers.
The school’s walls are plastered with student-made presentations, in multiple languages, about the value of diversity. There are numerous posters featuring an image of a woman in a hijab under the words, Todo el mundo es bienvenido aquí—“Everyone is welcome here.”
Pamphlets in the school’s entryway and offices point students and their families to an abundance of resources and informative literature—written in dozens of languages and covering topics such as immigrants’ rights, hate crimes, and managing the fears of young children. Boston Public Schools and the Boston Teachers Union created websites with similar information after Trump issued his executive orders on immigration.
Not all Boston International Newcomers Academy students trust that lawyers, police officers, or even their teachers will protect them. Many come from countries where they learned to be suspicious of authorities.
Abdiaziz Abdi, fourteen, fled Jijiga, Ethiopia, with his family when his father, the mayor, was deposed and jailed. Before arriving in Boston, Abdi lived in refugee camps in Kenya; now he has ambitions to be a doctor, a pilot, and a lawyer—all at once—while working in the American military.
“I love to defend my country,” he explains, referring to the United States. “I love to do this so that other countries don’t bother us and don’t take our territory.”
“I love to defend my country,” he explains, referring to the United States.
Abdi has sought to learn more about his legal protections. When a man attacked his sister for wearing a hijab, he explained to her that “in this country, everyone has freedom of religion. That man resisted our religion. He broke the rules. His gift is to go to jail.”
Unlike most of his student peers, Abdi does not believe the President has the authority to trample a religious minority’s rights. “In this country, we have rules and we have police,” he says. “Even the mayor said he [Trump] can’t do nothing in this city because it’s a sanctuary city. How are they going to know if you are documented or undocumented?”
He continues, “I don’t think anything bad is going to happen because we have rules and we have Congress and the government. And we have judges.”
Spoken like a true American.
Emily Kaplan is a writer and public school teacher living in Boston. You can find out more about her on her website.