While phrases about humanitarianism and illegality dominate the media, Binghamton University’s Óscar Gil-García works within migrant communities to redefine and understand the history of immigration policy and the health of these disadvantaged communities.

His advocacy and fieldwork most recently published focuses on immigrant children who have entered the United States without legal guardians — also known as unaccompanied minors — and how immigration procedures affect their well-being.

Increased enforcement practices allowing families to be separated have allowed a larger number of adults to be deported. Their children, often born in the U.S. and legally citizens, face hostilities, emotional traumas and other trials without their parents.

“It’s broadened my understanding that these children are not necessarily those that don’t have legal status,” Gil-García says. “We need to broaden our lens and understand how immigration practices have resulted in the production of unaccompanied minors in this country who are also U.S. citizens.”

Gil-García earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology at Vassar College before moving on to complete his master’s and doctorate in sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2010. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA, he worked as an assistant professor at DePauw University before accepting a position in human development at Binghamton’s College of Community and Public Affairs.

His past projects include research into the incorporation of Guatemalan refugees in the Mexican settlement of La Gloria, a petition to the Mexican government to initiate citizenship rights for members of similar settlements, and a photo-documentary that illustrated the strengths and stories of migrant families.

Some of the families Gil-García works with include parents without legal status in Mexico. If these parents have children born in Mexico, the children are barred from obtaining a birth certificate and become stateless. Other children have legal U.S. citizenship, but find difficulty in their entrance to the United States.

In one case, a father and his child, who wished to use his citizenship to study in the United States, approached border patrol for legal entry into the country, but were detained and separated. Due to their fears of deportation, U.S. family members who lacked legal status were unable to help. The child became part of the foster care system.

Gil-García and his wife are now taking fostering classes to care for this child.

“This has become my research. My wife and I can now be considered as a possible placement for this child, but the process has allowed me to learn that the people who are providing this information for prospective foster parents, they don’t know about the conditions of people being separated,” Gil-García says.

One aim of his work is to increase communication between institutions involved in separations, holding those who are harming immigrants accountable and teaching those who have the opportunity to help through affordable legal counsel and awareness. Another is to make it clear that U.S. immigration policy affects more than people at the southern border — it impacts migrants from all over the world, and U.S. citizens.

Sara Hobler, a Binghamton alumna who double majored in sociology and history, says Gil-García’s research can change the dialogue both socially and for students like her.

“Dr. Gil-García really hammered home the point throughout the course that good, well-executed research can be impactful and shape policy,” Hobler says. “I always had qualms about entering into academia and leaving the activist life that I’ve lived up until now, and he made me think ‘Maybe I’m not becoming a useless bookworm after all — I might decide to go get a doctorate.’”

The humanitarian language used politically to reduce immigrants and minors while bolstering border enforcement may actually do more harm than good in the fight for immigration rights. Empathetic legal advocacy focused on the individual may help these communities most significantly.

“We’re opening a Pandora’s box to allow the police state to surveil all forms of movement, citizen or otherwise,” Gil-García says. “We’re not going to be able to appropriately respond to large-scale social crisis with episodic humanitarian strategies but will actually need to employ strategic approaches to bettering human life and health in the long term.”

Wall, a historian who joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2010, received a highly competitive fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to research how Cold War politics and efforts by ethnic, religious, civic, patriotic and labor groups to spur, shape or halt immigration reform transformed vast swaths of American life.

“When President Lyndon Johnson signed the act into law under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, he downplayed its importance,” she writes in her proposal to the NEH. “‘[This] is not a revolutionary bill,’ he declared. ‘It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.’ Few predictions have proven faultier.”

The act did away with a system of national origins quotas in place since the 1920s that heavily favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe. It replaced this with a system that favored the reunification of families and, to a lesser extent, skills. This opened the door not only to Southern and Eastern Europeans, but also to millions of newcomers from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. It also put a ceiling for the first time on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, greatly contributing to illegal immigration from Latin America.

“Neither popular writers nor historians of postwar America pay much attention to how we got the Immigration Act of 1965,” she says. “It’s often portrayed simply as the product of a great liberal moment — we got the civil rights and the voting rights, and the Immigration Act got thrown in there too. … I’m interested in both how we got the act, and why it took the shape it did.”

Immigration reform then was just as contentious an issue as it is today, she says. The Cold War was raging, and proponents of reform argued that failure to make changes in the policy was offending the newly decolonized people of Asia and Africa that the United States wanted to keep out of the Soviet Union’s orbit. Ethnic groups such as Greeks and Italians used Cold War rhetoric too, arguing that population pressure in their home countries encouraged social unrest and provided a fertile ground for communism.

“There were also people on the other side of the equation, people who didn’t want to open the borders. They said, ‘Ah, well, if we open the borders, then we’ll have all these spies coming in,’” Wall says. It’s a familiar argument in 2016, with some politicians seeking to limit or ban immigration from Muslim countries because of the fear of terrorism.

Andrew J. Rotter, Charles A. Dana Professor of History at Colgate University, recommended Wall for the NEH fellowship. He says any book she produces will be carefully researched and beautifully written, in part owing to her background as a Wall Street Journal reporter.

“Wendy has an astonishing knack to make history come alive through the prism of current events — in this case, the (often poisonous and nearly always ill-informed) debate over immigration,” Rotter says. “Her story promises to place these debates in a deep and illuminating context.”

After Algeria won independence from France in 1962, political unrest and an expanding French economy led hundreds of thousands of Muslim Algerians to migrate to France. The French state’s solution to the unexpected migration was spatial separation of the Algerian population, but that was only the beginning.

Funded by several competitive fellowships, Wadowiec traveled to France and spent months chasing leads and collecting archival evidence of the effects of the mass migration. In colonial archives in the south of France, Wadowiec found the voices of Muslim Algerian women through a chance encounter with some surprising documents, changing the scope of her project entirely.

Before 1962, France had extended citizenship to Algerian men and women. Women in particular took this idea at face value. “There’s this explosion in this brief time period of letters to state officials from these women saying, ‘This is what I want from the state and this is how I view myself as a citizen,’” Wadowiec says. “But after ’62, that’s all gone.”

Wadowiec reframed her project to answer that gap in history: Why aren’t there records of these women after immigration?

“It’s not so much that I’m going to recapture voices that have been lost, because they’re lost for good,” Wadowiec says. “I want to explain the operations of both racism and sexism and how those things overlap in terms of citizenship.”

The French state considered the Muslim Algerians as a specific race rather than a religious minority. The Algerian women were seen as the embodiment of Islam — and as a danger to the identity of the French citizen.

“Women were specifically oppressed in a lot of the ways you see discussions about Middle Eastern women today,” Wadowiec says. “What my dissertation does is work through the roots of that and why we perceive Islam as a cultural racial threat.”

Wadowiec’s research is unique. Not much scholarship exists on this period and the application process to view many of the documents tests a scholar’s patience.

“Jaime is an infinitely creative reader of documents,” says Elisa Camiscioli, associate professor of history and women’s studies at Binghamton. “She uses school books, old-school nationality laws; she has very eclectic, amazing historical instincts.”

With her undergraduate students, Wadowiec stresses the importance of looking beyond what is familiar: “To go out in the world and explore is so important,” she says. “When you’re studying things like race, sexuality and gender, you kind of have to take that world view, adopt an open perspective.”