Inside the Slought Foundation, a little building on the edge of West Philadelphia, a professor, a lawyer and a Wharton student led 20 people in a multidimensional discussion on undocumented immigration last night.
The Penn for Immigrant Rights group, a new campus organization founded this semester, hosted the event at the Slought Foundation which aims to create a space for public dialogue on the social and cultural changes.
“One of the biggest problems is lack of discourse about this topic at Penn,” College junior and PIR member Joey Wallerstein said. “[This event wants] to encourage people, not just people who believe in immigrant rights as a cause, but to those who don’t know anything about it and who might be opposed to it.”
The club brought in Aaron Levy, the executive director of the Slought Foundation and a cultural politics professor; Nationalities Service Center Staff Attorney David Bennion and Fernanda Marroquin, a 22-year-old undocumented immigrant from Peru.
As a DreamActivist Pennsylvania member, one of Marroquin’s jobs is to help undocumented immigrants “come out of the shadows” and share what it means to be undocumented.
She also shared some of her childhood experiences as an undocumented citizen. “I couldn’t get my driver’s license or a part-time job,” she said. “I was so ashamed, so afraid of being judged.”
Bennion, the lawyer, emphasized it is important to not get bogged down in the legality of defining citizenship. “We need to re-imagine citizenship in ways that are not currently being discussed,” he said.
Levy pointed out the xenophobic sentiment he thinks is developing in the country. One of the solutions, he said, is education. “Education is key; but not just for everyone else, we need to keep educating ourselves.”
Tania Chairez, Wharton sophomore and co-founder of PIR, said she spent the entirety of last semester talking to student leaders on campus to establish PIR. As Chairez began coming out as an undocumented immigrant, she found herself in several negative experiences.
On March 7, Chairez and Jessica Lee, a junior at Bryn Mawr College, entered the ICE headquarters in Philadelphia to protest the arrest of Miguel Garcia, another undocumented immigrant.
They declared their status as undocumented immigrants and stood in the middle of the road demanding Garcia’s release. The two were arrested and spent 24 hours in jail for protesting in the street.
Chairez said her bold actions rooted from more than wanting to fight for her community. “You have to get to that point when you know you have to do something — something big.”
At Penn, Chairez feels there is a lack of discourse around immigration. The issue has been exploding at many other college campuses, including Bryn Mawr College and University of Illinois at Chicago.
Levy described UIC’s effort to “make legible these issues not just in the classroom, but on the space of the campus” through an art project showcasing large photos of UIC’s immigrant students on its museum walls.
Rachel Ellis Neyra, a Latino literature and culture professor, attended the panel to support one of her students in PIR and said she connected to the presentation “philosophically.”
“Levy brackets the term citizenship and thinks about hospitality instead,” she said. “We need to intellectualize these issues; a work of art or poetry helps one to do so.”
As word spreads about PIR and what it stands for, students and faculty alike are taking more active roles to support it.
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