In the past months, I have asked myself what I might say to someone in favor of the current U.S. treatment of immigrants, foreign nationals and international students. All over the country, we see students losing their visas with no explanation. A legal resident from El Salvador, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, was recently arrested and sent to a Salvadoran prison for terrorists. There he remains, despite the government’s admission that his arrest was due to “administrative error.” The list of detainments and arrests of legal immigrants and other foreign nationals goes on.
So what do I say to people who support such actions? I would begin by telling them that their attitude puzzles me. I don’t understand how they can champion such behavior while claiming to love the United States, a country in which so many of us descend from immigrants. I would tell them that while we disagree on this and other issues, we share a love of this country.
I am a professor of German Studies at this University, as well as the granddaughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. When my grandparents’ families arrived in New York shortly before World War I, they were an unknown quantity in the eyes of many Americans. My ancestors wore strange clothes, spoke a strange language and ate strange foods. Many Americans feared them and their fellow immigrants, as many do today’s immigrants.
Yet, this country took them in. The United States took a chance on my grandparents and many other unknown quantities. Because our country took this chance, my grandparents did not perish in pogroms, as many of their cohorts did. 30 years later, when Adolf Hitler seized power in Europe, my Uncle Harold, a Sergeant in the U.S. Army, helped defend the world against Nazi hegemony.
Flash forward to April 1976. A fat letter arrived from my dream college. When I showed my mother, she said, “Your grandfather made suitcases, and you are going to Vassar [College].”
I am a product of the American dream, as are my sister and cousins. We live in comfortable houses and apartments. We’re carpenters, housewives, massage therapists, helicopter pilots and academics. How could we not be grateful to the country that made this possible? How could I not want others — even unknown quantities — to have what we had?
I am not advocating that we open our doors to every foreign person without prior vetting. I know no one who wants this. I value my and others’ safety as much as anyone else and understand the need for caution. However, as Americans, we must not let our fear of unknown quantities turn us from an open, welcoming nation to a state that not only views foreign nationals with suspicion, but also ignores the rights of such nationals living here legally. Last week, an international student at our University had their visa revoked. The University did not disclose the identity or the nationality of the student or offer any explanation for why immigration officials had targeted this person. They gave us no proof of these people’s wrongdoing.
Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, was arrested by immigration agents. Her crime? Doing what I am doing now — expressing an opinion in her student newspaper. These people being detained, arrested or deported are labeled terrorists. However, claiming a person is a terrorist is not the same as proving it so. I would not wish to be charged with a crime and punished without proof, and neither would most Americans. I strongly object to our foreign friends, family members, students and colleagues being treated this way.
As a Jew born 10 years after the end of the Second World War and a German instructor for nearly 4 decades, I witnessed Germany’s slide into Nazism from both an academic and a personal standpoint. Historians agree that what evolved into the Holocaust began with individual arrests without judicial review, which the Nazi government termed “preventive arrests.” For half a century, I have watched Germany do its best to atone for the horrors of the Nazi era. However, the people lost to those years are gone forever.
I pray that we will not persecute now and atone later. Let us return to the country that welcomed survivors of the Holocaust, along with so many others escaping persecution or natural disaster. We can still turn this around. I pray we do so, while we still have time.
Cora Schenberg is an Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. She can be reached at opinion@cavalierdaily.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Cavalier Daily. Columns represent the views of the authors alone.
Read More
CARTER: Did anyone actually want VERVE?
By Nathaniel Carter | YesterdayWhile VERVE may shift student demand closer to Grounds, whether housing market effects will outweigh the harms of the University’s expanding presence is a gamble Charlottesville residents may not wish to take.
DUTTENHOFER: Is growth-based learning actually helping us grow?
By Lucy Duttenhofer | YesterdayWhile the department’s pursuit of curricular innovation is commendable, the implementation approach raises serious ethical concerns.
FREED: Do not be fooled — the Trump administration is not fighting antisemitism
By Dan Freed | 3 days agoGiven the tenuous connection to battling antisemitism, we are left to assume that the Trump administration is actually interested in censoring a certain set of departments which promote multiculturalism and global literacy.
