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When Gabrielle Oliveira, an associate professor of Education and Brazil Studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, began interviewing recently arrived immigrant families seven years ago, she visited many of the schools the children were attending. What she heard stunned her: When children began recounting their experiences in immigration detention, their teachers changed the subject, disallowing their painful narratives from being discussed.
Oliveira’s new book, Now We Are Here: Family, Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life (Stanford University Press), describes this phenomenon and offers an emotionally resonant and compelling introduction to sixteen asylum-seeking families.
Stanford University Press
Oliveira’s intensive three-year study was conducted between 2018 and 2021, and involved dozens of interviews with thirty children and twenty-four parents now living in Massachusetts. As asylum seekers from Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, all of them were separated at the border during the first Trump Administration. While the separations ranged from weeks to months, the trauma of being away from their loved ones—usually without knowing their whereabouts—continues to cause anxiety in both the children and adults years later. Moreover, despite the fervent desire of these families to adjust to the United States, obstacles including language barriers, COVID-19, and fear of detainment have made this increasingly difficult. Worse, these difficulties have ramped up since Donald Trump returned to office ten months ago. Nonetheless, the families whose stories are included in Oliveira’s well-wrought narrative are optimistic that they will ultimately succeed and find a way to the American dream.
“This is the story of how the promise of a good life, anchored by the constructed idea of a good American education, underwrites the migratory decisions, trajectories, and experiences of families traveling to live in the United States,” Oliveira writes in the book’s introduction. “The idea of U.S. schooling represents, for parents and children alike, a safe and constant environment where opportunity lives.”
Now We Are Here further addresses how public schools can better welcome newly-arrived migrant youth, oppose the targeting by the federal government, and ensure that asylum-seeking students are given what they need—materially, pedagogically, and emotionally—to achieve academic success and healthy social development.
Oliveira spoke to The Progressive shortly before the book’s November 4 release. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Are Brazilians and Central Americans the dominant immigrant groups in Massachusetts, where all sixteen families from the book currently reside?
Gabrielle Oliveira: No. Chinese immigrants are the majority. Latine people are next, but Massachusetts is a collection of little towns with different concentrations of immigrants in them. For example, many Brazilians live in Framingham, and there are lots of Central Americans in Chelsea.
Q: The book largely sidesteps the second Trump Administration, but I’m sure people are fearful about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) roundups and deportations. What are you hearing?
Oliveira: Everyone I interviewed came through a border, surrendered themselves, and asked for asylum. All of their cases are currently pending. But out of the sixteen families I interviewed for the book, four have had someone—a brother, a cousin—who was either briefly detained by ICE or who was detained and removed from the country since January. All of the families have court dates, and they are nervous about them. They’re also fearful when they leave the house to go to work or drop their kids at school, but they have developed communication networks to share information and help one another find safer routes to travel when raids are reported.
Q: Are the families angry at the government for making their lives so difficult?
Oliveira: For the most part, the adults express very little criticism of ICE or the U.S. government. They try to avoid talking about the threats posed by ICE because it makes them nervous, so they try to distance themselves from what could happen. Not speaking their fears aloud helps them stay as calm as possible.
But people are, of course, worried because even with this avoidance, parents have had to have conversations with their children about what to do if they encounter ICE or if a family member is detained. These families migrated to the United States together, so they have already experienced separation and detention. They now need to reopen this painful event by talking about what they’ll do if they’re picked up and who they’ll call first.
For some of the families, these conversations have made everyone more anxious, but other families have found it reassuring to have a plan of action.
Q: Are the children, especially the teenagers, as reticent to criticize ICE as their parents?
Oliveira: Many of the kids are more critical and express angst that the government is going after them. Most are nervous. In one school, several kids were reluctant to participate in a food distribution effort and felt it made more sense to lay low and not attract attention. They want to protect their parents.
Q: The book makes clear that many teachers have discouraged children, especially elementary-aged children, from discussing their journeys to the United States and what they endured when their families were separated. What’s the rationale for this silencing?
Oliveira: Many schools do a fantastic job with newcomers. In fully bilingual classrooms, they often celebrate linguistic diversity and multiculturalism. They also celebrate the history of different countries, have potlucks, and talk about national heroes. However, I noticed that as soon as the kids changed the subject and wanted to discuss something political, it became taboo. Teachers who were excited about having a room full of international students steered them away from emotionally loaded conversations. So there’s a split: The schools want to honor diverse cultures, but when the students tried to reveal something traumatic—whether it was about the bad food they’d eaten in detention or their separation from their parents—in the name of protecting the students from being retraumatized, the discussion was stopped.
Q: How does this impact the children who want or need to discuss what happened to them?
Oliveira: There are a few different reactions. Some kids become more and more reserved and are most comfortable at home with their families. Then there’s a middle group, where the kids have a circle of friends but stay within that bubble to share their stories. Finally, there are the kids who are thriving. They tend to learn English fast, do well in school, and become socially connected. This is the group that is always showcased as if to prove that immigrant kids can be American success stories. The dominant line is that kids are resilient and can adapt easily to anything, including adversity. But this idea of resilience can be damaging because detention is hurtful, and many kids need to talk about what they’ve been through.
Q: Have the education unions addressed how best to approach these issues?
Oliveira: Not that I’ve seen, but a lot of teachers are asking for training. I am frequently asked to come and talk about the migratory journey. Teachers want and need to know how federal immigration policy impacts who comes into the country. They want to know how they can help kids adjust.
Q: How have book bans and restrictions on diversity, equity, and inclusion impacted course content for immigrant students?
Oliveira: At Harvard, we’ve created modules that align with mandated standards but that also address important substantive topics. One book that is recommended is about soccer and describes the player’s desire to play in the World Cup. This opens a pathway for students to think and talk about their own dreams and futures.
We don’t want teachers or schools to become targets, so we encourage kids to write their own books and tell their own stories. But regardless of content, the number one thing we’ve found is that when teachers have high expectations for their students, the kids do better. They absorb their teacher’s belief in them.
Q: Are there sometimes conflicts between parents and children?
Oliveira: Many kids feel some resentment toward their parents. They came to the United States because their parents decided to migrate. While some are glad to be here, others miss their relatives and friends at home and wish they’d never left. They are concerned about the racism they’ve encountered, and many older teens question the wisdom of staying in school, thinking that they should work and make as much money as possible in case they’re deported.
For their part, most of the parents saw their conditions in their home country as untenable because of violence, economic precarity, or social immobility. They don’t want their kids to waste the opportunity to get a good American education and repeatedly tell their children that they came to the United States for them, to make their lives better. They sacrificed for them. It’s a bit of a guilt trip.
In addition, as young children enter adolescence, they typically want more freedom. They want a phone. They want to make decisions for themselves. This causes discord. Parents are fearful and understand that because they are asylum-seekers, their entire family is vulnerable. They constantly tell their kids that if they make a mistake, the consequences will be harsher for them than they are for their American-citizen friends.
Q: Do the schools recognize that newly-arrived immigrant students are not only English language learners but may also be budding athletes, artists, or musicians?
Oliveira: Learning English as a second language is a big part of a student’s identity in elementary, middle, and high school. A lot of high-poverty Title I schools, the schools that these students attend, are watched closely by the state, and the curriculum is inflexible about reaching specific milestones. Becoming proficient in English often gets in the way of allowing kids to take electives they’re interested in and can prevent them from joining a sports team or the school band.
But of the thirty kids in the book, six have already graduated from high school, and the rest continue to be enrolled. No one has dropped out.
Q: Have the adults been able to find community in their new environment?
Oliveira: Church and commerce bring people together. There is a gendered aspect to this, though, because many of the men work long hours in the construction trades and have less time for social activities than women and children.
Still, many of the families have joined Evangelical churches. These churches have become heavily immigrant spaces in the Boston area and routinely help families obtain clothing, furniture, and other needed supplies. The churches also often have a band, so being there can be entertaining. And some churches sponsor on-site counseling and help connect parents to school resources, including school psychologists and guidance counselors who speak Spanish or Portuguese. They also provide suggestions about primary care physicians or long-term therapy.
Overall, people tend to stick with people from their home countries. Brazilians stay together for language reasons, as do Spanish speakers. Framingham, as I said earlier, has a lot of Brazilians who have opened stores, bakeries, and restaurants. Entrepreneurs from Latin America have improved the town of Worcester and been championed by the local Chamber of Commerce.
Q: Has every adult you interviewed been able to find work?
Oliveira: No one reported overt discrimination against them, but the biggest problem I saw was the unpredictability of work. Immigrants are easily dismissed, told that they won’t be needed that week. It was worse during COVID-19, and the families had to scramble to find some way to make money because they still had to pay their travel debts and meet their current obligations. The men have a bit more stability because of developers’ desire to keep building, but women house cleaners have had a tough time.
Q: Given the Trump Administration’s open hostility to immigrants and asylum seekers, have any of the families left the United States?
Oliveira: No. Most of the people I interviewed believed that the poverty, loss, and violence they experienced in their home countries would not exist in the United States, or would be of short duration once they got settled. The perception of the American Dream that people get from movies, products, and images tells them that if they work hard in the United States, they’ll succeed, but if they stay in their home country, success will not happen. The idea that the United States allows people to have agency and opportunity remains strong.
Nowhere is this clearer than in education.
Kids in the United States go to school for free and enter buildings that many Americans see as decrepit. Immigrant families see them differently: There are cafeterias, bathrooms, books in a library, and a desk for every student. For them, this represents something powerful.
That the U.S. immigration system is also cruel is something they have to deal with. The adults have to come to terms with the fact that they likely won’t achieve everything they wanted to achieve, but they also have to think about what might have happened had they not left home. There are a lot of hypotheticals, but when all is said and done, they typically take comfort in the fact that even if they live in a small space and experience racism, they can send money home. They rationalize that their sacrifice is helping people they care about live better lives.
There is a discourse of gratitude toward the United States. Immigrants are proud that they pay taxes, and despite everything they’ve been through, they have an allegiance to the country.