Citizen Nation

Thurs Dec 6 is our last day of class, and YOU will be the presenters. Prepare a 2-minute oral presentation to present your project to the class (10 points). Consult the CITIZEN Project Guidelines and Rubric for details. AND submit electronically, via email or Google doc, a 150-200 word abstract for your paper (5 points). Use past student abstracts as examples. I will also hand out the Final Exam Study Guide. Any REVISIONS of your project final draft are due back (electronically also – via email or Google doc) are due by 11:59 pm on Dec 6.

Bonus / Extra Credit: Evening of Dec 6 – @ReadingthePictures salon “The Visual Representation of the US/Mexico Border Wall in the Media”, live online webcast 7:30 – 9:00 pm. Free, but pre-registration required.

Mon Dec 10 is the last day of WSU classes. Though we’re not having class that day, submit a 2 (or more) page Reflection Paper, that offers a thorough reflection of your process and progress with the CITIZEN Project assignment, explaining how this project helped your course learning (5 points). You can send this electronically or put a printed copy in my office mailbox, Sullivan 327-D.

There will be a comprehensive Final Exam on Tuesday, Dec 18 at 12:30 pm, covering the entire semester’s topics and content (40 points). It will be OPEN BOOKS but NOT OPEN NOTEBOOK, i.e. you may bring & use the Bellamy and Waldman books and the Course Reader during the exam.

Study Guide

Study Guide for HONORS

Grading: I will enter your Attendance and Participation grade into Blackboard and update your other grades by December 11, so by then you will know where you stand without the 40-point final exam grade.

If at that point, you feel you might benefit from extra credit, here are some options you can do, between Dec 6 – 18. Each one worth up to 5 points, but extra credit is not guaranteed and cannot be used to replace missing coursework.

Participate in the @ReadingThePictures Dec 6 online Salon event, and write a 2-3 response paper.

I’ve been collecting and tagging things I find on Twitter with #CitizenNation. Take a look at things I’ve tagged, and respond to all / any of them with a 2-3 page response paper connecting the news item to our course topics and/or to your own course learning.

Listen to a podcast about the migrant caravan (noting the date it was recorded) and write a 2-3 page report about the podcast’s coverage of this event and, if relevant, what’s happened since then. Some examples: Bipartisan Policy, Oct 26 / Lawfare Blog, Oct 27 / New Yorker, Nov 5 / Slate Trumpcast, Nov 12 / New York Times Daily, Nov 21 / Voice of San Diego, Nov 30

Watch a PBS Frontline documentary about Immigration policy, and write a 2-3 page review of the film, incorporating your course learning about the historical background of immigration.

Lost in Detention (October 18, 2011)
Immigration Battle (October 20, 2015)
Separated: Children At the Border (July 31, 2018)

Watch the MTV documentary “White People,” made by Jose Antonio Vargas (author of the essay we read for Dec 4’s class), and write a 2-3 page film review, connecting the documentary to our course topics.

In our next three classes we catch up with changes (and lack of changes) in US immigration and naturalization law up to the present day.

Tues, Nov 27: History of Immigration Law lecture day. Reading: Day 23, Mae Ngai’s important article “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Re-examination of the Immigration Act of 1924.”

Also, the FINAL Soapbox contest of the semester. Presenters: Jesse, Katie, Kasey, Evan, Emmanuel, and Mireya.

Thurs, Nov 29: Since 1965. Reading: Day 24, Massey “How a 1965 immigration reform created illegal immigration.” We welcome two special guests from the Lawrence field office of US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS), Field Office Director Kristen Smith and Supervisory Immigration Services Officer Corey Elya. They will help explain the complex legal and bureaucratic process towards naturalization as it is now and will have time for a Q&A to answer our many questions about the current system.

Handout: Who Does What?

Tues, Dec 4: Entry and Exit, Borders and Documents. Reading: Day 25, Vargas, “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant” and Kaplan, “Miami grandma targeted.” Response Paper #6 is due, see prompt.

Unit 3 Resources and Current Events We’re Following:

USCIS Homepage

“What the Armed Forces Can, Can’t, and Might Do at the Border” (West Point Modern War Institute)

“What Are the Legal Pathways for Central Americans to Enter the US?” (Lawfare Blog)

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sues DHS for record-keeping failures regarding families separated at the border (Oct 26, 2018)

Lawsuit-in-progress about Trump administration’s proclamation that asylum-seeking will be denied to anyone crossing border illegally; that policy blocked by federal judge (Nov 12, 2018)

Ongoing: Keep watching for news about the border, military deployment, asylum-seeking rules, border closings and migrant arrivals. For responsible news images of the unfolding events, see the Instagram feed of Getty photojournalist John Moore, @jbmoorephoto.

Although there are still votes being counted in some states (and may be for a while! Keep watching… esp Georgia and Florida) we are entering the course’s final unit after the Veterans’ Day weekend Continue reading →

This week wraps up our unit on voting rights with a close look at the midterm and debrief of election results. Continue reading →

For two weeks we’re looking at a key piece of legislation that concerns American voting rights and practices, the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Our questions are:

How did we get this law?
What were the historical context and circumstances of its passage?
What are its major provisions? What does it mandate / what does it prohibit?
What was its effect?
What happened to it in 2013?
What is the state of voting rights for the 2018 midterms? Continue reading →

In Alexander Keyssar’s book, The Right to Vote, he argues:

Nearly all of the major expansions of the franchise that have occurred in American history took place either during or in the wake of wars. The historical record indicates that this was not a coincidence: the demands of both war itself and preparedness for war created powerful pressures to enlarge the right to vote… While it may seem less exceptional and romantic than the frontier, without doubt war played a greater role in the evolution of American democracy (p. xxiv)

For Thursday’s class, we’ll put his claim to the test. Continue reading →

For today’s class, we explore the long fight for women to achieve meaningful voting rights. Continue reading →

Reading for today: Course Reader, Day 11.

The topic today is what happened to voting rights in the late 19th century. The larger context, of which you are already aware, is industrialization and westward expansion, coupled with large waves of European and Asian immigration which went largely unrestricted until the 1880s. It also includes the rise of machine party politics in Northern cities, and the return of Southern states to all-white, Democratic party control with severely restricted voting rights for black men. And: no women could vote anywhere, until the 1870s, when a few Western states began to grant (their small number of white) women that right.

Against that backdrop, we’ll look at the changing state of citizenship and voting rights for Native Americans, hitting some of the major milestones in that narrative. Continue reading →

Reading: Course Reader, Day 10. ALSO – we will talk about the material I placed in Day 9 besides Kerber, i.e. the controversy regarding birthright citizenship and the 14th Amendment that started earlier this summer with an July 18, 2018 op-ed in the Washington Post titled “Citizenship Shouldn’t be a Birthright.” Continue reading →

On Thursday and next Tuesday, we’ll look at a special category of American citizens: those who live in discontiguous US territories. The next two class sessions deal with colonized nations and territories within the jurisdiction of the United States. Their people have claim to American citizenship, although that claim has been at times historically contested, hard-won, or tenuous. We will explore these different experiences and histories and compare them to one another. Continue reading →