When Care Becomes Too Careful: Teaching amid Immigration Precarity

Words That Refuse to Remain Words

Deportation. ICE. Visa. Travel restrictions. Social-media screening. An “admit-until” date.

Lately, these words refuse to remain only words in my life.

I hear them as a transnational scholar and in conversations with students who have crossed borders to study, answer a calling, or build lives across more than one place. A policy change can enter the classroom before we do—through a delayed visa appointment, a family member’s status, or the question of whether visiting home is worth another border crossing.

As I write in early September 2026, changes under the Trump administration make this uncertainty more immediate. F, M, and J visa applicants remain subject to online presence review, while a Department of Homeland Security rule scheduled for September 15 would replace “duration of status” with fixed admission periods for F and J students and exchange visitors. Students and I are trying to understand what these changes mean for study, travel, work, and future plans.^[i]

In our classrooms, these words may be topics for theology, ethics, or pastoral care. But for some students, they arrive with bodies, papers, families, borders, prayers, fears, debts, and futures attached.

What kind of pedagogy becomes possible when immigration policy is not an abstract topic, but a daily atmosphere?

My first response is to protect my students. I want them to take intellectual risks without being forced into personal or legal ones—and to speak and create without calculating whether visibility itself is dangerous.

But I do not want protection to become the only way I know how to see them.

When Care Becomes Too Careful

Even as I try to imagine a pedagogy attuned to deportability, I hesitate.

It can sound like one more instruction: Be careful. Be sensitive. Do no harm. All of this matters. I am not asking faculty to care less. I am asking what happens when care becomes a narrowing way of seeing.

Care can become too careful when I lower expectations without asking what support a student wants, avoid difficult material, interpret silence only as fear, or turn a check-in into a request for disclosure. In trying not to harm a student, I may decide who they are before listening.

Deportability is not an identity or a label for undocumented people. It names a condition produced through law, surveillance, uncertain status, and the possibility that immigration systems may interrupt a life.^[ii] Undocumented students, international students, refugees, permanent residents, and citizens do not face the same legal conditions. Perhaps immigration precarity is broader, while deportability names its sharpest edge: exclusion, detention, or removal.

Deportability also travels through families, friendships, congregations, and classrooms.

A student may be physically present while part of their attention is elsewhere: a visa appointment, a family member’s status, or a future that feels suspended. This does not mean the student is less committed. It means learning is happening amid fear, responsibility, hope, humor, fatigue, and ordinary life.

The Right to Be Ordinary

Faculty need to be careful about what we ask students to share and how easily “immigration policy” can become family, paperwork, debt, fear, prayer, and love.

And yet, in our desire to care well, we may see students living under immigration precarity mainly through fear, trauma, risk, and vulnerability.

By ordinary, I do not mean untouched by precarity. I mean not required to represent it—or to perform resilience for us.

Students may live under real risk. But their lives are larger than risk. They may also be funny, brilliant, impatient, angry, joyful, bored, and intellectually restless.

What if such a pedagogy makes room for uncertainty without letting it become a student’s whole story?

Pedagogy cannot remove the legal conditions producing precarity, but it can refuse to make students prove, perform, or explain them. It may offer flexibility without forced disclosure, choices when assignments invite personal experience, and teaching that does not turn international or immigrant students into living case studies. It can maintain rigor while asking what support makes learning possible.

It may also honor students’ right not to explain or translate their lives or turn private experiences into material for our learning.

Perhaps it means creating classrooms where students can simply be students—students who disagree with us, love theory, are tired of theory, and talk about food, music, family, faith, work, beauty, and the future.

Students who are shaped by deportability but not defined by it.

Careful Enough for Life

I have listened to students wonder whether visiting family is worth another border crossing. Friends and colleagues have shared worries about visa status, work authorization, and the fragile timelines through which governments and institutions shape who may stay, teach, study, and belong. Some of us who teach carry these words too, though not with the same legal risk or institutional power.

I do not know whether “deportability-attuned pedagogy” is the right phrase. But I want a pedagogy that does not confuse care with pity, sensitivity with surveillance, or trauma-awareness with a narrowed imagination of our lives.

What might become possible in our classrooms when immigration precarity is recognized but not allowed to tell the whole story?

What if fear, anger, boredom, humor, ambition, uncertainty, and joy can all become part of the learning we do together?

Perhaps care is careful enough when it recognizes danger without allowing danger to tell the whole story—when it makes room for students to name who they are and who they are becoming.

Notes & Bibliography