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Educational Studies: A Journalof the American EducationalStudies AssociationPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/heds20

They Take Our Jobs! And 20Other Myths About ImmigrationJohn Kaiser Ortiz aa Bowling Green State UniversityPublished online: 01 Aug 2011.

To cite this article: John Kaiser Ortiz (2011) They Take Our Jobs! And 20 Other MythsAbout Immigration, Educational Studies: A Journal of the American EducationalStudies Association, 47:4, 409-411, DOI: 10.1080/00131946.2011.587923

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2011.587923

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EDUCATIONAL STUDIES, 47: 409–411, 2011Copyright C© American Educational Studies AssociationISSN: 0013-1946 print / 1532-6993 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00131946.2011.587923

They Take Our Jobs! And 20 Other Myths About Immigration. Aviva Chom-sky. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007. 264 pp. $14.00.

Reviewed by John Kaiser Ortiz, Bowling Green State University

Educators and interlocutors concerned with today’s controversy on immigrationnow have the timely and vital publication by Aviva Chomsky at their disposal.They Take Our Jobs! is certain to become a lasting resource for scholars andactivists alike, given the mounting controversy over immigration in the Americanpublic sphere today. Highly informative, carefully researched, and thoughtfullystructured, Chomsky’s work can help guide such debates in a logical and humanedirection. Chomsky’s work not only accurately summarizes prevailing myths aboutimmigration, but also provides substantiated, well-reasoned arguments againstthese myths. Amid legitimate and growing concerns over xenophobia (raciallymotivated bias and discrimination against immigrants), few other works in theliterature on immigration today merit the attention that this work clearly deserves.Educators in particular will find in this work many ideas and strategies on how toget students to humanize—for their own sake as much as for others—the conflictsand controversies of immigration today.

They Take Our Jobs! contains a note on terminology, an introduction, 21 mythsof immigration (with corresponding arguments against), an epilogue, and a histor-ical timeline. The myths whose fallacious, untrue premises this work is primarilydesigned to expose are organized into 5 broad sections. Part one concerns “Im-migrants and the economy”; part two deals with “Immigrants and the law”; partthree pertains to “Immigration and race”; part four is based on the question “Howhave U.S. policies created immigration?”; and part five revisits “the debate at theturn of the millennium.”

Chomsky frames her work in terms of her experience as a teacher, writer, andorganizer. One reason this book was written, she explains, is because “it’s clearto me that many of the arguments currently being circulated are based on seriousmisconceptions not only about how our society and economy function, but alsoabout the history of immigration, the law, and the reasons for immigration” (xi).In addition to these concerns, three additional themes—all of which are pertinentfor educators and activists alike—can be extrapolated from her book.

First, Chomsky consistently explains the conflicts over immigration in termsof principles of inclusion versus principles of exclusion, especially as historicaltensions between these principles characterize social and political practice in theUnited States. Principles of inclusion and exclusions help to connect issues of

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immigration to other areas of social and political lived experience, such as jobsand the economy, health care, transportation, and civil/legal rights. Teachers eagerto connect the range of social and political conflicts in our society today to an issuecommon to such conflicts might draw on these principles to identify those charac-teristics of conflict that arise from group-identity or group-belonging. Chomsky’sdiscussion of involuntary sterilization programs in “Myth 18: Countries need tocontrol who goes in and out,” is one example of how immigration policies bear onlarger questions our society faces today (174).

Second, Chomsky is duly attentive throughout her work to the history andphilosophy of human rights. In this way, Chomsky confronts the invocation anduse of terms like illegal immigrant by drawing attention to the United Nations HighCommission on Human Rights and its declaration that this term should not be used.Through the lens of human rights, Chomsky helps to situate the controversy overimmigration in a planetary framework. At the same time, Chomsky documentsinstances where the government of the United States, for example, classified Cubanand Haitian refugees according to different asylum entitlements and opportunities.The legal rights and recourses afforded such groups are not only inconsistent andunequal. These differences also suggest one way in which governments play aninstrumental role in the migration of human beings from one country to another.

Third, Chomsky frequently returns to the inherently global nature of immigra-tion. This appeal to globalization is one method for tackling xenophobia becauseChomsky endeavors to show how these collective myths reveal that first-hand,face-to-face experience with human beings from a different place than our ownappears to be less important to xenophobes than preconceived judgments aboutothers. The point here concerns a lesson about how all of us as human beingsshould conceive of difference and the role of others in their own identity and senseof self. Educators today undoubtedly face serious challenges in dealing with theunderlying causes of xenophobia. Chomsky’s reference to our globalized humansociety is one positive connection we can all support.

These three themes—by no means exhaustive of the many merits her workenjoys—illustrate how Chomsky sets out to reconcile prevailing myths aboutimmigration with their historical and political realities. The current debates sur-rounding immigration policy in the United States, then, are not exclusively aboutthe movement of peoples from one place to another, a point that Chomsky makesrepeatedly. As her work reminds us, “The main causes of immigration are struc-tural, economic, and historical, and they have to do with global relationships andglobal inequality” (191). This work offers two lessons that committed individualsneed to know. Immigration is, and must be, seen as a human rights issue, andonly in reframing the debate through those whose lives hang in the balance of ourunderstanding will we maintain our own humanity as we work toward preservingthe integrity of all human beings—immigrants, others, and all of us alike—acrossthe globe.

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As a college professor at a rural, mid-Western university, the greatest classroomchallenge I have encountered concerns the distance (both physical and intellectual)between the lived experiences of college students and those of the migrant workingclass. Chomsky’s work offers at least one direct solution to this dilemma. To besure, Chomsky makes frequent reference throughout her book to the indisputableways in which human beings are forced to take positions against other humanbeings—not by choice, but by the force of circumstance. In the opinion of thisreviewer and educator, I cannot imagine a more promising beginning to showingstudents how to be responsible and loving human beings in our conflicted world.Chomsky’s discussion of the invisible heart (an idea borrowed from the dulycredited Nancy Folbre), the default ways in which exclusionary civic practicestake root, and the political disenfranchisement of at least five million Americanswho cannot vote because of felony convictions—all of these issues add up to abasic conclusion that is immediately relevant to students discovering the world’scomplexity at the same time that they are preparing for their own careers and his-tories: “Immigrants compete with low-skilled workers for low-paying jobs . . . butthe reason that this competition exists is because too many people are deprivedof rights” (26–27, emphasis in original). Such a perspective cannot help but grabstudents’ attention. In recognizing their own vulnerability, students will be certainto honor the humanity of those whom they may have never met.

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