WIN-BC, Maryville College join forces to organize third annual Feb. 8 immigration forum
Jan. 30, 2024
It’s a hot-button topic often lost in the noise of heated debate and political grandstanding, but at its heart, immigration is about people.
Focusing on that humanity is at the heart of “The Immigrant Experience: Is There an Immigration Pathway for Me?,” an upcoming interactive educational workshop at Maryville College designed to help participants better understand the challenges that immigrants to the United States go through to earn legal immigration status.
Partly organized by Dr. Doug Sofer, associate professor of history at MC, in conjunction with the nonprofit group Welcoming Immigrant Neighbors-Blount County (WIN-BC) — an organization on which he serves as a member of the board of directors — the forum will take place at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 8, in Room 140 of Anderson Hall on the MC campus.
According to Sofer, the program will feature Alessandra Ceccarelli, director of the Office of Immigrant Services for Catholic Charities of East Tennessee, who will lead audience members through “immigration scenarios” — real-life situations that clients of her organization have had to face — in an effort to educate the public on how labyrinthine and complex the legal hurdles can be.
“We’re not sugarcoating it or pretending it’s without controversy, but we want to talk about the human experience,” Sofer said. “This is a response to the fact there are popular ideas out there about a lot of undocumented folks, that perhaps the issue is that they’re not getting in the right line or filling out the right paperwork or doing it the right way … when the reality is, in some cases there is no right line, and there’s no possibility whatsoever.
“In some cases, if someone is fleeing for reasons of safety or even extreme poverty, those aren’t options. And you don’t have to agree that picking the other choices are right — we just want folks to understand that those are choices made by actual human beings who aren’t choosing to leave their homes just for kicks. At Maryville College, we don’t shy away from talking about hard things sometimes, and an event like this is trying to show the depth of an issue that often gets oversimplified for the purposes of creating sound bites.”
This marks the third year of a collaboration between Maryville College and WIN-BC to explore immigrant experiences, Sofer added, all of them designed to educate and illuminate the Blount County community. According the Migration Policy Institute, undocumented immigrants number roughly 128,000 across Tennessee, roughly 38% of the total immigrant population. By leading participants through exercises modeling the process, WIN-BC hopes to shed greater light on the issue, according to WIN-BC President Sherry Brewer.
“We are trying to raise some of the issues that people in East Tennessee who are immigrants are actually experiencing, and let the folks who live here actually understand more about the immigration system, and what it does to people’s lives on a real basis,” she said. “It will give the audience the opportunity to take on the role and assume the identity of a real-life situation that people in East Tennessee have faced in terms of immigration. The general assumption by the majority of folks is that if people come here and abide by the rules, so to speak, that they would have an opportunity to become citizens or green card holders.
“The point of this is to show that our laws are much more complex than that and leave people, a lot of times, in a situation that none of us want to be in and no way to move forward with their lives. What we hope is to make it very concrete for people that these scenarios are based on actual neighbors in East Tennessee who have sought legal services through Catholic Charities, and to show how people’s lives are impacted by our immigration system.”
Participation is voluntary, Brewer added, and the workshop is free and open to the public. The annual event, added Sofer, is a nonpolitical one, instead focusing on real-life issues rather than policy discussion.
“The reason we’re doing this on a yearly basis is that we want to keep talking about it and to make sure people are thinking about it — not as a question of partisan politics, but as a human story for the local populations that are in Blount County,” he said. “These are people trying to make the best out of an incredibly difficult and complicated situation, and we hope participants will leave with a better understanding of that.”
For more information, visit the WIN-BC website at https://www.win-bc.org.