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Home » Interviews » Episode 14: Jo Napolitano

Jo Napolitano believes that giving immigrant and refugee students access to a good education is both the most moral and the most practical choice. Drawing on her own experiences as an immigrant and her years of reporting, she discusses the unlocked potential of foreign-born students. Tune in to also discover what she learned reporting on students at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Transcript

Denzil Mohammed: I’m Denzil Mohammed and this is JobMakers.

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Denzil Mohammed: The enterprising spirit of immigrants isn’t restricted to starting businesses. If you look deeper at what motivates immigrants and refugees to move to a whole new homeland, what it takes to learn a new language, culture and laws, and how they navigate various barriers, you’ll find that immigrants have a tremendous drive to do better, and this has always been the case throughout the U.S. history of immigration. For Jo Napolitano, journalist, former Spencer fellow at Columbia University and author of the new book, The School I Deserve Six Young Refugees and Their Fight for Equality in America, that enterprising spirit of immigrants and refugees across the nation, even at the U.S.-Mexico border, is something she has seen firsthand, especially among children. She’s seen them fight to go to good schools so that they can fulfill their dreams, learning with donated tablets in tents in Mexico during the pandemic. And she’s seen the outcomes, ambitious young adults who use education and the safety of the United States to thrive. Educating immigrant children, including those who are undocumented, is not only the moral thing to do, but an investment in our collective economic well-being. With better jobs, they can contribute more, and they can make lives better for all Americans, as you’ll hear about in this week’s JobMakers Podcast.

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Denzil Mohammed: Jo Napolitano, thank you for joining us in JobMakers. How are you?

Jo Napolitano: I’m great. Thank you so much for having me.

Denzil Mohammed: So this podcast is about enterprising immigrants and the kinds of things that America allows them to do. Give us your story of how you arrived in the US and where you are today.

Jo Napolitano: So I was actually born in Bogota, Colombia, and unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you feel the story turns out, I think it’s kind of cool. I was abandoned the very next day at a bus stop by my birth mother, and she had walked up to a woman who looked kind of reasonable, and handed me to that woman and said, you know, “Can you hold this baby for a minute? I forgot her blanket at my mother’s house. I’ll be right back.” And she never came back. So that woman stayed with me for hours and eventually I was taken to the police station and eventually the police tracked down my birth mother and she signed adoption papers, and I was placed in an orphanage. So I stayed there for 3.5 months, and not doing particularly well, not being given adequate food at all, in very, very, very bad shape up when I was adopted by a family from Brooklyn, New York. Actually, they were living on Long Island at the time, but they actually flew down to Bogota, got me, and took this kind of like perilous plane ride home. And I survived. And I was fed a lot of Italian food in a blender to make me kind of bulk up, and not, you know, succumb to this like acute-level starvation. And attended a solid public school, which is why I’m so interested in public education, and then went and got a nearly full ride to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, started writing for The New York Times when I was about 24, 25, stayed there for a couple years, then went to the Chicago Tribune for five year, then Newsday for five years. Then, when I was 40, I won a Spencer Education fellowship to Columbia University so that I could research and write a book on immigrant education, and the first chapter of that book is called “From Colombia to Columbia in Forty Short Years.”

Denzil Mohammed: Wow, that’s an incredible journey in just two minutes. How do you feel immigration has shaped your identity and the kinds of things that you’re interested in now?

Jo Napolitano: So, you know, it took me a while to kind of see myself as an immigrant because I did not intentionally leave Colombia or intentionally come here. But I guess that was kind of fated to have to happen and it has certainly worked out for me. In researching my book, which is called, The School I Deserve, I looked in a little bit on how Colombia is doing and how they were doing when I was born in the 70s. And these are really obviously, you know, we all know a pretty dire picture. As a matter of fact, Colombia, in 2016, had around that time about as many or slightly more internally displaced people than Syria. So that means people were inside their own country, running, you know, trying to find safety inside their own nation, which is a pretty bad situation. It wouldn’t be uncommon or a drug lord to come to your farm or house and say, “You don’t live here anymore. You got to go.” And things that were just really unimaginable here and just kind of like a lawlessness that goes on there. So that was the situation going on in Colombia clearly shaped my very early days. I believe that kind of like that incredible wealth disparity in the nation created like an upper class, oftentimes with a criminal element, and then just this enormous underclass. And where I was born, which is a place where I was abandoned, is a place called The Pillory. It’s where people would have had like public executions and hangings and really bad stuff happening. And so I kind of feel like, though I didn’t choose to come to Colombia, ’cause I was only 3.5 months old. That’s where I started and this is where I came to Long Island. The family that I was adopted by was very, very Italian-American, changed my name from Teresa to Josephine Napolitano and they had their own immigrant story, which in my experience, and this is kind of, you know, unlike some adoptees. Some adoptees will tell you a different story. But in my opinion, in my lived experience, their family background firstly became my family background. And it became more relevant to my life, as you know, when I looked at what’s going on in the people who are raising me. Like, what’s their backstory, their immigrant story? And that became, you know, if I had to track my family tree, I would track it from my relatives from. Italy, because their children are the ones who raised me. You know, it’s like their descendants had they had the greatest impact on my life. And so they had their own immigrant story. They had come from Italy. I would want to say, in the 20s, and my grandfather, who I was particularly close with, he was a really amazing guy who was a longshoreman in Brooklyn for 30 years, like working on the waterfront, that kind of classic, Italian blue collar life. And he had he was a smart guy, but he had to quit school in the 8th grade to join his father’s tailoring business, but he was a really a smart young man who didn’t want his education to stop there. And so he went on to his local public library every week and took out another like a classic work of literature and read it until he would have been like high school graduate age. And when I was told that when I was younger, it made an enormous impression on me. I just can’t even imagine quitting my own education in the eighth grade and then, you know, doing this labor type of job and then going to the library every week and checking out a new book and being so diligent about that and kind of making your own school. And I just thought that was really incredibly important and I was really impressed by that. And I loved him to pieces. He was like my favorite human being when I was a little kid.

Denzil Mohammed: That is incredible, that someone would take that on their own initiative to pursue their education as opposed to just, saying, “Let me just work and let me just make money and let me do what is expected of me. And a lot of people might say that that kind of enterprising spirit belongs to a particular era or to a particular place of origin, and that perhaps today immigrants are don’t have that kind of enterprising spirit. Now, this is something that we’ve seen in the research going back to the time of, like, Levi Strauss. Immigrants come here with an enterprising spirit. That’s what drives them to move to a totally unknown place. And perhaps it’s something that enables them to be more entrepreneurial, to start businesses at much higher rates than the U.S.-born. From your experience, both personally and professionally, do you see any sort of disparity between immigrants who came here before the immigrants who are here now, in terms of that enterprising spirit?

Jo Napolitano: Yeah, I’d say they’re more ambitious now. I would say when I was at Columbia University, I sat between two remarkable people who were former Somali refugees, and these were two graduate students at Columbia University. Both of them had come from a war-torn nation fleeing incredible violence in their homeland. Both had come in children. One of them was pursuing a PhD and I’m super proud of her. She rocks it out every day at the University of Texas system and the other one started the Sahan Journal in Minneapolis, covering his community and doing remarkably well and gaining recognition and awards. So, to me for someone to think an immigrant is here only as some sort of like societal leach that’s here to like take. I find that really a stunning categorization. I’ve heard as much said when I was at the Tenement Museum many years ago. Someone had remarked like, “Oh well, these immigrants back then,” that we were learning about who had come and were living in New York City in the early 1900s, “they’re different than the ones coming today.” And it would took me everything to say, like, “Yeah, by different, do you mean better. Like what exactly do you mean by different?” Now, of course, I thought my grandfather was amazing and my grandparents had their incredible story that I don’t think I’m better than them. But what I’m saying is that if for anyone were to imply that immigrants of an earlier era are somehow superior to who’s coming over today, I think that is just clinically insane. It literally makes no sense. It is refuted by study after study of how ambitious and how certain groups of immigrants make incredible leaps from one generation to another. Remarkably, I mean one of my really good friends, Veronica Calderon, who’s in my book, she’s my age, so mid-forties, and when she was growing up, she was raised by her two loving migrant farmworker parents. And so they would take her and her siblings all across the country to pick certain clock crops at certain times of the year. And that only guide now is an incredibly talented, really gifted ESL teacher with a four year undergraduate degree and master’s degree, and is truly a master of ESL education. And she was picking crops in a farm field for most of her childhood. So to you know to see her parents who were in their station that her getting a master’s degree and being so respected in her field is I think an incredible thing. So no, I wouldn’t say I have no idea if they are how to compare. I don’t know how you would even make it comparison. Part of me thinks of college attendance, but back then not many people went to college in the early 1900s. So it’s like, I don’t know exactly how you would measure that, but I certainly think that the immigrants coming here are no slackers.

Denzil Mohammed: One thing I want to point out is the disparity between the children of immigrants and their parents when it comes to education. And you talk about these sort of leaps and bounds that they’re able to achieve in America. Mexican immigrants, their children, where they reach with, where they reach with education compared to their parents, it’s a massive gap. You know, their parents come here probably with just a high school education or no high school education and their children end up in community college or four year colleges, and that’s the opportunity that America gives them. And I know that education and access to education is really important to you. You are just about to come out with a book on this topic when it comes to refugee youth. Talk a little bit about why you feel access to education is important when it comes to immigrants and what the findings of your book reveal.

Jo Napolitano: So yes, I wrote a book called The School I Deserve, and it’s about six refugees who had to sue their school district in Lancaster, PA, in order to be admitted to that school. So initially all of those kids were turned away from the school. Some of them, you know, heeded the school’s decision and just found work in the community and really struggled. Others pushed back and tried to get their refugee advocates to get them in school, and so the ones who pushed back were ultimately admitted to an alternative school that they felt was just really punitive, high discipline, not teaching them well. And they knew that this was wrong. So eventually the ACLU was alerted and sued the school district to put the kids in the mainstream campus and to stop the practice of either turning away refugees or putting them in a substandard school. And that’s what happened. So I wrote a book about that case and I did that because you know when we think of the term refugee in particular, we think of kind of like this huddled little group of people. They’re just dressed in rags and they have two cents in their pocket and they’re just in this really kind of decrepit state. And yeah, there’s a lot of humility and a lot of impoverishment that that folks may come here with. But these are people who are with brains, who are ambitious, who are intelligent, who work hard who know how to, or at least find out how to advocate for themselves, who contribute mightily once they’re here. I mean, the girl at the heart of the book is named Khadidja Issa and all she wanted to do was become a nurse. That’s what she wanted to do. And so when the school turned her away, what was unfortunate is they had a really robust nursing program at the mainstream campus, and that’s where she wanted to go. Ultimately, she was allowed in and now she’s in community college, chipping away at a community college degree year after year after year. She’s been in there about two years now. She finally is done with all of her ESL classes at the community college, and is starting to chip away the actual nursing work. And so it’s just like, wow, we created a situation that would deprive us of her and not allow her incredible ambition, intelligence, drive. When she was in high school and she was finally admitted to that nursing program. You know how you as a kid, you pass a quiz, you go okay, I got a 70, an 80, I passed? She would not stop taking quizzes, particularly on human anatomy, until she scored 100. So she would take it over and over and over and over until she got 100. And so her bookmarks were astoundingly high. And I really, I feel like there’s a lot of potential that we all benefit when we mine that potential using education as our tool, we all gain. You know, I’m terrified of needles, and I cannot wait until Khadidja can take my blood, because I know she’ll do it the right way. And so I just feel like, you know, look what we were going to do this child. We were going to make her be, you know, really deprived her and us of all of her abilities. So she would have either a stay-at-home mom, which is great. Stay-at-home moms are wonderful, but that’s not wonderful if you wanted to do something else or in addition to it. It makes me just so angry to see all of this wasted potential when we tell immigrants they’re not as good and they don’t have the right or maybe they won’t graduate. We gotta keep you out or put this put you on another track. It’s like we’re shooting ourselves in the foot. We’re denying ourselves this incredible intellect, and that’s just, that is completely unacceptable. So, you know, that’s really, I think all the time about all the children born in these nations who don’t have access to a solid education, cannot make their way to a university, cannot share their gifts with the world. And that is like taking a significant portion of the world just throwing it away. You know, we’ll never know those gifts and that’s sickening. I always think how much more advanced would we be with medical science, with human rights, with education, all these great things if we had everybody contributing. But instead we just cut off this massive, massive portion of the world every year through the lack of opportunity and we’re just slowing us down not to have people share all the gifts that they really have.

Denzil Mohammed: So your grandfather took education seriously. You took education seriously. Forced migrants, the refugees that you talk about in your book, take education seriously this year. Generations apart and yet still there’s this common thread. Are you sort of overgeneralizing this idea that immigrants are so enterprising? Is this really what you’ve seen in your work?

Jo Napolitano: Well, I’ll tell you this. I will tell you that I can speak to the importance of education for many immigrants, including unaccompanied minors and refugees. Khadidja’s family, who are the family at the heart of my book, could see mom is named Mariam and they had lived. Khadidja is from Sudan and she fled Sudan on foot to Chad with her family and when she was five years old to escape, unbelievable violence going on in Sudan. So she gets to Chad and she lived in a refugee camp for a dozen years. A dozen years. Like, we often think of people in refugee camps like they’re there for a few months or maybe a year. They were there a dozen years. So finally, years on, Mariam, Khadidja’s mom, learns that not only are they going to move from the refugee camp, but they’re coming to the United States. Now I, as an ethnocentric American, thought that anyone learning they’re coming to the United States is just thrilled beyond belief. That’s like the best possible thing that can happen. For Mariam, it was actually really sad because it meant that she probably would never see her parents again, with whom she lived in the refugee camp, big extended family, lots of brothers and sisters for her, aunts and uncles for the kids. And so, a move to America meant that a big portion of that life was just over. She knew she wasn’t going to be able to afford to come back or it would potentially not be safe enough to come back and see them. She was saying goodbye to them. And she’s younger than I am. She’s like in her early forties. She was saying goodbye to them for what she believed was forever. And so, she thought about not coming. She actually talked to her own mother and was like, “I might just not go, because I don’t want to be separate from all my family I’ve had all my life.” And then her mother said to her, “If you stay here, your children will have no future. They have to get an education. And they were not getting an education in the refugee camp.” They attended school only three months out of the year, ’cause that’s all that was offered. Khadidja was 18. She had a sixth grade education. You know, they had already lost so much education anyway. And so the grandmother said, “You cannot stay, you have to go and do this for them.” And so really education was the only reason she came. You know, that was the deciding factor. And I feel like you do see that a lot for children, it’s like, I think it’s very easy to understand a parent who has a child, growing up in a really difficult situation, wants to alleviate that, you know, wants to make that better, wants their child to have more choices, and so they’re going to go wherever that is, that opportunity is. And if that means they have to break the law and cross the border and do it, I mean, hell, Lord knows I would do it if I was living in a place that was really struggling. I mean, in my book, it talks about how I believe it was a woman from Harvard that said that some of the kids growing up in the Northern Triangle have a higher, just as bad of a death rate as people growing up in Aleppo. Like, it’s, literally that bad. It’s like in some of those communities, you know, it’s funny, when you and I, or many American people think about a child joining a gang, we always think about it as a decision. Like I’m a kid, I’m a teen, and I’m in a rough neighborhood. A gang may offer me a sense of friendship and family and may be able to look after me so I choose to join a gang. In some communities in the Northern Triangle, you’re born into the gang, like the street you’re born on. That’s the gang that rules this street. There is no choice. And so I think if we can imagine the situation people are coming from, that they will do anything to make that better. I mean, even my birth mother, I’m sure when she handed me to a stranger on that corner, she didn’t think she was making my life worse. She thought she was going to make my life better. Whatever she was living was so bad. You know, I was in very bad shape when I was born. I mean to be born five pounds, means she wasn’t eating burgers for lunch either every day. You know she was not doing well herself, so she handed me to someone who looks stable, thinking that it would bring me to a better place and I went to Columbia. So, like, I mean the university, so I’m like, it worked. You know like her active desperation worked for me. Like, you know, I’d love to be able to tell her that. Like, I’ve done all the things I was writing for The New York Times I was like 25 years old. You know, so that, so I feel like people make decisions out of desperation. I mean, if your house was on fire, would you and your kids stay in it or would you leave? You know, the moment my house goes on fire, I’ve taken my cat and my partner would get out of here, so makes sense to me.

Denzil Mohammed: I’m reminded of a graphic novel written by a guy called Jake Halpern who also worked for The New York Times. He won a Pulitzer Prize for it. It’s called Welcome to the New World, where he follows a Syrian refugee family that arrived in the U.S. on Election Day 2016. And some of the things you speak about, you know people think that, oh, I get to go to America. It’s like I won the lottery and I’m still looking forward. They had to leave their grandparents behind in a refugee camp in Jordan where they spent several years, where the children were not able to go to school. It really is a heart wrenching decision to do this and then up on top of that to adapt, to learn a new language, new rules, new culture, new schools, to be able to fight discrimination. They received death threats in their hometown in Connecticut. Bring us to this present moment, and help us understand what is happening at the border with unaccompanied minors. You just spoke about the Northern Triangle, and that to be in a gang is not to make a choice. Oh, I’m going to be in a gang. You’re born into these things. You born into very, very dire circumstances. Death rates are the same as in Aleppo. Help us understand what is happening with unaccompanied minors.

Jo Napolitano: Well, I’ll tell you that there’s a story I did about a school that volunteers created south of the border because children were being held so long, you know, more than a year south of the border waiting for entry because Trump didn’t honor the asylum seeking right that people have. And kind of suspended all the normal norms that we were used to seeing and in the order was suspended and some 60,000 people were waiting south of the border for a very, very long time. I wrote a story about that.

Denzil Mohammed: Is it, is that the remaining Mexico policy?

Jo Napolitano: Yes, and it was. The school is called the Sidewalk School. They’re actually pretty well known. They’ve been written about a lot. There’s ways to give money to them. Pretty remarkable organization and they serve children living south of borders. So I was actually a finalist for an Education Writers Association award for my story about the Sidewalk School because, during the pandemic, the Sidewalk School did a remarkable thing. They went virtual. So you really have to see how enterprising that is. I mean, you have kids living in tents with their families who were not allowed anymore to come to the school gathering grounds because it was too dangerous. And so the people who organized the school are pretty amazing people, raised enough money to buy tablets for the kids. So they were supposed to go like back to their tent and look at the tablet and do this, I mean really just you want to enterprising? Oh my God, it blows my mind. And by the way, the tents not in good shape. This is a very, very dire situation. And also through that school I had learned from another parent. Sometimes parents send their children from their homes. Let’s say the parents and family live in the Northern Triangle. They’ll send their children alone, and these are what are called the unaccompanied kids. They go with a coyote. They go with a human trafficker, I guess however you want to look at a person who takes them on this journey, sometimes these people look out for the kids and help them, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the kids are raped along the way, so I mean they face an unbelieving. Imagine sending your eight year old, your nine year old boy or 10 year old boy with people you don’t know, who are, in some instances very shady. I mean, I was talking to a teacher and a parent, and the parent had said, like “Even if my child is sexually abused along that trip, it’s still better than what they’re facing here.” That’s jaw-dropping. I mean, when we think about our children where like God, I would do anything to keep them from away from that kind of abuse. But a parent can look you in the face and say, “Even if they suffer that abuse, they have a better outcome and a chance to live, versus staying on this block here in Honduras or El Salvador.” That’s how bad it is. That’s jaw-dropping to me. And that’s a decision parents make for their children. And it’s like, wow, I mean, how bad do things have to be for you to agree to that potential of that kind of harm coming to your child?

Denzil Mohammed: That insight into what is happening at the border and the motivations of people I often see comments online about, you know, how can any parent want to endanger their child in that way? We need to understand how desperate circumstances are in other places and that universal theme among any parent who would just do anything to get their child out of that situation. And, thank you also for speaking as to the potential of these children, and what they can achieve in this country. Jo Napolitano, journalist and writer, thank you so much for joining us in JobMakers and sharing your own experience. We look forward to so much mamore work from you on this topic, and your views, I hope, would really educate our audience as to who immigrants and refugees are, what motivates them and what they can aspire to in this place called America. Thank you.

Jo Napolitano: Thank you so much for having me.

Denzil Mohammed: JobMakers is a weekly podcast produced by Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston, and The Immigrant Learning Center, a not-for-profit that gives immigrants a voice. I’m so happy that you joined us for today’s inspiring story of another enterprising immigrant. If you know someone we should talk to, email Denzil, that’s D-E-N-Z-I-L at jobmakerspodcast.org, and please leave us a review. I’m Denzil Mohammed. Join us next Thursday at noon for another JobMakers podcast