Even though every article I write in this series is incredibly long, I always have to leave something out. Here are some of the other stories that were told about education, technology, and immigration this year – stories I didn’t fit into part 5 in my year-end-series:
“Palantir Provides the Engine for Donald Trump's Deportation Machine” via The Intercept
“This Is What It’s Like When A Father Of 4 Is Detained By ICE While Dropping His Daughters Off At School” via The LAist
“Teaching when students are full of fear: Inside Indiana's first school for new immigrants” via Chalkbeat
“Post Office Fails to Deliver on Time, and DACA Applications Get Rejected,” The New York Times reported last Friday. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services initially said that there was nothing they could do, but the agency appears to have changed its mind and will review the applications.
“How White House advisor Stephen Miller went from pestering Hispanic students to designing Trump’s immigration policy” via Univision
“Losing My Legal Status In This Country Feels Like A Cruel Joke ” via Buzzfeed
Paddington Bear and Immigration
The children’s author Michael Bond passed away this week. As a little girl, I was quite fond of his character Olga da Polga, a much more interesting guinea pig than my pet guinea pig ever was. Whenever I’d put my guinea pig out in a hutch on the grass in the back yard, he’d escape and run away; Olga da Polga, on the other hand, sat there munching grass and telling wild stories.
But it was Paddington Bear, of course, that was always my favorite. (On my website, I cite his “hard stare” as inspiration for my own.) I haven’t kept many childhood possessions – I didn’t keep The Tales of Olga da Polga – but I still have all the Paddington Bear books. (If my little brother is reading this, yes, some of these are probably yours. Tough shit. They’re on my bookshelf now.)
Bond created the character after buying a rather lonely looking teddy bear, so the story goes, and imagining what would happen if an unaccompanied bear turned up at a train station. At the time, Bond lived near Paddington Railway Station, which had been the site from which many London children were evacuated during World War II. Bond said that he had memories of those children with labels around their necks and all their possessions in a suitcase.
And so Bond gave us a bear from Peru, found at Paddington Station by the Brown family, sitting on his suitcase with a note attached to his coat: “Please look after this bear. Thank you.”
Paddington was a refugee, of sorts. He’d come all the way to London in a lifeboat, he told the Browns. He insisted hotly that did not make him a criminal. We should look after refugees, you know. We should take them in and feed them and care for them and protect them from unfriendly, prying neighbors.