Immigration Historians Release Updated Syllabus to Help Faculty Teach Through a New Era of Xenophobia and Enforcement
The idea for an immigration syllabus arose during the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, when then-candidate Donald Trump came out as unabashedly anti-immigrant. He called Latino immigrants “bad hombres” and painted them broadly as rapists and criminals, spurring immigration historians into problem-solving mode. Just six days after Trump took office for the first time, the researchers published an open-source document meant to help educators and activists inform public discussion. The original syllabus included a semester’s worth of readings and videos—including PBS’s America’s Journey Through Slavery and John F. Kennedy’s book A Nation of Immigrants—intended to portray the breadth and depth of the immigrant experience in America. It was a direct intellectual intervention into a political moment defined by travel bans, family separations, and rhetoric that cast immigrants as threats rather than as people with complex histories and contributions. But seven years later, the same immigration historians realized their work was not done. In Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign, the president revved up the anti-immigration rhetoric, falsely accusing Haitian immigrants of eating domestic pets. By 2025, the nation “was embroiled in a surge of increased xenophobia and immigration enforcement,” the researchers wrote in the introduction to an updated version of the syllabus. The renewed crackdown included mass arrests, aggressive workplace raids, and the expansion of detention facilities, all accompanied by a political climate that made many immigrants and their families feel increasingly vulnerable. That sense of urgency led directly to the publication of a second edition, timed for a moment when college faculty across the country were struggling to help students process news reports of ICE operations, deportation flights, and legal challenges to long-standing protections for undocumented students.
Now the University of Minnesota Twin Cities’ Immigration History Research Center has published the second edition of the Immigration Syllabus, which proposes research papers and books that faculty all over the country can slot into their own syllabi to help students make sense of current events—including the violent actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. It also features resources such as newspaper op-eds, documentaries and podcasts that might be more accessible to nonexperts. The updated syllabus comes out amid the Trump administration’s aggressive campaign against immigrants—including college students. The Justice Department has filed 25 lawsuits in the last 16 months to end policies that allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition; those policies have been rolled back in at least six states and remain uncertain in many others. Separately, the administration has been engaged in legal battles over whether it can deport international students based on their speech. To meet the moment, the Immigration Syllabus covers topics including nativism, historic periods of mass migration from Europe and Chinese exclusion, citizenship, labor, refuge and asylum, detention, deportation, and the stalled efforts for immigration reform in the 21st century. Llana Barber, director of the Immigration History Research Center, said the updated Immigration Syllabus will empower faculty and perhaps K–12 teachers to “help students build their knowledge about immigrant experiences and build their capacity to think critically about U.S. immigration policy and U.S. immigration law.” By providing a wide range of scholarly voices and primary sources, the syllabus is designed not to advocate for a particular policy outcome but to ensure that students enter debates with historical perspective, factual grounding, and an appreciation for the diverse experiences that have shaped American immigration over centuries.
Barber, who is also the chair of immigration history at UMN Twin Cities, said the syllabus was created to support faculty in situations like the one she faced earlier this year, when she began teaching an introduction to immigration history course that she has taught for more than 15 years. ICE agents had amassed in Minnesota—part of Operation Metro Surge, which resulted in more than 4,000 arrests, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center; nationally, 33 people died in ICE custody in 2025. The agents’ presence in Minnesota and elsewhere left communities on edge and prompted many U.S. citizens to take to the streets to protest an enforcement strategy they thought was unduly harsh and unfair. Then, just as the spring semester began, ICE and Customs and Border Protection officers killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, fueling protests near and far. “There was no way to talk about immigration history without bringing up all of the strong feelings that people were feeling about ICE officers on their own streets,” Barber said. Her students, who came from all fields of study, voiced strong reactions and came to class with questions about birthright citizenship and the rights of detainees. She tried to give them “the broader historical context to help them understand the current immigration moment.” The challenge for instructors, she explained, is not simply to provide facts and dates but to help students confront the emotional weight of seeing federal agents in their neighborhoods and then connect those feelings to the longer story of how the United States has regulated its borders, who has been welcomed, and who has been excluded or expelled.
Though Barber was not involved in the creation of the original immigration syllabus, as the Immigration History Research Center’s director since early 2025, she led the process of updating it, in conjunction with the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, an independent association for researchers. Two of Barber’s books are included on the new syllabus. Before she got to UMN, Barber said, she used the immigration syllabus to inform her teaching and research at SUNY Old Westbury. “I [first] came across the syllabus as an intervention into the broader political conversation,” Barber said. “I also have used it for years as a resource to help me as an immigration scholar understand the state of the field, development in certain subfields, what new scholarship has come out recently and how other immigration historians understand the way that the field has evolved.” For Barber, the syllabus is therefore not just a teaching tool for students; it is also a professional resource for scholars trying to keep up with a rapidly changing academic landscape. The second edition reflects recent scholarship that has reshaped the field, including new work on immigration enforcement, the carceral state, the role of women and children in migration, climate displacement, and the intersections of race, class, and national origin. It also incorporates digital humanities projects, archival collections, and public-facing writing that make the work of historians more visible and useful to a broader audience. That dual purpose—serving both classroom instruction and scholarly development—is one reason the syllabus has been widely shared and adapted across institutions of higher education.
The syllabus has also served as a resource for A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, a history professor and director of Latino studies at Penn State University. He first learned of it in 2016, when “immigration as an issue, as a phenomenon, had really migrated right to the center of American political life,” he said. Over the last decade, he has turned to the syllabus often, he said, because “it’s a statement on behalf of specialists in a particular field that say this is the most thoroughly documented, useful, accessible set of sources.” The new edition of the Immigration Syllabus features Sandoval-Strausz’s latest book, Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City (Basic Books). And though he is an authoritative researcher in some areas, he has also used the tool to help review the content of his own lectures. He said he would look at the Immigration Syllabus and ask himself, “Has there been anything published [recently] that might change the way that I see America’s immigration past?” That kind of self-reflection is increasingly important in a field where the political stakes are high and new archival discoveries can complicate long-held assumptions. The syllabus also allows faculty to expose students to voices that have historically been marginalized in mainstream immigration narratives, including Indigenous perspectives on borders, the experiences of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, the long history of anti-Latino sentiment, and the ongoing struggles for asylum seekers and refugees. By organizing materials around key themes and questions, the syllabus helps instructors move beyond single-story depictions of immigration and instead present the United States as a nation continually shaped by migration, conflict, and adaptation.
By putting the current moment in context, faculty can help themselves and their students prepare for whatever might come next. The updated syllabus is open source and freely available, which means it can be used not only by faculty but also by activists, journalists, and community educators seeking reliable information during a period of intense polarization. As the Trump administration continues to pursue aggressive enforcement policies, including the possibility of further mass deportations, not only in the workplace but also on college campuses, the classroom has become a front line of civic education. Historians who contributed to the syllabus argue that a basic understanding of immigration history is essential for democracy: it can counter misinformation, humanize people who are often reduced to political abstractions, and expose the cycles of fear and backlash that have recurred throughout American history. The Immigration Syllabus, in both its original and updated forms, represents a collective effort by scholars to make that history accessible and relevant. Barber and Sandoval-Strausz both emphasized that the resource is a living archive of scholarship and a call to educators to step into the role of public storytellers. It does not pretend to have all the answers, but it does provide the questions, the background, and the evidence needed to wrestle with them. In an era when political leaders have used false and dangerous claims about immigrants to justify sweeping changes to law and policy, the latest edition of the Immigration Syllabus offers teachers and students a way to think historically, critically, and humanely about the nation’s borders and the people who cross them. As Barber said, the goal is not simply to teach immigration history but to equip a new generation to understand the roots of today’s conflicts and to imagine more just futures. The release of the second edition is therefore not an endpoint but a continuation of a project that began as a worried response to a presidential campaign and has evolved into an enduring educational resource for a country still wrestling with what it means to be a nation of immigrants.