 Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I am Dr. Michelle Villagran, Chair of the San Jose State University School of Information Diversity Committee. And I want to welcome you to our 2020 diversity webinar series for our university, faculty, alumni, and students. Our presenters will be fostering discussion around sharing content and diverse topics, which align with our goals of inclusive excellence, diversity, equity, and inclusion. And I'm very excited today, as this is the third webinar in our eight-part series. With that, I would like to introduce today's session Beyond Library Services to Immigrants, a discussion on the role of information in migration and presented by Dr. Anna Endumu. Turning it over to you. Thank you so much, Dr. Villagran. I am very excited to be here today, and I'd like to first thank you, as well as your colleagues and the iSchool at San Jose State University. I'm delighted to be joining everyone. So I am a professor at the University of Maryland College Parks iSchool and my research centers on the role of libraries and information in the lives of all kinds of marginalized communities, but especially immigrants. So that's a little bit about me. And let me tell you a little bit about what we'll be talking about today. First, I'll give some context on the relationship between libraries and immigration. And then I'll introduce some new conceptual directions, ways that we can reframe how we approach and relate to immigrant communities. And then I hope to provide some practical takeaways for you to apply in your work setting or in your academics. And then we'll close with some Q&A. And just a little bit of housekeeping or administration. Like many of you, my household is a little cray cray right now. And it gets loud. So if you hear a little rustling in the background, that's just a white noise machine. And I'm hoping that it's not too distracting. Without further ado, I'll go ahead and get started. So there are 244 million immigrants all around the world. And 47 million of these individuals call the US home. And the US has the largest and most diverse population of immigrants of any other country. And about one in seven people identify as having non-US origins or family members who migrated to the US. And that is based on the 2010 census. And it is anticipated that the 2020 census will uncover even more diversity in terms of ethnic origins. So library service to immigrants has been a long-standing and really century-old service within library communities. And many of the services that we now know and recognize as being kind of quintessential library services such as English language learning, children's story hour, and the host of other programs originated as a way to connect with non-US-born communities. However, there have been some problematic kind of approaches within libraries toward immigrant communities. And especially at the turn of the 20th century, when millions and millions of European immigrants migrated to New York and the northern corridor of the US, there were a lot of misunderstandings and, at the same time, overestimation of librarians' roles in their lives. And we saw a lot of rescue narratives. And John Foster Carr, who was very influential within the American Library Association, he published a lot. And he formed one of the first committees, a committee on work with the foreign born within ALA, which is undeceived of the failings of ALA newcomers. But they also understand their possibilities. And we see early on a lot of this type of discourse that problematizes in the kind of others, immigrant communities. And John Foster Carr, he published a lot on immigrants and how to reach immigrants. But a lot of his publications were kind of button pushing to put it mildly, if not prejudiced. So again, he wrote, we're altruists playing Cinderella and short rations, but the joy we get of doing something for nothing. Some weeks we get nothing out of it, but mud. I have the pleasure of scrubbing up some dear Italian boy. So this is the kind of dialogue that took place. We also see Childers and Posts, who published an influential book called The Information Poor in America. And a lot of scholars went on to glean from that book. So again, this was a very pivotal publication. And they wrote, for example, immigrants are not predisposed as a general population to alter the undesirable condition of their lives or to see information as an instrument in their salvation. So again, we see this idea of librarians being saviors or immigrants being fatally information dispossessed. And again, just like today's rhetoric, especially when it comes to Central American and Mexican communities, Childers and Posts wrote that many groups, not just immigrants, but people of color, people with disabilities, are isolated from information that sustains the dominant society, because a number of characteristics magnify their isolation. They are proud of their culture. And especially tenacious in their language, they distrust or dislike Anglo institutions, such as schools, medical clinics, public housing, et cetera. So these were the types of blanket statements that were made about immigrants. We see, again, in the 21st century, there's still this idea of immigrants being information impoverished and universally and fatally information impoverished. And Shen writes, for example, as one of the key information poor groups, urban immigrants are affected by lack of English proficiency, education, technology skills, and equal access to information. And so Shen fails to operationalize what he or she means by urban immigrants. And just, again, makes a very vast and wide and problematic assumption about immigrants' information capacities. You'll see that my work involves how libraries can reframe how they approach immigrants. And there are three problems or paradoxes, is what I call them. The first paradox is gross underestimation, while other fields such as demography and population study see that information and technology, especially the smartphone, are incredibly important and being used in vibrant ways among immigrant communities. Libraries have not caught up to that reality. So there's an underestimation of what immigrants do and handle and how they customize information. And then the second paradox or irony is that there is homogenization within library communities when it comes to understanding immigrants. So for example, Hispanic, the term Hispanic, is often conflated with immigrants. And these are not interchangeable terms. And I'll talk about that in a little bit. There are an entire, there are entire classes of groups, sets of groups, immigrant identities that are ignored within LIS literature and research. For example, black diasporic immigrants have not been covered or their experiences are not amplified out of about 4,000 publications that talk about immigration or immigrants, only three centered black diasporic immigrants. So that's very telling. And the last paradox is prescription. In our work, we really have kind of number one for this to be an area of diversity and inclusion. There is a tremendous lack of diversity in how we approach the research. Many of our publications are case study or best practice oriented, meaning that the literature is localized. So there's not a lot of empirical literature or research looking at a nationwide macro level, bird's eye view, panorama of how immigrants actually customize and apply information in their lives. So we have really operated in a way that we are experts and we prescribe a lot of services. And so these are the three paradoxes that I argue are limiting our services to immigrants. OK, now this is going to be tricky because I did want to use the pointer. So I'll just explain a little bit about what I mean by homogenization and underestimation. And in the group that I largely studied, which is black diasporic immigrants, this is how vast a black immigrant can be. Their identity can be so dynamic and diverse. So you have the Pan-African diaspora, which is anyone that any community that exists out of the dispersion, the historic dispersion of Africans throughout the world. You have Africans. Typically, you identify an African by a region. You have North African or Middle Eastern, which is Mina. You have Sub-Saharan Africans, so on and so forth. You have African-Americans, which are those who have ancestral ties to slaves in America. Then you have Africans in America, who are those who migrated. You have Afro-Caribbean and then Afro-Latinx. Now you also have ethnic groups within that. So you may be in Iqbal of Nigeria or Garifuna of Central America, with the term tribe being outmoded. Then a person may also be mixed ethnic or of mixed ethnic ancestry, such as a Creole. So you may have the Creole of Louisiana. And this is typically a mixture of black, American Indian, and African, and European ancestry. It can also be a language that should not be confused with national or nationality references, such as Chicano or Patracho for Honduranians, Boricuan for Puerto Ricans, or Bayesian for Barbados. Creole is really a mix or a homogenization of different ethnicities. Then you may refer to regionality. So a black immigrant may come from the Caribbean or West Indies. But then although there's some overlap, certain terms are not used interchangeably. For example, Caribbean or Latin America. So a person may be of Latinx descent not to be confused with Hispanic. And I'm just teasing these out so that you can see how vast an intersection might be. And so a person who is Latinx can be from any Latin American country, whether or not that country is a Hispanic or Spanish-speaking country. Spanish is the country a person from Spain or the language of Spain, which should not be confused with Hispanic. Then you have Anglophone, Francophone, or Hispanic as in Spanish-speaking and Lucifone as in Portuguese-speaking. So a person from Brazil is Latinx. So these are the different nuances. Then you also have to look at the age at migration. This is very important. And again, within population studies, this is teased out. And we do not take care to do this in LIS. You may have a first generation immigrant. But within that, a person who is generation 1.75 migrated closer to birth versus a person who migrated in generation 1.25, which is closer to adulthood. And language patterns, acculturation, so many things, so many variables differ based on whether you're 1.75 and 1.25. The term second generation is no longer used in academic circles because it's a very controversial term. You're either US-born or you're not knowing a second generation. You're first born American. So just really acknowledging birthright citizenship. And then you may be a person who fled your country and then was granted refugee status in the US or fled your country, entered the US, and then sought asylum, which is an asylum. An undocumented person is a person who migrated without a official documentation or a visa, basically a person who migrated without a visa. And sorry, I have that one twice. Let's go down to permanent resident, which is a person who's achieved green card status, naturalized citizen becomes a citizen. But many people are in fluid status. And that's because policy is ever changing. And so the ways in which a person becomes undocumented are myriad. And so policy might change. Also your documentation and process may be backlogged. And you go out of status because of the backlog. And so you may also live in a mixed status household where a person might be a first generation or a birthright citizen. And then the parents might be undocumented or maybe other relatives in the home may be undocumented or they may have a green card. Some of them may be naturalized. So it's very easy to be in mixed status and fluid status in this current environment. So I just wanted to show you how complicated and complex immigration is and identity is. I want to really challenge us to think about why people migrate. And this is actually very important in our work in libraries. Oftentimes we begin with the end. But it's very important to, especially when you're serving an entire community, whether it's a campus community or a neighborhood community. If you have many of the same type of people, you may want to investigate why those individuals migrate it. And that may inform their information behavior. And so some people migrate as a result of opportunity. And this is considered voluntary migration. So this may entail volunteer family reunification, education, or employment. We have a lot of highly skilled immigrants right now that are contributing to the response to COVID-19 and a lot of DACA recipients as well. There is also forced migration. And that's another reason for migrating to achieve stability. We see that natural disaster, armed conflict, and political displacement also causes migration. And so these are usually regarded as forced migrants. And so my goal is to help people think about how information helps immigrants move, integrate, and become socially included within society. Now offer a few recommendations on how to make this happen. First, it's important to recognize that in 2020, basically in the era in which we're living, the smartphone is really the modern day compass for all intents and purposes. So we saw that with the Syrian migrant crisis of 2016. And people had their smartphones. They were getting services, connecting with relatives as they migrated throughout Turkey and into Europe. And we saw that again in 2018 with the Central American migrant crisis. And again, people could not do without their cell phones. And I have a lot of rich stories and anecdotes from people who migrated. And this was their experience. So number one, and overall, this is the takeaway. We need to figure out how to address immigrant well-being from an information standpoint. So moving away from a purely procedural, purely transactional kind of approach to a more holistic approach, how can we focus on well-being? And so we first should understand how immigrants personalize information. So we can amplify positives and get away from the deficit mindset that has prevailed. And so we should be looking at pre-migration information behavior. What was the community's interaction with libraries before? Was it primarily academic or scholastic in scope? Was there an availability of public libraries? Do they need to be introduced to the US interpretation of a public library? I'll give you an example. In conducting focus groups with Afro-Caribbean immigrants, some of them recounted that they had to adhere to, what is it, dress codes before entering a public library in their country of origin. So the idea of a library that has, for example, gaming or yoga, that may need to be introduced or contextualized. So it's important to think about pre-migration information behavior and also information assets. There are some really cool ways that immigrants are using information and personalizing and creating information tools as well. And we should also think about those. And I'll give you some examples. And we should also be thinking about how diasporas rely on information environments and how networks are so important. And information tools help immigrants stay connected around the world. And one person calls immigrants e-actors or trans-glocal actors, meaning that they cross boundaries in really rich ways. So we also must understand how information is used to marginalize immigrants. And in our work, as librarians or future librarians, we should address injustices. For example, information is very much tied to ethnocentric and nativist discourse. For example, illegal versus undocumented. We can choose to use undocumented versus illegal. And there is an ongoing fight to change our own Library of Congress subject heading illegal alien. And this has been a years-long fight. And LOC still has not changed it. And we can also combat misinformation and disinformation about immigrants, especially in the current political environment. And as we address this pandemic, and it's important to also understand the role of automation and algorithms and algorithmic bias in how immigrants are treated. For example, automated deportation and Palantir, which is the algorithm or the software that decides who gets to stay and who is deported. And so all of this is based on software and flawed software, as well as surveillance. Pentel is used to surveil those who are screened for deportation. And certain smartphone applications are surveilled, very popular ones. Facebook, for example, other social media. And Ventel is used to keep track and geolocate those who are undocumented. So we can also, in our work, understand how immigration is used to marginalize. We can address those injustices. We must also understand the health and psychological implications of information. And we can do this work by promoting wellness. We can understand, for example, a culture to stress, which is stress brought on by the strain of adjusting to a new culture. This used to be referred to as culture shock. But now there is substantiated, especially medical literature, on the immigrant health paradox, for example. Meaning that those who arrive in the US usually arrive in fairly good health. Either they have past strict health screenings or they have made long journeys. However, within five years or as time in the US progresses, health outcomes deteriorate. And so this is called the immigrant health paradox. We can also understand vital information grounds that help mitigate some of these risks, such as places of worship, parks, and markets. We can partner with those locations. And we can also understand how immigrants can be informed and civically engaged. Right now, I'm working on a project to help immigrants be involved and included in the 2020 census, because there was so much misinformation and also strategic marginalization as it pertained to the census. So we can also promote informed citizenship. I introduce a framework for training librarians and training MLS students. It's called the heart framework. And we can go one by one through the acronym. The first one is humanitarianism. And we should, as much as possible, remember that engaging with immigrant communities is not just a one-directional transaction. You are also doing humanitarian work. Number two is experience. As much as possible, we should try to understand the immigrant experience and not simply promote conformism, but adjusting and acculturation. It should be our outcome and our goal. The next one is acculturation. And acculturing to the US, notice I have not said assimilation, but acculturing to the US is a long process. Some people estimate that full acculturation takes about 20 years. So what is that experience? What are the different stages of acculturation? That's also very important. The next one is realism. Too often, library work is naive and rooted in pragmatism. What someone Bushman has called doing pragmatism, right? Where we only focus on the policy, the service, and we forget that beyond the library, there's an entire sociopolitical context that we should be aware of. And lastly, transnationalism. You're dealing with communities when you engage with immigrants who are very, very transnational. They are here, but they're also at home. And information tools and information really allows people to be global E-actors. One tool for learning how to be a humanitarian librarian. It's called Mind of Five and it was developed by researchers, primarily Dr. Ricardo Gomez at the University of Washington's High School. And you can use a card game to play with your peers or if you're in a library setting, you can use it to introduce especially ethics, information ethics and privacy. How do you engage with immigrant communities, migrant communities, undocumented communities, and really keep their stories and their experiences private? So this is one tool. There's another tool that you can use called the Immigrant Experience and this was introduced through Experience Magazine. And it's a simulation. It's a game where you can take a journey. This is a game that's based in many different decades. I think there's eight actors or eight avatars in total. And you'll see how complicated the decision to migrate is. It's never as simple as I'm going to the U.S. for a better life. Oftentimes you're leaving behind children, dependents, elderly parents. And so this is another tool that you can use to kind of simulate the immigrant experience. Another tool you can use, this one was developed by a librarian. She's the same person who came up with the concept. She coined the concept of vocational awe for Basi Etar. And she created this game, Killing Me Softly. And this is a game that simulates the experience of a person, a marginalized person, an underrepresented person being really experiencing microaggression every day in a toll that it takes out. So she borrows from the idea of a culture of stress which comes from migration literature. But she argues that anyone can experience a culture of stress if they are from an underrepresented community. So this is a good tool to understand immigrants and other underrepresented groups. And I highly recommend it. And we should also be trying to understand realism, social realism, right? And so not a plasticity of diversity but really understanding the different layers of diversity and equity and inclusion. And so you can use the International Human Rights Coalition Archives in conjunction with the Digital Public Library of America. They have chronicled an entire archive and catalog of immigrant stories, how they came here, what were the decisions and rich videos and reading material. There's a host of other tools here that you can kind of immerse yourself in just to understand immigrant stories. And Jill E. Barron is a librarian at Dartmouth University and she is one of the people who has been advocating for a change of the LOC subject heading illegal aliens. I would really recommend that you watch this video as well so that you can understand the impact of language and the power of cataloging and classification and really categorizing people. It's always a political act. We are on a marathon, Michelle. Okay, the next slide is transnationalism. How are immigrants using information tools and creating information tools? So they're not just information users, but creators. And so remittly is an application that allows people to kind of, to send money home. And so remittances, if you've never heard the term, remittances are money funds that are sent back to a country from a relative abroad. And so some countries, their entire GDP, gross domestic product, it relies. Their economies rely on remittances. And remittances are sometimes the only guaranteed way to help the poor. That trickles down. Where aid may not trickle down, remittances are guaranteed to make it to poor households. And Haiti remittances account for 25% of the entire economy. So remittly is an app that helps you send money much cheaper than Western Union. And so that was created with immigrants in mind. WhatsApp was created by an immigrant who was undocumented and later on welfare. And he created it with immigrants in mind. And there's also Find Hello app, which helps you find other immigrants from your country and healthcare, housing, legal help, after migrating and seeking integration here in the US. So these are the types of networks and social tools that immigrants are using in amazing ways. It's important to understand that libraries are part of information systems. And as librarians, we should seek to promote the freedom to receive, seek, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. This is a UN Declaration of Human Rights. And it should be our imperative to make this a reality. There is one that came very early on, a question regarding what is the best way to address language barriers? Okay, one of my colleagues, his name is Calvin Watson, trying to remember what library he's at. What he has done is provided, this is one recommendation. If there's no staff on site, or maybe even volunteers on site, you can use apps or dedicated tablets to help mitigate the language barrier. So there's a lot of apps Google translate, for example, that will help you communicate with people who are non-English speakers. So they have used iPads, Broward County Library System, that's the one it is, Broward County Library System. They have used iPads to help, and this is a library system in South Florida. So again, Spen speaking, Hitch and Creole speaking communities, many different kinds of immigrants right outside of Miami. So they have been using tablets for some time and it's been incredibly successful. I would highly recommend that you look it up and see and sometimes libraries have partnered with community leaders to have volunteers who can help with translation as well, between specific hours. And then also the librarians can have language classes for library staff to help them learn the language as well. So the burden shouldn't be just on participants or patrons rather. Okay, thank you. There's another question. Are e-books and e-services popular for immigrants? Okay, yes, and especially, you wouldn't believe, a lot of people and Karen Dali has done work on this. Reading and reading in stealth mode and one librarian, her name is Anita, she's at the university at Tulane University now. That's how she learned English by reading alone solitary and translating books that she had read in her native Polish language to English. And so a lot of literature is saying that reading an e-book, smartphone, anything applications on the smartphone, they are used for people in a non-intimidating self-paced way to learn a language as well. Not just language apps or language ESL classes, but e-books help people learn a language in a way that is comfortable for them. So yes. Excellent, let me move to the next question. As we learn as individuals more about how to move towards amplifying positives, are there suggestions on how to introduce this information to colleagues and move towards more institutional changes? So really looking at ways to increase chances of buy-in. I would really recommend that you have little vignettes and distribute examples of immigrants, and especially examples that disrupt common ideas. So I would really take time every week or once a month to highlight a different immigrant. It could be as simple as saying, did you know Steve Jobs, he's of Syrian descent, right? And really demonstrating the diversity and the vastness of immigrant communities and sharing that, or maybe even reading a common book as a library among work staff and talking about that book. I would recommend Nugent's The Refugees or Edwidge Danty Katz, any of her works really, but Father I'm Dying is one. And so any immigrant refugees, their works, their books, and so I just really would encourage you to as much as possible make the implied explicit and disseminate counter stories about immigrants. Excellent, that's great suggestions. Here's another one. Could you recommend, and I know you did talk a little bit about some tools or resources, but could you recommend any tools or resources to apply the scope of this presentation to an academic library context? Yeah, this is so important, especially because a lot of people forget that international students, although international students are not considered immigrants, not by INS, because the idea is that they're not immigrating, that they'll go back home after. So F1 visas are not considered immigration visas, but still the experience is the same, even if they enter information rich settings and they have a lot of support systems in place, the cultural experience is the same. So in your work as an academic librarian, I would really encourage you to think about pre-migration norms, how do international students use apps and applications? And so this is very applicable to even a K-12 setting, thinking about the parents experience, right? So media specialists, academic librarians, this talk was not just geared toward public librarians, so it is definitely applicable to college or campus librarians as well. Thank you. Another question, you referenced informed citizen, a few slides back. Is there any move to reframe good citizenship information models as for serving people who may not be citizens in the legal sense? If I understand the question correctly, it is a question about what is meant by citizenship. I think that's what the question is getting at. And really civic engagement is the idea. So not just immigration process, but how to take part. And one of the things that I've been doing, I've been working with Asian-American groups, Latinx groups, Black diasporic groups, to get the word out about the census. And this is because not everyone can vote, but everyone can be represented. Everyone needs to be represented in the census, right? And so civic engagement can be done whether or not you are documented, whether or not you're a citizen. And so this can just be as simple as staying abreast. How do you stay abreast? How do you know what's legitimate? And we can help with that. We can definitely recommend tools as librarians to help manage information and apply information. Thank you. And if that didn't fully address your question, go ahead and put that in the chat and we'll get to that. But thank you. So let's move on to the next one. We have about five minutes. Do you think that libraries and information centers that are providing services to underrepresented groups like undocumented immigrants should receive additional revenue or funding? I don't know whether they should receive additional funding, but I do know that, and I can't speak for the main source of funding, IMLS. I do know that agencies and our large partners, even ALA's mission has changed from looking at the provision of information to quality of life of communities. So when you think about quality of life, everyone benefits when everyone in your community is doing well. So I think the imperative is shifting and this is a good thing for undocumented immigrants because ultimately many agencies recognize that whether or not a person is in fluid status, changing status, undocumented, going to be deported, it is to the advantage of a neighborhood, municipality, a state if everyone is thriving. So IMLS, ALA, so many other groups are concerned now with how we do our work, but how people are benefiting socially from our work. So I don't know whether there will be, especially not in this current political landscape, any special funding for that work, but our services should be relevant regardless of whether a person, it should be relevant regardless whether a person is documented basically, and we should care about how our communities are doing. And I think you touched on, there was a follow-up about recommending funding sources or places to go for funding. So I think you addressed that in that question. How about another question here? Do you have some specific suggestions to connect with a hard to reach immigrant population? I would say begin with a thought leader or an opinion leader in that group. Usually the most visible leaders are the business people, the ones who own the markets, faith-based leaders as well. I would reach out to them and ask them what they need. Also, immigrant radio, do not underestimate immigrant radio. It is so amazing if they can just play or even just give a shout out to the library if you can buy ad space on immigrant radio. That will help gain some credibility for the library. But then a simple thing which we overlook all the time is inviting immigrant groups to just come and use the library space for meeting space. And if you have a rental fee, think about waiving that or if a group doesn't have their 501C3 status yet, waiving it for them. Invite them to just come and have a meeting in your space and you'll see how they begin to ask. You'll see how they'll notice the signage. You'll see how when you have a program and invite them, they are already present. So no agenda, just inviting people to say, hey, you have this meeting on maternal health among Somali women in Minnesota. Have you thought about meeting in the library? That's it, right? No commitment or nothing. And just that invitation and that outreach might be the relationship starter. I love that. I think that's a really good note to end on. I know there are about eight more questions we did not get to, but I will send them over to you, Anna. And then we can, perhaps if you wanna address them in writing, we could post them as a link along with your recording. I thank you all for hanging on. And we want to thank you for your expertise, all of the information you shared for your time and to all of the attendees. We appreciate each of you for taking time out of your day to attend yet another Zoom. So thank you everyone and look for the recording to be posted on our website.