thank you all for being here tonight i'm emily reardon and i'd like to welcome you on behalf of the friends of the belmont public library belmont against racism and the human rights commission who are all  program thank you also to the belmont media center for recording the presentation if you have friends who wanted to be here tonight but are away on vacation you can tell them that soon they'll be able to go to the belmont media center website and see the tux tonight we are very happy that susan eaton director of the silliman center for the advancement of philanthropy at brandeis university will speak about her book integration nation immigrants refugees and america at its best she'll take us on a journey across the united states on the road she traveled with a team of journalists called one nation indivisible beginning in two thousand and eleven they were looking at cities and towns that have found innovative ways to incorporate immigrants into the economic and social fabric of community life with action taken by local governments non profits faith communities and individuals and to bring these ideas home lindsey rinder director of english and english language learning for the belmont public schools will give us a snapshot of immigration in belmont where do our students come from what languages do they speak why have their families chosen belmont as their new home and what are the schools doing to ease their transition lynsey rinder has been teaching in belmont for thirteen years and directing the english and e l l departments for seven years she has also worked as an educator in east palo alto st louis and this is in the indian reservation please welcome lindsey to be here partnering with the library and i'm so happy in particular to be here to talk to you about our own bilingual belmont and what an international community this town really is all right so i have a couple different ways to share with you information about all the different languages that our students speak the graphic right here is a visual way of representing the most common languages that are new immigrant students speak chinese is the most common language spanish and korean follow japanese and russian are also common languages arabic is very small you may be able to see it just over korean but that is starting to grow we have more students speaking arabic and turkish who are coming and that leads me to talk a little bit about why our students come here i it's not numerically true but generally speaking we can divide our population in half about half of our students are coming because their parents have agreed to become postdocs at mit who are researchers at harvard doctors in the many boston hospitals that we have they're coming for usually a shorter period of time a few years they usually are bringing a lot of  resources background knowledge very cosmopolitan experiences with them oftentimes these are very sort of flat earth families that have lived in multiple places in the world and know how to navigate different cultures and find their way in different places about half the other half of our population is coming because they haven't had the sorts of opportunities they want to have in their home countries they're coming here for economic opportunity but most importantly every single one of them whether they're coming for just a few years or whether they're coming to stay they are all coming because they value education every single family who moves into one i would say is coming to belmont because they prioritize their children's education and are willing to make sacrifices small and large so that their kids can have the best education that they can possibly find and they support their kids in many different ways to participate in  activities that our school system offers to study on their own to find other opportunities outside of our schools in order to learn english in order to learn many other things as well now we have a larger immigrant population in tallinn than just our students and it's growing if we looked at the whole district back in two thousand and twelve there were forty six different languages represented among all of our students not just arielle students and forty eight different birth countries ranging from our media to respect stamp in two thousand and sixteen we're up to fifty seven different languages in the district with eighty three different birth countries so we're really starting to draw from every single corner of the earth and i just took a few representative sampling so if we were to look at all of the countries students who are born in that begin with the letter m we would find macau malaysia moldova and mongolia if we were to look at the letter k we would find kazakhstan kenya and korea so we really have an international community in our schools and in our town to you go so what does it mean to be an e l l in our town first of all it means that you're in good company we have a growing global citizens one out of every seventeen students in the district is in the yellow students still learning english and that's one out of every ten at the elementary level some of our students are new to this country and to english but many of our l's are acquiring two languages at once they're still developing their native language but they've already learned a lot of english they're working towards grade level proficiency still we do have some  particularly in kindergarten who were born here but the vast majority of our students are immigrants all of our students including our students most certainly are important parts of our school communities as a town we are also an international town at the last census which was back in two thousand and ten twenty five percent of town residents were born outside of the united states and thirty percent of those aged five and above spoke another language at home that's actually more than the percentage of students in the public schools who speak another language at home that's about twenty percent during the last school year so i want to talk a little bit about ways in which we build community and work to support our yes well students while also drawing on their strengths so how do we build language as part of community to be in the all student means that you have we tell the elementary students a special group of friends and helpers and you build friendships through community activities in your yes all class and where possible you share a home language with a partner someone who is in your home classroom your home room if we can make that happen so that you have someone to share your home language with and both students can use that language we have other ways too that we  support our students to help each other these pictures are from our cross age reading buddy program the bigger taller students are the high school students they're all students and they  worked on picture books reading fluency pronunciation expression so that they could then share those picture books with their cross age reading body who was a kindergarten student and at the wellington elementary school which is a short walk from the high school so then those high school students who got had an authentic context to practice their merging literacy skills in english also had an authentic audience the kindergarden students with whom to share those books we also encourage all of our internationally based students whether they're l students or not to volunteer at our yes all summer camp so we have usually two or three high school students at any time in the  room there are supporting kids they often share home languages with some of those kids but they're also learning from the e s l teacher and the other support staff who are in the room and some of them do go on to pursue teaching careers at these for a little while after graduation the last example is we have a very new chinese in wish exchange conversation exchange program at the high school so we have a group of chinese speaking students who are learning english and a group of english speaking students who are learning chinese through our foreign language program and so they met for an hour a week after school and they spent the first half an hour practice in speaking in chinese and then the students were the experts and then they spent the second half an hour practicing speaking in english when the english speaking students were the e we're very proud of our students and our international community here in town i wanted to close with one of my favorite quotes from a student this past year there was a group in the cherry mixed grade level group of all sort of intermediate proficiency in english who like to start every period by having a discussion of current events they were very interested in what north korea was up to and all those all the sort of global scene and and they were able to do this even though they came from a very wide range of countries and one of the students remarked toward the end of the year i like how we come from countries that do not always get along but in here we can be friends and make connections mentioned earlier she's the director of the silliman center for the advancement of philanthropy at brandeis and there she works for social justice with funders academics and non profits she's also a professor at brandeis as well as the harvard graduate school of education i first came across her work when i moved to boston in the early two thousand and i read her book the other boston busing story about the voluntary desegregation program meco which belmont is a part of and has been for decades and we're very grateful to pars support for  transportation options for our students from boston from reading her work i imagine that susan's perspective on social justice is to keep looking for the success stories in the winds big and small so that we can learn from those stories garner hope from those wins and keep our eyes on that long moral arc of the universe bending always toward justice i'm looking forward to learning more about it from susan tonight thank you thank you thank you thank you emily everybody for coming out that was a fabulous presentation and it's rare that i come and speak to a place where i get to learn about the local context and this just a really powerful way to demonstrate that you know in a in a place like these issues that i'm going to talk about today i really are quite selling it maybe in a different way than they are in a lot of the places that i'm going to be talking about but still it's clear that this community has a real commitment to ensuring that that immigrant students that immigrants an immigrant and young people who are children of immigrants get the opportunity or able to you know benefit from all the opportunities that exist in this community and in the region yes so as emily mentioned this book integration nation in this project was it is a collaborative project i oversaw the project and wrote most of the stories that are contained in this book but it began as a project in two thousand and eleven called one nation indivisible funded by the kellogg foundation and the ford foundation and the idea was to as emily said  across the country and look for document and amplify the voices of people who are incorporating immigrants and being inclusive of immigration and here we go and what common native from the project was this book called integration nation and i'm showing the cover here because when the designer first sent me the cover of the i wasn't crazy about it and being somebody who's always concerned about racial diversity and ensuring that there's representation of all racial and racial cultural groups in different venues and public presentations i said you know i feel like there's just too many white people in this in this cover and i said you know some immigrants are white but not many of them and so i'm a little troubled by it and he said well you know i read your book really carefully and i loved it and to me i think that this cover works because this isn't a book that's just about immigrants it's a book that's about all of us and so if you really look at the representation it pretty much does represent the country as a whole and i said to say thank you for him telling me what my book was about  designers they see the world in different and important ways so what i'm going to do tonight is tell very truncated versions of four stories from this book from boston north carolina mississippi and utah but before i start i just wanted to give a little bit of context for the you know what sort of impelled this book so in two thousand and ten and as a lot of you know the state of arizona passed a law called s b ten seventy and that law made it easier for the state to deport people who were in the country without legal documentation it didn't number of other things but one of the major things that added civil rights and human rights advocates were worried about was the fact that it would encourage racial profiling right it would say zero zero zero people who look a certain way we can follow them around and ask them for documents and potentially violate their human rights after s b ten seventy was passed in arizona many east central states followed suit including alabama georgia south carolina and indiana many of those laws were we either shot down completely and revoked or significant portions of them were deemed to be unconstitutional by the federal courts there were some municipalities as well that were passing these kinds of laws including laws that made it a crime to give a person who is undocumented or ride in your car for example or to spend time and sleep at your house those were all considered crimes in addition to hiring people who  undocumented or assisting them in getting work or assisting them in getting housing or providing them housing so all of this was going on and as we see right now at the presidential campaign the cameras turned right all the cameras turned to that kind of noise and that kind of conflict i was in news paper for reporter for a long time and i learned that the conflict narrative is what we go toward and so there is so much there was so much noise out there in the universe about all of the negative things that were happening in terms of excluding immigrants or trying to you know get immigrants out of the country that were here without documentation parallel to this i had also been working with the kellogg foundation to try and understand the state of immigrants in several states across the united states and what i was learning by talking to people is that while all this was going on in the media and there was all this noise many times in local communities in places like belmont oftentimes in public libraries and in centers in and among people who weren't terribly ideological people were doing something quite different  they were happy that immigrants had moved into their communities they were as lindsay is talking about working really hard to incorporate immigrants fully into all of the opportunities in the social and educational lives of their communities they were speaking out publicly about the importance of this and leaders were were talking about the importance of bringing more immigrants to places that had lost population and so but there wasn't really very much understanding about this those stories really weren't out there in the media so this book was an attempt to to try and bring those stories to the to the forefront and as you can see with donald trump i have been extremely successful  making sure that the dialogue is all about inclusion no i haven't but i'm still trying to my own way so just a little bit of context before i start about  immigration generally right now about forty three million immigrants live in the united states and that's about thirteen and a percent of the u s population and of this group about eleven point five million immigrants are here in the country without the legal documents that make it legal for them to be in the country and this is an important statistic and lindsay's lindsay's presentation really i think brings list brought this to life as well about one in four children in the united states have at least one parent who is an immigrant and so what does that mean what are those numbers mean to me it means if you're a person who's concerned about the future of the united states concerned about the future of our children you need to be concerned about the future and the possibilities and the opportunities that are available for for immigrants now this is called immigrant integration integration nation so what is immigrant integration by using the word integration leaders of what is really could be called now a new movement intentionally distinguish themselves from older efforts of what was called assimilation and still is often called assimilation which historically has  required a sharing of culture and language and customs as part of the process of acceptance and success in mainstream america ev i'm alone now who is the director of the massachusetts immigrant rights advocacy coalition here talks about it this way she said assimilation implicitly privileges the values and interests of the receiving community but in contrast integration has come to mean valuing what diverse newcomers bring with them as well as emphasizing what is needed to ensure their success and their potential contributions to the receiving communities so i'm really concrete thinker and when i see things like this i need to understand how it  looks and i'm hoping to show you that with some of the some of the stories i'll start to tell our first story takes place nearby in boston and it begins with this this woman maria who upon graduating at twenty one years old from regis college with a degree in social work took a job can you hear me here's this echoing weirdly it feels like it's a little feedback a little bit all right  took a job as a social worker and her job was really straightforward she worked for an agency in which she had to work with women who were quite poor many of whom had been homeless nearly all of whom had been who were survivors of domestic abuse and ma them up with services health services educational services for their kids housing food stamps all of those basic things nearly all many of the women who she was working with were immigrants and she saw a great needs of the communities that she was working with but she also saw something else she saw incredible assets that weren't being tapped into she left home every day amazed by the resilience that her many of her clients displayed and the fact that they nearly all of them spoke to languages english and whatever their native language was and many of them all of them really had navigated incredibly complex cultural cultural situations crossing cultural barriers learning to adapt and learning to survive under some really tough circumstances and so her goal became not just to mash the match the women up with services that they need as if they were charity cases but she began to still understand what what did the women have to offer how could we put their skills to use in a way that would lift them out of poverty and also benefit the communities in which they were settling and so she went to the library right were all good things begin and she wanted to and she started looking at books about careers and job projections and what the research told her excuse me to was that one of the one of the fastest growing jobs in the united states for the next thirty years was going to be medical interpretation and translation and so at twenty one years old she said well that's easy all i have to do is match up the jobs with the women but of course she found out it was more complicated than that she found that the women play it she found that you know going to a medical interpretation class cost a thousand dollars if you didn't have a thousand dollars lying around you couldn't take the class if you didn't have babysitting services for your kids you couldn't take the class if you didn't have transportation you couldn't take the class all of those things and so she began to identify all of those barriers and she created a grant proposal wrote a grant proposal at twenty one and she got some money from a social entrepreneurship organization to begin an organization called found in translation this in two thousand and fifteen was the graduating class twenty fifteen she started her program five years ago with ten students and last year this most recent class of graduates in two thousand and sixteen graduated from fifty eight women and there were six hundred eighty seven applications for those slots women come from all over the world so the languages represented here include a mark polish russian spanish portuguese haitian creole and chinese japanese many different languages she found that when she was doing her research she found that the average salary for a woman in this field coming out at the entry level was about forty five thousand dollars and that would represent a five hundred thirty percent increase in the salary of the of the women who she with the families and which she was working with the other thing that this program does which is really important is it creates a community of support among the women it provides mentors long term for women after they graduate and provides help with contacts in the future the women the organise the organization help set up linked in that counts and it also has developed a really positive reputation within the medical community so it has tremendous support among individual doctors and practices among clinics and hospitals many of the people who i talked to when i was writing the story many of the doctor said that those are the women who we seek out those are the people who want first for our jobs because they often can really understand and relate to the kinds of challenges that many of the patients have had over the over the course of their lives this woman sarah pheno saltsman is from russia she was a doctor in her home country and when she came here she worked drawing blood and worked cleaning program as a medical interpreter and i just want to read a little bit from syria if i can find the i'm sorry sorry my eyes are just at the age where they're it's unclear whether i'm going to be able to read or not ok now i'm going  advice though she left her age off her application i did not like being dishonest but why would they want to make this kind of investment in an older person she says a staff member of found in translation called her she told me if you are worried that we were discriminated against discriminate against you we would not do that saltsman recalls i told her my birth year i still didn't think they would be interested in me but they were very interested she sat for an interview she aced the language proficiency tests i still didn't think they would call saltsman says but they called it from the start was also has been among the most exuberant members of a class of particularly vibrant women during the show went on culturally based home remedies several women offered samples of soothing oils including are gone from morocco and from senegal some of them topped up the wonders of sage and other herbs for healing rashes speeding up recovery from colds or aging depression  contribution inspired the greatest intrigue grinning she stood up and displayed a brown leech in a jar of water the women some of them gasping and recoiling others laughing and all of them curious passed the leech around beaches are useful for a lot of conditions altman explained but in the united states they are f d a approved remedy to encourage healthy blood flow and prevent clots after skin grafts and amputation looking back on her more than two decades in the united states and her twelve weeks at found in translation and translation so says if i had come to this country in discovered something like found in translation when i first got here tears come to her eyes she pauses well i would have had a totally different life a better life and she's not referring to money sure a service secure income would be nice she says but no it was the encouragement that i was it was that i was told yes this country needs what you have you have value that's what makes all the difference in the world so twenty three million people in the united states about nine percent of the  population are not profession in english and this is an increase of about eighty percent since one nine hundred ninety and federal laws in every state that apply to every state guarantee medical patients the right to free and competent interpreter and  n the translator of what are called vital medical documents these laws are not enforced in many hospitals and so these women really make a crucial difference in providing the dignity and ensuring that women immigrants get a fair and high quality medical care and it's just more pictures and this is the classroom twenty fift creating all kinds of jobs it was creating high level jobs for engineers it was creating jobs for academics and for researchers and it was also an all of that economic activity was also creating a lot of low wage jobs as well there were more restaurants and more hotels and so as a result that area was attracting many many many more immigrants and i'm going to start by reading a little introduction from one of those immigrants from mexico  valuable in his adopted city always be ready to sprint he was sixteen with a sixth grade education when he followed his father from mexico to the booming research triangle his father set up a bank with a durham's downtown convention center and for raila got hired to work alongside him my dad had a car but he had two jobs really recalled there wasn't a lot of bus service so i had to walk during the daytime it was ok but sometimes at night time it was dangerous a lot of times i had to run and people would run behind me i was eighteen nineteen years old so he pauses and laughs nervously you can run fast for ayla was an attractive mark even though he had a bank account many of the long lived young latino men arriving in durham during the one nine hundred ninety s did not that meant they carried a lot of cash with them some of them were afraid of the police either because of their legal status or because of the reputation of the police back home and they were reluctant to report armed robberies during those years you could rarely turn on the t v without hearing terrible news such as the one nine hundred ninety seven murder of jose oriana a salvadoran immigrant who was gunned down as he was walking to a convenience store near duke university i was scared his first instinct was understandable go back to my country and never come back and so during these years the police obviously were troubled and advocates for us still the growing latino community in the growing immigrant community gathered police officers and initially asked for more  coverage and more protection in latino neighborhoods but as the weeks went on what the advocates and the business community and the law enforcement officers in the chambers of commerce realized was what they needed was a place for people who were poor and who were undocumented to be able to put their money so that they could begin to build wealth and as a result of this understanding over time the latino community credit union was born in north carolina and if you think about it it was a really interesting enterprise the goal was to get this is a bank to get as many poor people as possible to come and be members of the organization all you needed to open an account was five dollars and the idea and so initially people were doubtful even people within the immigrant community and they were saying you know i don't think you're going to get people because people are not going to trust the banks but what happened was the relationship between law enforcement latino advocates and safe leaders so from and other faith leaders began to talk about the opening up of the latino credit union and after this first time after this first sunday when it was mentioned there was the first branch around the door around the block people lined up some of them holding jars of money to bring into the bank it is now the fastest growing credit union in the united states it was originally launched in two  thousand it's got fifty five thousand members not all of them latino and not all of them immigrants nearly all of them are people low incomes i think ninety seven point five percent of people with extremely low incomes there are twelve branches now across the state of north carolina with one hundred seven million dollars in assets they offer education on fair loans and they also work as advocates against things like predatory lend and you know rent to centers and and payday loans and all of those kinds of things and so it's begin to it's been a place not just where people can put their money and take out small loans and build their businesses and build their wealth but also something that protects the community and also encourages activism among the community  living in deep poverty and she was cleaning houses for you know just on her own here and there whatever she could find really living hand to mouth but back in her country she had been something of an entrepreneur and she had had a domestic cleaning service back in her country and she had had employees and she had run a pretty fairly successful business and so she wanted to do that again but didn't even have the five hundred dollars to invest in you know a decent vacuum or supply and so she found out about the latino community credit union she went in and she took out a five hundred dollars loan she bought the supplies she needed and then five years later she has six employees and she has a middle class income all of her employees get full health benefits and she has her own very successful business and there are many many stories of those among you know many people that i talked to in the community but i think one of the most important contributions of this credit union isn't even related necessarily to economics there was a study done out of duke university recently and then repeated a few it is being repeated now again looking at crime rates in places where these credit unions have a strong foothold and what they found is controlling for numerous variables that if a credit union existed in the place the crime rate in the would actually be much much lower because it encouraged commercial activity and encouraged people to put their money into a safe place and so reduced armed robbery and made the community safer so that's just a kind of like you know extra benefit that you get from this is the inside of the flags i'm going to skip mississippi if we have time later we can talk about it just because i feel like we for the interest of time here not that mississippi isn't very interesting but i cause i do want to talk about you i want to have time to talk about utah so in two thousand and six does anybody remember what was happening in two thousand and six with regard to immigrants and immigration and immigration advocacy ok so in two thousand this is the show that it wasn't that effective even though in two thousand and six there was a lot proposed in the u s congress by a gentleman by the by the name james sensenbrenner which would have made being in the country without legal documentation a felony that would move it from a civil violation to a felony and as a result immigrants all around the country began to organize there were marches and many cities i see a lot of people nodding their heads now remembering this right and it was really the first time that a lot of people who weren't already interested in immigration and watching immigration began to understand whoa cow there is a lot of immigrants in the heart communities but in no other place were people i think more shocked than salt lake city utah these are the streets of salt lake city utah in two thousand and six why we're there so when i say utah what do you all think of mormons right and it is in many ways still a fairly homogeneous place but it is changing and is changing rapidly if you remember in two thousand and two salt lake city was the site for the u s olympic for the i'm sorry for the olympics and so because it was a site for the olympics there were there was a great and  very fast creation of jobs in construction the infrastructure in the state of utah really needed to be built up large swaths of utah were quite rural and they needed to be connected to salt lake city and partly part and park city and so what happened was immigrants mostly from originally from mexico and guatemala who had settled in other states near utah nevada or even california began coming to utah for these jobs now originally people thought ok this is great but they'll probably leave afterwards and go back to those other places because why would they want to live in a heavily white mormon state but something surprising happened immigrants really seems to like utah and began settling and industries because of the olympics started getting built up and immigrants began finding you know decent but low paying jobs still  recreational the recreational industry and sort of the spinoff industries that became a result of that and so here we have a state that unlike california and unlike nevada historically has not had large shares of latino immigrants and really wasn't very well equipped to deal with this very rapid very intense cultural change and so what did educators do when large shares in many communities not all communities but in many communities began showing up well they did what educators often do in places they separated the now spanish speaking children from the children who spoke english and they had a kind of parallel school system going so all of the resources and energy of the educators were put in to teaching the students who spoke spanish teaching them english and this went on for years but on the ground many educators began to feel that this just was not working it wasn't working only because the students the spanish speaking students weren't doing well in their in their subjects but because but they weren't but also because the school was just so disconnected that there was the separation that just didn't feel right and meanwhile you had communities that were still very very separate from each other no was really getting to know each other or talk to each other and so many of the school print principals started looking for a better option and they learned about what many other states have been doing for years which is a form of education which i'm sure lindsey knows a lot about which is two way immersion program it's very similar to what you describe with the chinese english speaking students who are trying to learn chinese and what they wanted to do was bring students who spoke spanish together with students who spoke english and have both groups of students learn in two languages learn the content of the school work in spanish and in english and at the same time learn each other's languages so interesting lee at the same time at the state level state legislators were very concerned about the fact i wanted to bring in more international business and so they said to attract more into international business and to make you more competitive with all of the global companies that are looking for places to settle we want to be sure that the people here are more cosmopolitan and speak other languages and so they started a grant program that would allow the public schools would give ten thousand dollars for them to  develop language immersion programs now these could be in any languages could be in chinese these could be in german this could be in french but the educators the local level said you know we want to try this program that doesn't just teach you know white mormon kids or white kids spanish we want to draw upon the assets of our spanish speaking community to benefit everybody and so now utah there is no other state in the country that has more of a commitment in terms of resources and staff to bilingual education there are now twenty eight of these two way immersion spanish english schools across the state of utah incredibly popular among white families among latino families and in many of the schools that i visited had really changed the very nature and sort of social life of the school it led to principals wanting to hire more bilingual staff it led to parents of latino students taking on leadership school leadership roles in some of the schools all around it has been a really positive development for the state of utah and now you've got even educators from here in supposedly liberal massachusetts recently a delegation of educators from massachusetts went to utah to try and learn more about how they were you know what they were doing and trying to think about different ways of creating legislation that would make it easier to create these kinds of programs we do have some in massachusetts but not a law and so what are some of the common themes that are in all of these stories right each of these stories is different in a different place to different contacts but there are some things that run through all of them one is a sense of the people who create these programs or sustain these programs are the leaders who are out in front on these programs and trying to get resources for them is an understanding that we're better together and that immigration immigrant integration is a two way street everybody is going to be affected by him and immigrant immigrants are going to change from coming here and when we're open when when people who are already living in the community are open to it they also are going to change it's a two way street an immigrant integration is really affirmative those marches that i should mark that i showed you a picture of w really about what can we fight against what do we have to fight against which is also really important immigrant integration is different it says you know what are we fighting for and what can we build what would this look like on the ground in really concrete ways  our communities and im an immigrant integration is also positive we looks at the assets of people who come to this country and the ways in which how can we give people the opportunity so that they can contribute to their fullest potential in ways that they want to as opposed to just seeing immigrants as some sort of charity that need to be helped in society and then what are some of the next steps so that we can move some of these these programs that we see in these efforts and these policies that we see across the country more broadly it's really important to have support of state and federal policies funding obviously from government which is starting to move and philanthropy our country is a little strange in that even though we have far more immigrants come to this country than any other place we don't have one office or one place that is concerned with immigrant integration most of our federal policy asked the question of who gets to stay and who needs to go and how do we know and when do they go and how much does it cost to become a citizen it's not really about figuring out how immigrants can best adapt and best find prosperity and wellbeing in their new communities it's very different from places like even australia or canada for example that also have large shares of immigrants and a narrative strategy again that elevates stories of welcoming and successful integration and vocal leadership instead of the narrative of immigrants coming and being a so called burden on the community and also a coordinated multi sector solutions oftentimes people in education only care about only think about education but if you look at for example the community credit union what started out as a public safety concern really big became the remedy really was found in economic wellbeing and that in turn helped improve public safety so understanding how all those things relate and connect to each other is really important and this is just  quote that i really love in part because you know a lot of the a lot of the people that i met on this journey were people who had values like mine you know progressive liberal values but this guy in utah was not one of those he was very conservative he had bragged about his a plus rating for the national rifle association and was very conservative on a lot of ways but he as a result of really understanding the positive impact of the two way immersion spanish programs in the state really had become transformed me in on the issue of immigration and began to understand it and he was a mormon and saw it  you know concurrent with congress with the with his own faith and some beliefs and this is something that i think that applies to every state in the country look our state has changed a little rural communities little towns are all changing if you celebrate that and if you give our young people a place to blossom and grow and to really integrate if you create the opportunity for all of us to integrate and to each come over to the other's perspective a little bit how can that not be good for everyone so lindsey if you you want to come up and i'm happy to we're both happy to take any questions or comments that you might have really good question i don't know but certainly massacres as you are showing is one of those places that had so many different and so many different languages spoken i mean to the extent that  you know i've seen your work in different ways lately it did extend that if there's a group that is advocating not just for like an ethnic group but for immigrants as a group or even better for  worker then i think that value is oftentimes the variable that terminus whether or not it's going to be a successful effort rather than the next i mean you see on the whole that's where there's so there's like a kind of multiethnic you want to talk about this yeah i mean i think here that i think that in so many places you know even places that have really great initiatives and have a mayor and that comes out and talks about the importance of immigrants and has a lot of government programs that support and build on the assets of immigrants that the social part of it the social integration is still look much harder harder and coming in there's a kind of communities people receiving communities and they you know provide support and assistance for communities that want to be more welcoming and lot more social integration and want to create spaces for people from different cultural backgrounds who can come together and work you know making their community more welcoming more improving their community in a variety of ways and they've had some great successes in places september there is going to be an issue jim for folks to newtown to get together specifically with your neighbors so now we're all talking to each other no matter what  with what you're talking about is absolutely great that this is over and over again and people have found that you know to start something like this you can't like could put something on the wall be like come to a racial that teacher fact is retiring ye you see that some of the pushback that we're seeing you know from there yeah i mean yeah i mean i just think it's so complicated but i think that you are definitely on to something there that there is a there is perceived as more of way of life whatever it might be and that's validated by other people of power in the community yes i think maybe that might be might be part of it but of course there's still a lot of misinformation missed out there about things like you know speaking english or not even wish we as you know look most immigrants who come here when their children were learning english nearly all of unusually by the second generation people are speaking english fluently and sadly i think by the third their native language just cause which is awful and i think you know efforts like the two way merger programs are trying to change that  yeah i mean i think there's this kind of fossilization out there that immigrants don't want to learn english which is ridiculous i've never met the right who didn't want to learn english and didn't speak english already  portuguese survey chinese is you know an understanding that that's important and i think even that gets people riled up who still so i think so first of all all teachers in the whole district now has received training in how to how to teach english language learners so that's not maybe integration test related at all