Newcomer African Immigrant and Refugee Youth Responses to Anti-Immigrant Discourse After the Trump Election

• In Event: Blackness and Immigration

Abstract

This presentation will explore how newcomer immigrant and refugee English leaner (EL) youth from Central Africa in the U.S. responded to anti-immigrant political discourse in the year and a half following the 2016 presidential election. Drawing on individual and focus group interviews with twelve EL high school students from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon, findings offer nuanced perspectives on how race, language, national origin, and documentation factor into students’ alignment with or resistance to Trump’s anti-immigrant discourse. The presentation will conclude with a robust conceptualization of the dynamic relationship between mobility and displacement, identity formation and civic engagement among multilingual immigrant and refugee youths of color in resettlement contexts.

Author

• Liv T. Dávila, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign