Our Next Guantánamo

Immigrants might become the next target for state-sponsored terrors

We create Guantánamos in those fevered moments when imagined needs enflame ancient hatreds and modern fears, telling ourselves they will keep us safe and forgetting that they never have before. ...

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Our Next Guantánamo

The Violence of American Border Policies Continues

Both political parties say they care about families—so why would the Biden administration return to a family separation regime?

And yet, in the absence of new legislation that makes it easier to cross the border legally for work, the Biden administration has defaulted to a hard line on immigration that continues to separate families and promote border security. ...

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The Violence of American Border Policies Continues

Frederick Douglass on Multiracial Democracy

On a universal right to migration and the ideal of “composite nationality”

Douglass’s conception of multiracial democracy envisioned the political coexistence on egalitarian terms of individuals of “all races and creeds” as fellow citizens. He called for a “composite nationality” anchored in the idea of a universal human right to migration and the political legacy of the Americas as a multiracial continent. ...
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Frederick Douglass on Multiracial Democracy

The Orchids That Bloom in the Dark

The migrant domestic workers of the U.K. organization Waling Waling are fighting for their dignity and human rights

On a warm, wet London Saturday, a group of Filipina women meet in Regent’s Park. They are joined by a few friends from North and West Africa, several small children, and a couple of men recording the event on camera. They spread blankets on the grass which they quickly cover ...
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The Orchids That Bloom in the Dark

How Do We Process the Loss of Our Homes?

A talk with filmmaker Swetha Regunathan

By all measures we are living in an era defined by housing crises, a flood of human habitat destruction. The losses are both economic and environmental. Over 17 million people in 2018 alone were displaced from their homes because of climate change–associated disasters, according to the United Nations. Here in ...
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How Do We Process the Loss of Our Homes?

Trumpism and the Banality of Evil

More reflections on challenges of historical comparisons

I am astonished that it has come to this. I have long understood that the American political system is flawed. White supremacy is knitted into its fabric. The electoral college is a monster that has undermined majority rule and is now being used by Trump and his supporters in their quest ...
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Trumpism and the Banality of Evil

The Last Time I Saw Them- New Democracy Seminar Forum

On the uses and disadvantages of historical comparisons for life

Can understanding distant parts of the world inspire deeper ways of thinking about our own? Can understanding moments in the past help us to think more creatively about the present? The Nietzschean “on the uses and disadvantages” is intended to suggest that thinking across time and space is not a ...
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The Counter

Around the same time, I was watching the Netflix series Immigration Nation about the activities of the American Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency ICE, and also the short documentary film The Last Time I Saw Them featuring interviews of Holocaust survivors who had been separated from their families. Several things ...
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The Counter

Separation

Deserts, hurricanes, and classrooms

Personally, these stories brought to mind a student, Jonathan, who recently took my college writing class. He’s a first-year full-time student who manages a fast-food restaurant in City Heights, a dense refugee-packed neighborhood in San Diego.  Four years ago, he was my strongest 8th grade English student in middle school. He ...
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Separation