‘There’s a Different Story to Be Told’.

Ali Noorani (SPH'99) Alum; Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum; Author of There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration

Hometown: Salinas, California

Breakfast: A latte and a vegetable toast sandwich

On his colorful socks: “Colorful socks are just easier to match. The 50 shades of blue was beginning to get embarrassing.”

What prompted your new book, There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration?

The basic premise of the book is that the nation’s immigration debate is more about culture and values than politics and policy. Especially in a time like this, when dystopian talking points are lobbed back and forth, I think most Americans are trying to figure out the changes in their neighborhood and what those changes mean to them.

I feel like there’s a very different story to be told about the immigration debate, a story that includes conservative and moderate faith, law enforcement, and business leaders across the country who are engaging in this conversation in a really constructive way. It’s not Left versus Right so much as it is people struggling with this in a positive way, and that’s just not a story that we hear enough.

How does that constructive engagement play out?

One of the places I wrote about in the book was Spartanburg, in upstate South Carolina. South Carolina itself has seen the second-fastest growth in the Latino population after North Carolina. The history of Spartanburg is one of textile mills, but as textile mills moved to Mexico it seemed that Mexico moved to South Carolina. What that meant for Spartanburg in particular was that the faith community, educators, and businesses really had to grapple with these changes either in a defensive way or in a constructive way.

Arcadia Elementary School saw this massive increase in their Latino student population, but their principal said, to paraphrase, “We’re going to welcome these students, we’re going to make sure that we’re serving their education needs, we’re going to make sure that we’re hiring members of the Hispanic community, and we’re also going to help their parents.”

I also sat down with the leadership of the First Baptist Church of Spartanburg, one of the largest Southern Baptist churches in the state, and they were working hard to resettle Syrian refugees—regardless of the refugees’ religion.

Upstate South Carolina in a place where you would think these demographic changes would lead to a very defensive posture, but principals and business leaders and faith leaders were engaging with it in a very constructive way. I’m not saying it’s easy by any means, but they’re willing to take on that challenge.

To have that kind of success, who do advocates need to engage?

Our value proposition is that, if you hold a Bible, wear a badge, or own a business, you want a common-sense solution to immigration. People see themselves in that message. For the most part, conservatives come to immigration through their faith, through their belief in the rule of law, or their belief in economic prosperity, and it’s a matter of engaging conservatives and moderates on any one or all of those particular messages.

That’s why the pastor, the police chief, and the local business owner are the best leaders of this conversation at this particular moment. Through the book I interviewed nearly 60 faith, law, and business leaders, and I hope that I was able to give their stories the justice that they deserve, because these are folks who in many ways are ahead of their constituencies, and they’re taking either politically or financially pretty courageous positions.

That sounds like a principle of public health—needing to engage communities, rather than trying to create top-down change.

Absolutely. What I took away from my education at BU is that it’s important to look at the population, at the public, and how the public is interpreting issues, how they’re acting on issues, and ultimately how you make systemic change. That’s how we really try to approach our advocacy at the National Immigration Forum: We want to work with particular constituencies within the public, we want to help them communicate a message that resonates with that particular community that’s struggling with these issues, and ultimately constituency-plus-communication gets us to strategic advocacy. You could make a really good argument that that is a public health approach to public policy advocacy.

How do you see immigration advocacy and public health intersect?

Whether you’re in Boston or Bismarck, there’s a growth in the immigrant community, and with that comes challenges and opportunities from a public health perspective.

When I was at the Dorchester House Multi-Service Center [now DotHouse Health] running their public health programs—this was probably 2000 or 2001—we had after-school programs for kids in the Vietnamese community. They came as refugees, they were here legally, and they were doing kid things, and some of them got into a fight. Their public defender said, “Take community service, you’ll be fine.” Well, it turns out that by pleading guilty and getting community service, that was a deportable offense. That was a moment in a public health context where I realized that the nation’s immigration system was acting in a remarkably unjust way. That was a very formative experience for me seeing at that intersection what needed to be done.

How would you characterize the current environment in the US in terms of immigration—especially in the last few weeks, as Dreamers covered by DACA have begun to be deported?

I think DACA as a program is amazing in that it protects 750,000 young people from deportation, but I could also make the argument that it was more important for DACA to lead millions and millions of Americans to realize that their child’s best friend is undocumented, the family one pew over in their church is undocumented, the family down the street is undocumented, and regardless of whether the program continues or if the administration increases deportations, those millions and millions of Americans cannot un-remember that, and that’s a really powerful moment where folks are coming to realize that the undocumented community is part of their community.

How have you seen more conservative communities come to that realization?

I was in Idaho about four weeks ago, meeting with a room of about 75 Idaho dairymen. I would say about 90 percent were Republicans, and at least half of them had voted for Trump. To a person, they wanted to see a more constructive and positive approach to immigration, not just because their Latino workforce was a cog in the dairy industry, but because their Latino workforce had been with them for 10 years. These dairymen, by and large white, conservative dairymen, saw their Latino workforce as an extension of their family, as an extension of their community, and that is not a sentiment that is reflected by the federal debate.

Whether we’re in Utah or Idaho or Texas or Alabama or South Carolina, really conservative parts of the country, people are seeing the immigrant communities that they live and work with as extensions of their own families in many ways, and I think that’s the sentiment that we need to figure out how to amplify at the local level so it becomes a bigger part of the national conversation. It all goes back to this idea of Bibles, badges, and business.

How do you stay hopeful in this work?

I think that voters of all stripes are beginning to understand that what the administration is doing on the immigration enforcement front doesn’t represent their needs and their goals. That’s borne out both in the work that we do and in the polling that comes out almost every week.

The current environment is on the one hand deeply polarized by an administration that I think wants to end immigration to the US as we know it, but on the other hand I sense there is a growing consensus across the full range of voters that they want a more constructive approach. I’m not going to say that we’re at a tipping point right now—the debate feels really ugly and polarized—but whether through the research for the book or our work and travels every day, my sense is that conservatives, moderates, and liberals are all really looking for a different way on the issue of immigration, and I’m not sure that this administration represents what the majority of Americans really want to see. Let’s just say the Trump administration has provided no lack of teaching moments when it comes to immigration, and people want a different approach.

—Michelle Samuels

 Ali Noorani (SPH’99) is executive director of the National Immigration Forum. He will be speaking Tuesday, May 9, at the Dean’s Seminar Book Discussion “There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration.”