In 1942, my mother was incarcerated with her family at a U.S. government-run internment camp at Tule Lake in California. This was a result of Executive Order 9066. She was 5 years old. She was separated from the life she had known since she was born in Santa Monica, California, and was imprisoned together with her mother and little brother because, even though all had been born in the United States, they were of Japanese descent.
My mother’s life-wrenching experience has been echoing in my mind as I follow the reports of the separation and detention of families at the U.S.-Mexico border. More than seventy years after my mother was imprisoned, Trump surrogates, including Kansas’ Kris Kobach, cited the rounding-up and imprisonment of Japanese-Americans as policy precedent during and after the 2016 election. The internment of Japanese-Americans re-entered the immigration discussion again when the Supreme Court upheld President Trump’s Proclamation 9645, limiting travel from several predominantly Muslim countries. In that decision, issued last week, the Supreme Court chose to condemn the 1944 Korematsu decision, which had upheld President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 imprisoning Japanese-Americans.
My professional life has provided me with a unique perspective on U.S. immigration policies and their implementation from both inside and outside the federal government. As the former Acting Assistant Secretary for International Affairs and Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Policy for the United States Department of Homeland Security, I led U.S. engagement with international partners as we worked daily to enhance the security of travel and trade and to implement the immigration policies of the Obama Administration.
Now, I am president of Bennington College. The first so-called “Muslim ban” executive order in January 2017 was signed during our annual internship term at Bennington, during which our students work and live all over the globe. Nearly twenty percent of our students have foreign citizenship. Some of them suddenly were prevented from returning to the college. We made middle-of-the-night phone calls, we elicited letters from our Congressional delegation, and we found last-minute flights in order to ensure we could get our students back into the U.S. and to our campus safely.
With the Supreme Court’s recent decision, the current version of the so-called travel ban, Proclamation 9645, is now in place for the foreseeable future. As a result, students who were planning to attend U.S. colleges and universities in the fall — including Bennington — will not be able to. This may seem like no great hardship to some readers, but this decision by the United States government will be enormously detrimental for all students, both foreign and U.S. citizens, with long and lasting effects.
If our students are to engage and help propel the global economy into which they will soon graduate, our campuses must reflect that world. Corporations are transnational and trade is a major driver of economic growth, regardless of today’s threats of tariff-driven trade wars. The current executive order, and the cooling effect it will have on the significant number of international students who want to study in the U.S., will do serious damage to America. It will also damage our nation’s ability to educate young people for the future of work and their futures as members of a democratic society.
Bennington College, like higher education broadly, is committed to — and depends on — the free exchange of ideas across disciplines, across cultures, across continents. This executive order works against the most fundamental goal of higher education: to teach all of our students about the world. We know that our students — whether they are from Kansas City or Karachi — benefit when they are able to work, study, and live among others with diverse experiences and perspectives.
The next generation is graduating into a world with serious challenges: deep social and economic inequity, racial injustice, pervasive sexual violence, all embedded in a system of rapid, global, technological change. Preparing our students to engage in the world is a primary duty of educators, but ideally, we are reaching higher than that. We must also help our students to develop the capacity, vision, and desire to re-imagine, re-shape, and remake the world, in large and small ways. We need innovators, groundbreakers, and change-makers. We need all students to understand that institutions — including the pillars of our democracy — are made by people, sustained by people, and can be changed by people. The upcoming generation has serious work ahead of them, and we all are dependent on their success. This current policy is harmful to their — and our — collective future.
