Imagine walking into a college classroom in early 2025, not knowing whether the people around you feel safe, angry, terrified, or all three. Outside, immigration enforcement has become visible in a way many Americans have never experienced. Inside, students are asking questions that have no easy answers: Who belongs here? What does the Constitution promise? Why do some immigrants get welcomed and others treated as threats? For professors who teach American history, these are not abstract questions. They are the questions of the moment, made urgent by raids, detentions, and a political climate that often feels hostile and unpredictable. In response to this crisis, a group of immigration historians has offered a powerful, practical tool: a syllabus. The idea began in 2016, when Donald Trump was running for president and made anti-immigrant sentiment the center of his campaign. He described Latino immigrants as “bad hombres,” accused them of being rapists and criminals, and turned immigration into a deeply divisive national debate. Immigration historians, watching this unfold, moved into problem-solving mode. They knew that good teaching could counter fear with knowledge. Six days after Trump first took office, they published an open-source document designed to help educators and activists inform public discussion. That first syllabus contained 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, all chosen to show the breadth and depth of the immigrant experience in America. It was a quiet, intellectual act of resistance: a way to remind the country that immigration is not a new crisis, but the very foundation of who we are.
Seven years later, those same historians realized their work was not finished. In Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign, the anti-immigrant rhetoric grew even more heated and more dangerous. The president falsely accused Haitian immigrants of eating family pets, a wild and damaging lie that nonetheless spread through the media and into the public imagination. By 2025, the researchers wrote in the introduction to an updated version of their syllabus, the nation “was embroiled in a surge of increased xenophobia and immigration enforcement.” It was time to revise. Now the University of Minnesota Twin Cities’ Immigration History Research Center, under the leadership of historian Llana Barber, has published the second edition of what is simply called the Immigration Syllabus. This updated edition is meant to be used by faculty all over the country. It suggests research papers and books that can be plugged directly into existing courses, helping students make sense of current events—including the violent actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on American streets. But it is not only for academics. It also includes newspaper op-eds, documentaries, and podcasts, making it accessible to nonexperts, community members, and perhaps even K–12 teachers who want to help young people understand what is happening around them. The goal, Barber explained, is 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.”
The updated syllabus arrives at a particularly frightening moment for immigrant communities and for anyone who cares about fairness in the legal system. The Trump administration has aggressively targeted immigrants, including college students, who often have little protection and much to lose. The Justice Department has filed twenty-five lawsuits over the last sixteen months to end policies that allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition. Those policies have already been rolled back in at least six states, and remain uncertain in many others, leaving students wondering whether they can afford to stay in school or even remain in the country. At the same time, the administration has been fighting legal battles over whether it can deport international students based on their speech, a chilling development for campuses that value open debate and academic freedom. The Immigration Syllabus is designed to meet this moment head-on. It covers topics like nativism, the historical periods of mass migration from Europe, the Chinese Exclusion Act, citizenship, labor, refuge and asylum, detention, deportation, and the long, stalled efforts at immigration reform in the twenty-first century. By connecting today’s headlines to the long arc of American history, the syllabus helps students see that current debates are not unprecedented. They are part of a continuing struggle over who gets to call themselves American—a struggle that has been with us since the beginning.
Llana Barber, who is now the director of the Immigration History Research Center and the chair of immigration history at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, did not create the original syllabus. But she knows exactly why it matters. Earlier this year, she began teaching an introduction to immigration history course that she had taught for more than fifteen years. This time, though, something was different. ICE agents had gathered in Minnesota as part of Operation Metro Surge, an enforcement effort that resulted in more than four thousand arrests, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. Nationally, thirty-three people died in ICE custody in 2025. The presence of armed federal agents in Minnesota communities left people on edge, and many U.S. citizens took to the streets to protest what they saw as an unduly harsh and unfair enforcement strategy. Then, just as the spring semester began, ICE and Customs and Border Protection officers killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, sparking protests near and far. Barber walked into her classroom knowing that her students were living through history. “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,” she said. Her students, coming from all fields of study, were vocal and shaken. They arrived with questions about birthright citizenship, about the rights of detainees, about what the government could legally do to people in their neighborhoods. Barber tried to give them what scholarship can offer: the broader historical context to help them understand the current immigration moment, and to help them think clearly and compassionately about the world they are inheriting.
Barber’s own relationship with the Immigration Syllabus began long before she came to the University of Minnesota. When she was teaching earlier in her career at SUNY Old Westbury, she used the syllabus as both a teaching tool and a scholarly guide. She first came across it, she said, “as an intervention into the broader political conversation.” But she also used it for years as a resource to help herself understand the state of the field, to see what new scholarship had emerged, and to learn how other immigration historians understood the way their discipline was evolving. In early 2025, she began leading the process of updating the syllabus, working closely with the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, an independent association for researchers. The new edition reflects the latest scholarship, including two of Barber’s own books. But it also reflects the emotional and political reality of the moment. A syllabus, after all, is not just a list of readings. It is a statement of what a community of scholars believes is important for the next generation to know. It is a way of saying: You are not alone in your confusion. You are not the first to feel afraid. Here are the voices of the past, the testimonies of immigrants, the lessons of history, and the evidence we have gathered so you can make up your own mind.
The syllabus has become a trusted resource for other scholars as well. A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, a history professor and director of Latino studies at Penn State University, first learned of it in 2016, at a time when “immigration as an issue, as a phenomenon, had really migrated right to the center of American political life.” Over the past decade, he has turned to the syllabus again and again, because, he said, “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.” His own latest book, Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City, is included in the new edition. But even though he is an expert in the field, Sandoval-Strausz uses the syllabus to review his own lectures and to keep up with new developments in immigration history. He looks at the list and asks himself: Has there been anything published recently that might change the way I see America’s immigration past? That is exactly what the Immigration Syllabus is meant to inspire—not blind certainty, but honest curiosity and a willingness to learn. By putting the current moment in context, faculty can help themselves and their students prepare for whatever might come next. In a time of fear and division, that may be one of the most important things education can offer.