Public Hearing » Joint Committee on Immigration Reform

Georgia State Capitol, Atlanta, Room 450

16 December 2010

I thank this committee for holding these public hearings on an issue important to Georgia

and to the country, and that is immigration reform.

I gather that immigration reform means different things to different people.

To me, immigration reform means expanding opportunity in the marketplace, in

education and in all areas of society in which an individual’s life intersects with the state.

Immigration reform means making the social world bigger. It means making our

community bigger and more inclusive.

I speak to this committee today as an individual. I do not speak on behalf of an

advocacy group or political entity.

I am a 17-year resident of Georgia. This past year as a volunteer for a nonprofit

literacy organization I have been teaching English, primarily to undocumented

immigrants. These are native Spanish-speakers from México, Guatemala, Honduras and

El Salvador. We meet at a recreation center off Buford Highway in northeast Atlanta.

I share some personal history before I say more about these students and their

unique situation in life. My secondary education took place in the mid- to late 1970s in

the suburbs of Washington, DC. Only in the past 10 years, by scanning yearbook photos

before high school reunions, have I realized a disturbing fact. And that is, I attended

segregated schools. These schools were in Montgomery County, Maryland, traditionally

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16 December 2010
one of the nation’s wealthiest public school systems, by and large progressive in outlook.

Scanning the yearbook pictures I notice that every fourth or fifth face is unknown to me.

This is surprising, because my graduating class in high school was relatively small—less

than 200. The faces I do not recognize are, without exception, faces of color. In origin,

they are Asian, African and Hispanic. These English as a Second Language students

occupied their own classrooms in the junior and senior high schools I attended. Although

we would graduate together, we never mixed. White students, in fact, made jokes about

them. It pains me to think that I may have been one of the ones laughing at these slurs,

born of youth and ignorance. We as students participated passively in a regime of

segregation, less acknowledged but no less real than separateness between white and

black.

You may be thinking that educational practice thirty-some years ago in a state

that is not Georgia has no bearing on the present conversation. I would agree, up to a

point. The fact is that law-making bodies such as the Georgia Legislature help shape the

social world. As Georgia and other states consider what I hope you will forgive me for

calling an “Arizona” system of enforcement—that is, a regime of crime and punishment

for undocumented migrants and their families—I think about my students on Buford

Highway and the students, my cohorts, 30 years ago that I never got to know.

In 1829 a Creek tribal leader spoke to the Creek nation, the Muskogean

confederacy that included Alabama, Georgia and Florida, about President Jackson’s

intent to relocate them west of the Mississippi. This leader said to them, “I have listened

to a great many talks from our Great Father. But they always began and ended in this—

‘Get a little farther; you are too near me.’ ”

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16 December 2010
 One question I ask of honorable legislators and Georgia citizens is, with Arizona-

style laws and additional limitations on immigrant rights, do we make criminals of a

group after their arrival in order to justify having called them “illegal” in the first place?

Do we send a message through such laws, “You are too close; we do not wish to see

you”?

To conclude, my students, who number among some 500,000 undocumented

immigrants in Georgia, who in turn number among some 12 million in the United States,

are sometimes tagged with the label “invisibles.” These students number among a further

millions upon millions who travel the world’s networks of migration. One of the women

in our class who works as a restaurant server at an elite Atlanta social club relates the

experience of customers looking past her, or of not speaking when she says “hello” to

them. I believe that we judge wrongly when we correlate such “invisibility” to a desire to

shirk responsibility. Undocumented immigrants are not invisible because they cannot be

seen. They are invisible because we are blind to their identity as human beings.

These students who occupy an English classroom on Thursday nights are my

friends. They form a vital part of my community of learning. They educate me about

courage, generosity, love and joy. If their rights as human beings are constrained, so are

ours.

I thank you for your attention and for your service on behalf of everyone in the

state I call home.

—John Turnbull
1780 Ridgewood Dr NE Apt R
Atlanta GA 30307
(404) 441-6777
johnt629@yahoo.com

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16 December 2010