That was one of the conclusions of “Global Migration and Cities: Urban Governance, Migration, and the Refugee Crisis,” a panel discussion held Friday, Feb. 9 at the Lincoln Center campus.

The panel, which was part of conference organized by the Fordham Urban Consortium, featured

-Els de Graauw, P.D., associate professor of political science, at Baruch College

-Jennifer Gordon, professor of law at Fordham Law School

-Annika Hinze, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science and director of the Urban Studies program at Fordham

Judy Benjamin, Ph.D, the Helen Hamlyn Senior Fellow at the Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs, moderated the panel, which touched upon everything from the plight of Syrian war refugees to the estimated 500,000 undocumented immigrants living in New York City.

Hinze noted that although refugees are no longer confined to camps, and immigrants in the United States no longer only settle in “gateway” cities such as New York City, cities still offer a level of integration that a nation states can’t offer.

“There are already communities in place that provide immigrants with an intermediary, rather than being plunged into a new national context with different customs,” she said.

She said it’s also important to remember that immigrants are also settling in places like Alabama and North Carolina.

“This is an important conversation to have, because in a way, it takes away this dichotomy between the large metropolis and rural areas, because rural areas are increasingly feeding immigration,” she said.

De Graauw agreed, noting that immigrant affairs offices are springing up around the country.

“Ten to 15 years ago, you could probably count on one or maybe two hands how many cities had those offices. Today, we have over 40 of them, and they’re not just in the expected places like New York City. They’re also found in much smaller places, like Memphis,” she said.

“Cities are trying to figure out what they can do, because they are responsible for creating productive, healthy and stable communities. They know all too well that if you alienate or drive underground big segments of your population, it’s going to have ripple effects in many different ways.”

Local context is still important, as a place like Detroit is more amenable to the notion that immigrants are a demographic lifeline than say Atlanta, which de Graauw said is seeing greater immigrant population growth in the suburbs. But issues such as municipal I.D. cards, which New Haven first unveiled in 2007, bring together cities into groups such as Cities for Action, which a coalition of over 150 mayors and municipal leaders.

Gordon said Amman, Jordan, is a good example of how a city can ally itself with an international non-governmental organization to push its national government in a progressive direction. The European Union and the United Nations promised aid to Jordan if it agreed to make it possible for 200,000 Syrian refugees to work legally. In August, the national government agreed, but it restricted that employment to specific work, such as that in garment factories, and it set aside 20 desirable occupations to Jordanians. Amman officials have pushed back hard though, and have tentatively received exceptions for jobs in construction.

“That to me is a potential positive story about cities, and international human rights organizations combining to successfully put pressure on the national government,” Gordon said.

Fordham Law Professor Jennifer Gordon and Christina Greer, Ph.D., associate professor of political science,  discussed a multitude of issues during the hour-long conversation, including the importance of language in the context of the immigration debate, the role of sanctuary cities in today’s America, the fallacy of portraying some immigrants as good and others as bad, and how each of their ideas has evolved since their books were published.

The program, titled “Immigration Nation: Identity & Labor in American Politics,” also highlighted the ways the Trump administration in its first eight months has targeted immigrants, whether through increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests, ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or the various iterations of the travel ban.

The professors noted that in the xenophobic atmosphere that President Trump has created immigrants are increasingly targets of attack. “The racism and xenophobia inherent in the [Trump] policies, combined with the new permission to speak in ways that are racist and xenophobic, make life very hard for immigrants,” said Gordon, author of Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2005).

These factors make it harder for low-wage immigrant workers to defend their rights through worker centers, noted Gordon, who founded and ran the Workplace Project, a nonprofit labor rights center, from 1992 to 1998. However, the model is still “urgently necessary,” Gordon said, because it allows workers to use their collective strength to fight for improved work conditions and pay, organize community education, and devise legal strategies.

Trump’s appointment of then-Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions as attorney general sent a clear message of intent with regard to the administration’s hostility toward immigrants and its “maintenance of whiteness,” said Greer, the author of Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream (Oxford University Press, 2013). The Trump administration’s hardline immigration stances—and the potential for encounters with ICE agents— have inspired fear among many communities, leading people to keep their children home from school, families to stop attending church, and women who are victims of domestic violence to avoid the police, Greer told the standing room–only audience of students and faculty.

The Trump administration’s rhetoric is also having an adverse effect on local law enforcement’s relationship with communities. Greer cited St. Louis police officers chanting “Whose streets? Our streets” during a protest earlier this month as one prominent example of this development.

“That’s a really clear indication to not just marginalized communities but especially immigrant communities that they’re not welcome here,” Greer said, noting this message emanates from the White House.

In this political environment, the words that people use to describe immigrants are telling, the professors agreed. A person is not “an illegal” because they have violated an immigration law, any more than they would be if they ran a red light, Gordon noted. She added that the use of the term “alien” makes it easier to conceive of immigrants as “not fully human” and therefore deny that they should have rights.

“The low-wage labor market of the United States is dependent on undocumented immigrants, and to me that makes it a much more complicated question than who follows the rules and who doesn’t,” Gordon explained.

“Not only are you asking people to clean the house and mow the lawn but the sign on the door says, ‘We’re a nation of immigrants, please if you’re tired and hungry and poor, come on in,’” Greer added, expanding on a metaphor Gordon used to pinpoint the oftentimes hypocritical nature of U.S. immigration policy.

Lost in the public discourse about immigration is the fact that most undocumented immigrants have overstayed visas after being legally admitted, rather than crossing the border without authorization. The largest group of people who have overstayed visas are from Europe. This refutes assertions that Trump has made that undocumented immigration from Mexico is the principal problem and justifies the need for a border wall along the southern United States.

How sanctuary cities will protect their residents at risk of deportation remains an open question. Cities and states do not possess the power to grant immigration status or prevent deportation, but they can refuse to hand over non-citizens to ICE after criminal accusation or conviction, Gordon said.

Victor L. Essien, international law librarian at the Maloney Library and adjunct law professor, moderated the event.

The Behind the Book series, sponsored by the Maloney Library, serves as a bridge between the Fordham University academic community and Fordham Law School, fosters dialogue between people with different ideas, and provides background on the writing and publishing process. Previous installments have highlighted debates surrounding the Second Amendment and the media and politics.

—Ray Legendre

The University Research Council presented the Outstanding Externally Funded Research Awards (OEFRA) to recognize the high quality and impact of sponsored research within the last three years and its enhancement of Fordham’s reputation—both nationally and globally.

Honorees in five separate categories included:

Sciences: Silvia C. Finnemann, Ph.D., professor of biology

Since joining Fordham University in 2008, Finnemann has secured over $3.65 million in grants from the National Institute of Health, the Beckman Initiative for Macular Research and the Retinal Stem Cell Consortium of New York State for her research on healthy eye function and age-related changes to eye cell function. These grants enable her to support a thriving laboratory where she has a team of graduate and undergraduate students and post-doctoral researchers.

Social Sciences: Celia B. Fisher, Ph.D., The Marie Ward Doty University Chair in Ethics and professor of psychology

Fisher has earned 12 major research awards and over $11 million from federal agencies over the past 20 years for her work in HIV and substance abuse prevention and research ethics. Recent awards have come from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

Humanities: Stephen R. Grimm, Ph.D., professor of philosophy

Grimm was awarded $4.5 million by the John Templeton Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation to lead a three-year interdisciplinary initiative called “Varieties of Understanding: New Perspectives from Psychology, Philosophy, and Theology.” His grant is the largest externally funded research award in the humanities in Fordham’s history.

Interdisciplinary Research: Jennifer L. Gordon, professor of law

With grants from the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundation, Gordon pursued a three-year initiative to combat abuse and trafficking of Mexican migrant workers recruited to work in the United States. Partnering with the Mexican human rights organization ProDESC, she has developed a transnational pilot program set to launch this year to implement recommendations that have arisen from her research.

Junior Faculty Research: Marc N. Conte, Ph.D., assistant professor of economics

Conte received nearly $500,000 from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a division of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. In collaboration with a researcher from the University of Nebraska, he is using the grant to study how behavioral economics can improve auctions that induce farmers to set aside land for conservation and biodiversity.

In opening the ceremony, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, lauded the honorees for the fearless inquiry of their academic research, particularly at a time when truth and wisdom are being devalued in our society.

“Research is at the center of the academic enterprise,” he said, “enriching not only the Fordham community, but the community of the United States and of the world.”

Organized by the Office of Research and the University Research Council and sponsored by the Bronx Science Consortium, the daylong event also included grant education workshops, a forum of university researchers, and a keynote address by Dr. Walter L. Goldschmidts, Ph.D., vice president and executive director of the Office of Sponsored Programs at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

-Nina Heidig

There’s a lot of posturing among politicians about immigration reform, especially in this election year. While politicians seem content to offer lip service on the effects of undocumented foreigners clogging a souring American job market, Jennifer Gordon, associate professor of law, is ready to act.

Gordon, who has spent her adult life working for the rights of undocumented laborers, proposed a “transnational labor citizenship” program last year in an article in the Southern California Law Review. The idea entails the creation of cross-border workers’ organizations, much like unions, through which workers in one country legally sign up to work in another country. In exchange for receiving an education in workplace rights, help defending those rights and a temporary work visa, laborers would pledge not to work for substandard pay or undercut other workers in any way.

In addition, the program would monitor for unscrupulous employers and ease the way for transnational workers to travel between their host country and home country.

“Our nation’s use of immigrants as a low-wage labor force is not an accident; it’s a confluence of many, many things,” said Gordon, author of Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights (Harvard University Press, 2005). “You can shape immigration and you can control it some, but you can’t stop it. People are still going to come. Politicians would rather sell the fantasy that ‘We can hold them off’ through a border wall, but in truth they would accomplish much more by structuring immigration policy in a way that reinforces the basic workplace laws of our nation.”

Gordon is one of those individuals whose social justice work has made a palpable difference in the lives of the poor and exploited. In 1992, just out of Harvard, she founded a non-profit rights center in Hempstead, N.Y. called The Workplace Project, a membership organization for immigrant workers—primarily Hispanics—typically working as kitchen help, landscapers and domestics. She gave classes in Spanish on labor law and helped educate the migrant workers in workplace parity, creating a model for a self-sustaining member organization that thrives today.

Gordon recounted the story of one prep cook who was working 70 hours a week for $2 per hour. When the employer stopped paying altogether, the worker moved into the restaurant and slept on site, working on the promise of a paycheck.

“You think of people being paid less than minimum wage, but it was common that people were paid nothing at all,” she said, “[Some] employers sense that if workers are undocumented, they can be abused with impunity.”

In 1997, Gordon and her group were instrumental in the passage of New York state’s wage enforcement law, one of the toughest in the nation. The law requires an offending employer to pay interest and civil penalties of up to 200 percent of unpaid wages, in addition to the original underpayment. For her efforts, Gordon received a MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant” in 1999.

While Gordon said she feels empathy for immigrant workers who come to the United States for a better life, she knows it creates a domestic dilemma. “I see the U.S. workers’ concerns, particularly those in low-wage industries, who feel that more immigrants bring more competition and worsening working conditions,” she said. “But if immigrants do not have rights in the workplace, they are a far greater threat to working conditions than if they do have rights.”

In unity, Gordon said, both groups will strengthen workplace standards.

To the many skeptics of her plan, Gordon points out that unions and non-profit organizations in other parts of the world have begun to collaborate across borders to ensure that migrants’ rights at work are respected. Some sending country governments have also begun to take an active role. The Philippines, one of the largest sending nations in the world, is one example. Like Mexico, the Philippines is dependent on its own migrants for income, Gordon said. To support such migrants, the government has created the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA), an agency of the Filipino Department of Labor and Employment. OWWA is tasked with protecting the welfare of overseas Filipino workers and their dependents. The agency offers training, loans, insurance and rights education to Filipinos before they ever step foot in a foreign country.

“Both cross-border organizing and state action to defend migrants rights is much more developed in Southeast Asia, for example, than in the United States,” said Gordon, who admits that the U.S. government, riven by special interests and political bickering, is not ready to sanction a pro-undocumented worker program anytime soon (and especially not in an election year).

A more likely scenario, she believes, is that a pilot project could be created through collaboration between existing workers’-rights organizations in one region of Mexico and one part of the United States to form a budding transnational link.

Last September, Gordon received a two-year grant from the Ford Foundation to further research and draft proposals for the transnational project. She also is working on a project with co-worker Robin Lenhardt, associate professor of law, on African Americans and immigrants’ co-existence in the workplace.

“I believe in the human right of movement and the right to seek work,” Gordon said. “And I deeply believe in the contributions that immigrants make to our society.”

– Janet Sassi