Final Paper
AlmightyFluff
FinalExamBBSp2021.docxFinal Exam, Beyond Boundaries, Spring 2021
Please choose one essay to write about. Your answer should be approx. 3 pages (double-spaced, left-margin) in a Word document (not a google doc). If you are one of those students with writing issues, you should make an appointment with a tutor now – and use that appointment as your first deadline. (At the end of the semester, the writing center sends me a record of who attended tutoring sessions and when.) Your name should be in the title of the document you email to me. If I do not acknowledge receipt of your exam, it means I did not receive it. It is up to you to make sure that I receive it. If you have trouble, contact IT or ask your advisor for assistance. Your exam is due on May 9th. I won’t be able to give extensions because grades must be submitted to the registrar’s office.
ESSAY 1: Write an essay about Jose Antonio Vargas, his coming to the United States, his discovery that he was an “illegal” and why (and how) he became a journalist. Your essay should include a discussion of why Vargas came to the U.S. (and under what circumstances), how he learned how to “pass” as an American, why he “came out” as undocumented on his 30th birthday, and the relationship between his status as undocumented and his decision to become a journalist. You should also include a discussion about language. Specifically, what does Vargas say about many Americans’ tendency to refer to undocumented immigrants as “illegals?” Your essay should include a discussion of historical continuity. While it may be tempting to say that everything changed once Trump (or Biden) became president, we have learned that there is often more continuity than change. For example, while Hart-Cellar does represent structural change in immigration law, what does Vargas say about President Obama and immigration?
STORY RELATING TO ESSAY 1: Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen (Harper Collins, 2018)
ESSAY 2: Write an essay about the history of the criminalization of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Your essay should include a discussion of the 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts that Mae Ngai writes about in “The Strange Career”; why and when ICE was created, how and why Trump “radicalized” it (Franklin Foer); and how it operates today, including 287G, for-profit detention centers, and refugee policy and practice (“Immigration Nation,” New Yorker Radio Hour, and “On the Media”). Your essay should include a discussion of historical continuity. While it may be tempting to say that everything changed once Trump (or Biden) became president, we have learned that there is often more continuity than change. For example, while the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924 do represent structural change in immigration law (as does 9/11) what does the historian Tom Wong say in the OTM podcast (2nd link below) about immigrants seeking asylum at the border?
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/2
STORIES RELATING TO ESSAY 2:
Mae N. Ngai, “The Strange Career of the Illegal Alien: Immigration Restriction and Deportation
Policy in the United States, 1921-1965),” Law and History Review, Vol. 21, No. 1
(2003)
Franklin Foer, “How Trump Radicalized ICE,” The Atlantic, September 2018
