Immigration and Inclusive Communities: A Feminist Exploration

This panel explores dimensions of the immigrant experience, with an emphasis on the costs of exclusion and on finding paths toward “Inclusive Communities,” the theme of this conference. Each paper draws on the writings of Jane Addams. She is a good choice, as the immigrant experience lay at the center of her philosophical imagination. When Addams founded Hull House in 1889, immigrants and their children made up 78% of Chicago’s population, typical of industrial cities in the United States. The vast majority of the urban poor and working class were immigrants; when addressing issues of poverty and of the working class, Addams was writing about immigrants. The panel’s three papers explore Addams’s thinking in the context of her own time and as providing a fruitful resource for today’s immigration challenges. Paper #1, “The Right to Belong and the Plight of the Undocumented Immigrant Person,” argues that the right to belong should be regarded as a fundamental human right. The author begins with Arendt’s claim that stateless persons are without rights, as only communities can grant basic rights. The author extends the argument by showing how “belonging” is contingent on how the person is perceived and received by the community. Using Addams’s and Dewey’s constructions of the social self and of democracy as a way of life, the author argues that the right to belong places on community members the ethical obligation to perceive undocumented immigrants as full human persons with the potential to lead flourishing lives. The legal implication is that all persons deserve legal status; “illegal immigrant” should not exist as a legal category. Addams would agree that immigrants have a right to belong. Paper #2, “Immigration and American Founding Ideals,” focuses on Addams’s arguments regarding the converse: by not embracing immigrants in this way, the community does grave harm to itself. Addams enumerates these harms and connects them directly to deficiencies in the nation’s fundamental commitments. First, the public’s exclusionary attitudes and policies toward immigrants reflect deep structural problems whose root cause lies in the nation’s refusal to expand its political ideals to include economic ones. Second, the nation’s refusal to recognize potential solutions immigrants could contribute reflects its adoption of the English legal tradition which values private property rights above all. Finally, the dominant majority’s contempt for immigrants is a manifestation of Anglo-Saxon imperialism, deeply internalized in the nation’s fabric. Paper #3, “‘Restoring Human Dignity’: Sister Norma Pimentel and Jane Addams on Immigration,” brings the immigration debate right up to the present. The author tells the story of Sister Norma Pimentel, founder and director of the Humanitarian Respite Center in the border town of McAllen, Texas, which provides food, clothing, rest, and provisions for undocumented immigrants. Sr. Norma defines the Center’s work as “restoring human dignity.” The author develops the strong affinities between Addams and Sr. Norma, whom the author describes as a contemporary feminist in the spirit of Addams. Both enacted human dignity in their work with immigrants by approaching them with sympathetic understanding and recognizing that honoring human dignity begins with ensuring basic needs are met. (One commentator described Sr. Norma as “Jane Addams without the essays.”) Using a range of perspectives on immigration, the three papers explore the meaning of inclusive communities. All stress the fundamental human need to belong to a community and to have one’s essential dignity perceived and honored in action. This places an ethical obligation on the public to align its perceptions, attitudes, actions, and policies accordingly.