By Christopher Young,
Contributing Writer,
Amid the many hardships of migration, separation, uncertainty, and starting over, families often find hope in their children’s education. In Now We Are Here: Family Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life, Harvard scholar Gabrielle Oliveira, the Jorge Paulo Lemann Associate Professor of Education and of Brazil Studies, shows how parents see schooling as a “currency of love”, a way to give meaning to sacrifice and to invest in a more stable future for their children.
Her research exposes the emotional and moral dimensions of migration too often missed in policy debates, revealing how classrooms become spaces where families negotiate trauma, identity, and belonging—and where schools can either deepen exclusion or open doors to dignity and possibility.
Pilar Marerro, co-producer of the National Briefing Series, opened the questioning: In your book, you describe education as a currency of love for immigrants. Could you elaborate on how that concept emerged from your data and how it differs from common narratives of immigration for economic opportunity? “I think one of the things that we know, we know that people leave their homes most of the time because there’s uncertainty in the places where they are, and they’re experiencing lack of hope, prosperity, for jobs, for growth, for all of that. So that’s what we know happens, that narrative has been well-established and documented, but often what I found was that migrants and migrant families become this kind of one-dimension characters in the media where you just hear more about coming for economic reasons, period.”
Oliveira continued, “People are forgetting that this is a full human, that has wants, hopes and wishes, so education becomes this stabilizing force where the promise of an education, which means that the promise of your kid going to a school, being in a classroom with a teacher, reading books, going through that routine brings the sense of you know, the sacrifice being worth it. Education is seen as being this place where parents show care and show love towards their children. So that for me, was a very important piece of the puzzle to be able to understand more profoundly and not just repeat the same narrative that ‘people leave only to escape something’.”
The next question: you have said in your book that parents consistently share that migrating to the United States, despite everything they go through, was worth the sacrifice.
They see this country offering the hope of safety, opportunity, etc. However, we are, of course, in very different, very difficult times for migrants. Have you spoken to these families lately? Can you elaborate how they weather storms like the ones we are living now in the U.S.?
“Right, so the narrative that these families continue to live by, which for me is always incredibly inspiring and the resistance that they show is that they’re looking at this as another emergency. They talk about multiple disruptions…that you leave home because of the situation you’re encountering, you get to the border, and something like detention and separation happens, which is another piece that is incredibly complex and potentially traumatizing, then you get reunified, or you’re in the United States, and then COVID happens, and then for a lot of these families, they were essential workers, and they had to really figure out how to support their children during that time. And now we’re in this phase which is a high surveillance moment where people are worried. They’re worried about going to work, they’re worried about taking their kids to school, etc.”
Oliveria stressed that people attempting to immigrate to the United States today are experiencing intentional terror, which generates exclusion and trauma. She indicated that about 20 million children, 1 in 4 school age children in the US, have at least one immigrant parent, and that this impacts communication because schools are not always staffed to adequately address language barriers, and sometimes those barriers are often misinterpreted as special needs.
Amid a flurry of questions from over sixty media outlets, The Mississippi Link newspaper asked, have you discovered any levers in your research that can get the attention of deeply conservative policy makers, in a state that’s the antithesis of Massachusetts, the state of Mississippi? I know you already approached the employment aspect, but are there any other things that you’ve discovered that can be implemented to get these people to focus on humanity and rightness?
“Thank you for that question. I agree with you. It’s much easier to do what I do in Massachusetts, but I do talks in Florida, and in different places where folks have disagreement, but I’ll say that the biggest lever for me that I have found that people tend to convey and come together is when we talk about children specifically. When we isolate, kind of, a child, and try to bring into conversations – a 5-year-old going to school – and to kind of pull into this idea of, if you’re not concerned about a child’s well-being, where’s your moral compass. Secondly, this idea that some people have that immigrants are here to take. It’s the complete opposite.”
The entire briefing can be viewed at https://americancommunitymedia.org/media-briefings.
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