STATEN ISLAND — A week-long series of events at Wagner College, from Feb. 28 through March 7, will bring together students and community members to focus on two of the area’s largest immigrant communities and proposed changes in America’s immigration policy under the Bush administration.
“This will be a ‘border-crossing’ experience for our students,” said Wagner history professor Lori Weintrob, one of the event organizers. “They will not only cross the border between the college and the surrounding community; they will cross the ‘border of privilege’ between affluent Grymes Hill and Staten Island’s immigrant communities.”
The week’s activities will be co-sponsored by Wagner College, Project Pericles, El Centro de Hospitalidad, the African Refuge Center and the Mosaic Coalition, to bring to light the contributions and challenges of these fast-growing, ethnically diverse communities on Staten Island and in New York City.
Feb. 28 (Wednesday), 5 p.m.
The week will start off with an opening ceremony on Wednesday, Feb. 28, at 5 p.m. on the Wagner Oval, featuring food, art and music provided by El Centro de Hospitalidad.
At 6 p.m., the program will move indoors to Wagner’s Spiro Hall, Room 2, for an hour with speaker Deepa Fernandes, the host of WBAI radio’s “Wake-Up Call” morning program. Fernandes will be talking about her new book, “Targeted: Homeland Security and the Business of Immigration.” Community members and students — including those from Wagner’s departments of Education, Political Science and History who have been studying immigration — will ask questions and share their experiences.
Feb. 28 – March 7, outdoor art installation
An outdoor art installation will be featured all week on the Wagner College campus, beginning on Feb. 28 and ending March 7. The exhibition, modeled on Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates,” will consist of over 25 sheets hung along five walkways throughout the Wagner campus. Panels of the installation will be painted by students. The exhibition, as a whole, will be evocative of the wall being built along the border between the United States and Mexico. A similarly provocative piece is being planned simultaneously to be exhibited at Elon College, North Carolina.
March 3 (Saturday), Clifton clean-up
On March 3, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Wagner College students will join community members in cleaning up a lot adjacent to the African Refuge Center, 185 Park Hill Ave., in Staten Island’s Clifton neighborhood, for a future garden project. The African Refuge Center is located in the heart of Staten Island’s Liberian community, which is the largest community of Liberians in the world outside Liberia itself.
An after-school literacy program at the center, staffed by Wagner students and sponsored by the International Rescue Committee, began six months ago. The current program builds on an earlier Wagner College literacy initiative at nearby P.S. 57 that dramatically improved the school’s third-grade reading scores.
March 7 (Wednesday), 6 p.m.
The week of immigration-related events at Wagner College will wrap up on Wednesday, March 7, at 6 p.m. with a student debate in Spiro Hall, Room 2. Students will debate both sides of the “guest worker” concept and the U.S./Mexico wall. Students participating in the debate, both Republican and Democrat, will prepare their debate points in response to the guest-worker program articulated by President Bush in his 2007 State of the Union address.
The debate is part of a larger program on six college campuses organized by “Debate for Democracy,” a pilot project initiated last year by Project Pericles. “D4D,” as the project is also known, will hold a faculty/student conference on the Wagner College campus over the weekend following the debate, March 10 and 11.
The public is invited to attend all of the events planned for the week of Feb. 28 through March 7 at Wagner College.
For more about Wagner College, visit us on the Web at www.wagner.edu .
