Editor’s note: This is the twenty-second entry in a series on how historians—especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia—do the work of history. If you know of someone we should interview, or would like to be interviewed yourself, send an email with the subject line HOW I DO HISTORY to pitches@contingentmag.org.
Yael Schacher (@YaelSchacher on Twitter) focuses on immigration policy and asylum law. This is how she does history.
What’s your current position?
For the last six months I have been the Deputy Director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International, a non-profit organization in Washington, D.C. From 2018 through 2021 I was focused on U.S. refugee and asylum policy as Senior U.S. Advocate for Refugees International. Working at Refugees International has helped me think more deeply about both the U.S.’s role in the world and, especially in my current role, more comparatively about migration and displacement.
Tell us about Refugees International and what it is like to work there.
Refugees International (RI) is a policy-focused organization, not a direct service provider. But most of the people I work with have spent significant amounts of time on the humanitarian response to forced displacement in different parts of the world. Many have worked for operational non-governmental organizations (NGOs), somewhere in the United Nations (U.N.) system or at other international organizations or have been involved with U.S. aid and development efforts. Several have worked on immigration and humanitarian issues for members of Congress or for state and local officials or as journalists. These folks bring a sense of practical experience to policy advocacy: they know what it takes to make changes on the ground and to communicate a message. My RI colleagues know the key players in the field. But since Refugees International does not accept funding from the U.S. government or the U.N., we can be critical of them. Sometimes we can say what other operational organizations can’t—lest they be kicked out of the country where they are administering aid.
Refugees International is a small organization of about 25 staff members that is divided into teams. I’m on the program team, which consists of advocates with different geographical and thematic areas of focus—i.e., the Middle East or climate displacement. Then there is a team devoted to fundraising and another devoted to outreach—with policy makers, with the press, with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, etc. Working at Refugees International has made me think a lot more about how to reach audiences with my research and writing in order to make change. If you write a report full of insights and suggestions but nobody knows about it—it’s like that tree falling in the forest. It’s a collaborative effort at Refugees International to get a policy report out the door: planning travel and research, doing interviews and taking photos, writing and editing, laying out a report and translating it, “rolling it out” to press and policy makers, doing meetings and interviews and events, promoting it on social media. The people who work at the organization—on all of its teams—are devoted to its goals and everybody gives the work all they’ve got, which is great. Bringing people with different kinds of expertise together is fruitful and productive—especially when everyone is committed to the same goal of upholding the rights and improving the lives of the forcibly displaced.
Working at RI has changed the way I think about audiences but also about collaboration—and it has made me more open to collaborating with others generally, including in academic work, and to bringing together academics who focus on immigration with those who work in immigration outside academia. I have had a great experience supervising undergraduate and graduate student interns—even some history majors and PhD students—at Refugees International who have gone on to policy jobs and this makes me happy. There aren’t many history PhDs in the policy and advocacy spaces I now circulate in, but there should be more.
I have gotten to do some great projects and meet amazing people in my work—immigrants, activists from the U.S. and other countries, and high ranking officials. I have visited numerous immigration prisons, courts, and shelters. I have traveled to cities on both sides of every major port of entry along the U.S.-Mexican border. I have interviewed deportees from the U.S. in Guatemala. I have attended summits in the U.S. and Europe. I have also been able to do and share historical research with litigators fighting anti-asylum policies. I have strategized with advocacy organizations whose past strategizing I analyzed in my dissertation. The experiences I have had the past four years have been personally broadening and fulfilling in ways that are hard for me to sufficiently convey.
Yael outside Casa del Migrante, where she interviewed asylum seekers who had been deported from the U.S. border to Guatemala City. All photos provided by the author.
What’s a typical workday or workweek look like for you?
I spend about a fourth of my time traveling and interviewing immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers about their experiences. Another fourth of my time is researching the history of particular policies and writing up reports that incorporate that history, the experiences of migrants, and policy recommendations. Also a good chunk of this half of my time is doing public speaking (podcasts, webinars, talks and lectures, testifying before international organizations or commissions) and speaking to the press about what I have witnessed on my travels and what I am writing about.
I spend another fourth of my time on strategic thinking about the goals of Refugees International as a whole and my Americas and Europe team specifically; this involves things like internal meetings, planning events, editing reports of others, and presentations to supporters and funders. The last fourth of my time involves work in coalition with other organizations (on issue campaigns, sign-on letters, joint research, ongoing litigation) and meetings with policy makers (about Congressional hearings and proposed legislation, about regulations and the implementation of programs and policies). This last fourth also involves a lot of writing (comments on regulations, statements for the record, amicus briefs).
Yael moderated a panel on the Remain in Mexico policy at Refugees International.
Have you always been interested in history?
Not exactly. I have always been interested in how behavior in the present is associated with the past. My father is a neurobiologist who studies memory and also had a large collection of books about the Holocaust in Poland, where his parents were enslaved and many of my relatives killed. In general, I grew up in a weird mix of shelteredness and exposure; I was encouraged to think critically and our house was truly filled with magazines and newspapers and books of all kinds.
Yet, in elementary school and junior high I was enmeshed in Jewish learning—I participated in national Old Testament contests and intensely studied Talmud (religious law). In high school, I came to see how the past—and especially the Holocaust– was being used to impress upon me and my peers certain ways of behaving in and approaching the present—and I didn’t like it. I also got very interested in literature—and started to approach all texts differently, seeing them more as cultural products of certain times and places. In high school I was drawn to modernist fiction like Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Call it Sleep by Henry Roth, which struck me as fundamentally about both what it is like to grow up in, and out of, religious environments and about the past in the present. My interest in refugees and asylum is partly a product of my interest in understanding how people relate to a past that they have had to break from.
Tell us about your undergraduate and graduate experiences.
When I was a sophomore English major at Columbia in 1997, I took a graduate course on “literature and psychoanalysis” and went through a brief phase where I thought this was fascinating. By my junior and senior year, and then in life beyond, it became increasingly apparent to me that the best approach to a text or a personal experience was a historicist or socio-anthropological one. I spent my junior year studying poetry—still my favorite literary genre. I remember an assignment in a class taught by the poet Kenneth Koch in which I had to write out in prose what a poem was saying and then explain what difference form makes. I chose a poem by W.H. Auden, a favorite poet of mine to this day, that mostly described a landscape but I inferred the speaker was talking to a stranger– which altered the meaning of the poem. Poetry captures, simultaneously, ideas and feelings about time, place, memory, belonging, and estrangement; I assign poems in every class I teach on migration because I believe the right poem can convey so much in short form.
I had internships at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s and then in the film department of the Village Voice my junior and senior years in college. What really struck me was the political culture and history of each place and I became very interested in studying literary production in the United States (I previously had not been focused on American literature specifically). My major undergraduate paper for Professor Andrew Delbanco was on the history of three periodicals from the 1840s (one in New England, one in South Carolina, and an African American journal from New York) and their representations of slavery. I also remember well an assignment for historian Alan Brinkley’s “America Since 1945” course. It required building a paper around one major primary source; my source was a report about a War on Poverty program in New York and I learned a tremendous amount. Probably the most important history course I took was Eric Foner’s class on the American Radical Tradition, which was about how reform and dissent is central to American history. I loved the readings and never wanted to miss a lecture of that class.
Yael as a graduate student, at her home office.
I felt the same way about Werner Sollors’ course on ethnic modernism and Elaine Scarry’s lectures on American drama at Harvard, where I was a graduate student in American Studies.1 My path in graduate school was somewhat similar to the one I took as an undergraduate. I started with a focus on literature. Then I shifted to writing about cultural production—I wrote major seminar papers on minstrelsy in the 19th century, the photography of Japanese American internment, and industrial design at a mid 20th century Boston art museum. But courses with Nancy Cott on U.S. history in the 20th century and with Debbie Anker on immigration at the Harvard Law School nudged me towards law and policy. There weren’t many history courses on immigration at Harvard then so I really just had to find my own way. It took me a while to find my research focus. Part of what helped me was time I spent choosing sources to digitize for the Harvard Library’s Open Collection on immigration to the United States. I came across a couple of sources that ended up in my dissertation.
I took a long time to complete my dissertation not only because I had to find my focus, but also because I had two children while working on it. About three years into sustained work on my dissertation, when I was pregnant and it was clear I would not finish it in the time Harvard required and before the birth of my first child, I withdrew from the program on the understanding that I could reapply to get my degree when I submitted my dissertation and passed my defense. I spent the next five years continuing to research and write my dissertation, teaching mostly American Studies courses at the University of Connecticut (where I served on the American Association of University Professors’ executive committee representing adjuncts), and taking care of my two small children (with the help of a wonderful partner).2 I submitted my dissertation on my older daughter’s first day of kindergarten, defended it in the winter, and then graduated in spring 2016.
Yael, celebrating with family, after passing her dissertation defense.
You received your PhD in American Studies. For those unfamiliar with the discipline, tell us about it and how it differs from history?
American Studies programs themselves differ; when I started at Harvard, it was focused more on history and literature than theory. Many in my cohort and those from the years around it did interdisciplinary projects related to the history of science, or film or music. I took courses in history and literature but also in urban planning. I did my oral examination fields in U.S. history, U.S. literature, Urban Studies, and Social and Political Thought. I read A LOT of books. I felt lucky to stick with Werner Sollors as my primary advisor even as I shifted towards legal history—he was just such a supportive intellectual mentor. The faculty affiliated with American Studies were, generally, really great. It was hard finding teaching in history, though, because faculty had their own students getting PhDs in history. I was a teaching fellow in Harvard’s History and Literature program for two years and that was a good experience; I had some great students. I do think, though, I benefited from getting a degree in English as an undergrad and then a masters in History along the way, so I had a good grounding in the methodologies of each discipline.
Did you teach recently? If so, where and what class?
In the spring of 2022 I taught an undergraduate international affairs/sociology course offered by the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University called “Immigrants, Refugees, and the State.” It was exciting to plan because I wanted to incorporate “critical refugee studies” elements, cover migration and refugee issues in different parts of the world, and take a fundamentally historical approach to policy and international law and organizations. The goal was to denaturalize current frameworks so as to come up with new policy solutions. Besides covering certain themes and topics (i.e.. labor migration, refugee status determination, etc.), I chose case studies on Afghanistan, Haiti, and the Horn of Africa, where displacement has been an issue for decades; I focused on the 1970s through today. I think the writing assignments I came up with were pretty good but I was rusty on classroom activities and lectured too much. If I teach the course again, I’ll assign less reading and come up with different ways to engage the students in class.
Yael talking to Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) at the D.C. bookstore, Politics and Prose.
Are you working on a book? If so, what is it about and when might we get to read it?
I am working on a book called “Exceptions to Exclusion” about the history and evolution of asylum in the United States. It builds on the basic arguments of my dissertation about the development of asylum as a discretionary exception to exclusion and the push and pull between immigration officials and advocates for asylum. Who is worthy of the exception and how and where they have applied for asylum has changed over time. Over the past few years I have been thinking about and sketching out a new concluding section on asylum since 1980—which is when my dissertation ended—and that is focused on the U.S.-Mexico border. I have also been slowly gathering materials on the 1980s, 1990s, and 21st century, as well as conducting interviews with lawyers and policymakers. It has been very hard to carve out time to read, research, and write while also working for Refugees International. Nonetheless, I hope to finish my manuscript by the end of this year and that it might come out as a book sometime in 2024.
What are some history of immigration works or resources that have informed your research? Who are some scholars that have inspired you?
I’ll just mention two that are very different and that have been significant to me in different ways. I read Mae Ngai’s book Impossible Subjects just after I decided what I wanted to write my dissertation about but before I embarked on any research. That book showed me what it was possible to do with Immigration and Naturalization Service records, which became important sources for me.
Another inspiration for me is Isaac Hourwich (1860-1924), whose unprocessed personal papers I spent weeks combing through at Harvard’s libraries and whose most famous book is Immigration and Labor (1912). Before delving into my dissertation, I wrote an essay about Hourwich’s approach in that book – which marshaled good historical and economic arguments to refute nativist policymakers. I feel a sense of kinship with Hourwich—who was an academic and activist, was both a socialist and a libertarian, wrote for popular audiences and for highly specialized ones, worked in many spaces (as a lawyer, union organizer, bureaucrat, aspiring politician), and balanced so many identities and responsibilities, yet had a clarity of focus and moral vision especially on migration. I hope to write as profoundly and differently from others as he did about the relationship of migration to big topics like nationalism, imperialism, and the rights of workers.
Yael with the commissioners of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights after a hearing in Laredo, Texas.
What’s a thing or several things that people do not know or understand about the asylum process?
I’ll just list a handful—there is so much.
Asylum in the United States wasn’t “born after World War II.” Depending on what aspects of it you are talking about, it is both much older and much younger (this will take my book to unpack!)
Seeking asylum at a port of entry or after arrival (regardless of status and whether inspected or not) has been a legal way to immigrate to the U.S. since 1980. The southern U.S. border did not become the primary locus of asylum seeking until the 21st century.
Today’s asylum seekers (like all immigrants) are not entitled to attorneys at public expense (or to federal public benefits), despite the fact that having an attorney is one of the most dispositive factors in determining whether an asylum claim will be granted. This is especially true for those who are seeking asylum as a defense against removal in immigration court – which is not a court in the sense that it is not a part of the judicial branch of the government. The judge is a Justice Department appointee and the prosecutor is an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attorney.
The United States is obliged to abide by the 1951 UN Convention on Relating to the Status of Refugees through its 1967 Protocol—most prominently the prohibition on non-refoulement—but in practice interprets its obligations very narrowly, especially in the way it limits access to U.S. territory and to economic and social rights (like the right to work) to those seeking asylum and in the way it subjects asylum seekers to detention (which the U.S. claims is not a punishment or penalty for seeking asylum, but certainly seems like it to the detained asylum seekers I have met!) If someone wins asylum, she is entitled to the same benefits as a refugee resettled from overseas but rarely accesses them.
Some of the most creative asylum advocacy since the 1990s has been devoted to winning refugee status for victims of gender-based violence despite the fact that persecution based on gender is not one of the specified grounds of eligibility in the refugee definition.
Many other countries in the Americas have a more generous refugee/asylum standard than the United States, which does not accord refugee status to those fleeing generalized violence or public disorder. And temporary protected status is only accorded to people already in the United States from countries facing disorder. It’s not a pathway for people fleeing.
Asylum backlogs have best been cleared by regularization legislation that typically allow for the adjustment of status of asylum seekers who have been waiting for adjudication and living in limbo in the United States for years. Winning asylum and gaining a slot in the U.S. refugee admissions program are similar in some ways and very different in others; they are bureaucratically and procedurally distinct. Legally a refugee is defined as a person who has fled their country and fears persecution if returned there so people cannot apply for asylum or refugee status from their home country; but, in an effort to control irregular migration, the United States has done “in country” refugee processing from countries like Vietnam and El Salvador for people with family members in the United States, which muddies matters. The current parole program for Ukrainians completely blurs the migrant/refugee distinction by being a temporary status for those with sponsors in the U.S.
For those who see and read about refugees and people seeking asylum and want to help, what do you recommend? What are some good practical steps that you advise?
Donate money to organizations that provide for the basic needs and legal services of asylum seekers. If you have language skills, you can volunteer at local organizations to do things like give asylum seekers rides or take them to the doctor or get their kids registered in school. There are also opportunities to open your home temporarily to house refugees and asylum seekers (there’s a huge lack of affordable housing). Talk to your family members about immigrants and refugees—so many people believe immigrants and asylum seekers are a “burden,” which really has no basis in fact.
Yael testifying about externalization of the obligation to protect before the executive committee of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
What don’t people understand or appreciate about working in a humanitarian nonprofit? What has surprised you about working at Refugees International?
There is some tension between humanitarianism and human rights in the work of Refugees International. But what is more significant to me is the tension between policy work and direct services. I travel to shelters on the Mexican side of the border and watch court proceedings on the US side. But I don’t provide asylum seekers shelter or represent them in court. Or give them a job. I push policy makers for more humane policies, fairer procedures, and broader eligibility for work authorization. Sometimes, of course, I have referred people to attorneys and helped them settle in after they’ve arrived. I keep in touch with many of the people I have interviewed and sometimes I invite them to speak at Refugees International events. But there is a tension there.
As mentioned above, I work in coalition a lot—some of my closer friends are colleagues at other organizations with related goals (working on immigration more broadly or U.S. foreign policy). It is empowering to work together. Each organization has its own identity, priorities, and ways of doing things—as I know from having co-authored reports with Human Rights Watch and worked with other groups on joint projects.
Finally, I am constantly thinking—how can I push for policies that are both possible and principled? How can I frame things in a way that people will see them in a new light and be open to new solutions? How do I make sure that in everything I do, human stories and human needs are at the center and driving what I am asking for and recommending? That is what I spend my time doing.
How has the pandemic affected you? In 2020, 2021, and now 2022?
It slowed down the research for my book, since archives were closed. It was very hard on my whole family—we had just moved from a house in Connecticut to a small apartment in D.C. and we were all working and learning from home. I stopped being able to travel for Refugees International. I shifted to working with organizations I had gotten to know on previous trips. For example, I worked on a project with Haitian Bridge Alliance and Espacio Migrante (a shelter in Tijuana). They are direct service providers and didn’t have time to analyze survey and focus group data and write a report about how migrants, and especially Black migrants, were faring during the pandemic and could be better served. So I worked on that with them! One of the issues the report documented was the impact of Title 42, a public health authority the United States has invoked since the start of the pandemic to justify keeping ports closed to asylum seekers and expelling those who are caught after crossing the border. I’ve spent the past two plus years addressing this policy in numerous ways. The Biden administration instituted a Title 42 exemption process that allows NGOs to refer vulnerable migrants for processing under the regular immigration laws. This has literally put me squarely in the middle of the very thing I wrote about in my dissertation: asylum as an exception to exclusion.
Yael outside the National Archives.
Your research involves lots of government documents. Can you speak about the way that federal agencies, especially the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as the U.S. National Archives decide which records should be preserved and be made accessible to historians?
This is a topic I came to both through my dissertation research and in my work at Refugees International. Agencies have officers that work with archivists at the National Archives to decide which materials should be preserved and when they should be transferred. Recently lawyers for immigrants and immigrant rights organizations have successfully sued to have immigration court decisions made publicly available and to have records relating to detention permanently retained in the archives. Decisions favorable to immigrants or evidence of mistreatment in the past must also be made available if we are to understand the evolution of immigration law and policy. Right now, these are simply not available. This is because the records have not been designated for permanent retention or because the agency is late to transfer records to the archives. Scholars need to pay attention to retention schedules that are posted in the Federal Register to ensure that records of interest to historians now (and maybe in the future) are preserved and deposited. There is also so much material waiting for processing at the National Archives, which needs more funding. Federal Courts produce extremely rich records—especially depositions and documents revealed in discovery– and are usually well preserved, but not always. It is just devastating to discover that voluminous administrative records from federal cases have been thrown away.
Yael as a postdoc at the Institute for Historical Studies at UT Austin.
As a historian, can you talk about the way that historians contribute to court cases/litigation in their areas of expertise— and, more deeply, the different forms of evidence and ways of approaching the past (and especially legislative history) taken by federal judges and by historians?
When I was a postdoc at the University of Texas at Austin in 2017-2018, I began paying close attention to immigration cases the U.S. Supreme Court was hearing and noticed that historians did not file amicus briefs as often as other social scientists. When I myself began working with litigators on asylum cases, I came to see that good historical arguments (that would convince most historians) would not convince a court. It was a real challenge to marshal evidence, cite precedents, and imitate the reasoning used by the judges in order to write a convincing brief. There is a hermeneutic quality to the way judges interpret statutes; it reminds me more of my Talmud days than the messy legislative drafting and markups that I am privy to in my Hill work with Refugees International. I think historians could have a lot of impact on immigration law but they will need to write in a different way to reach the judges. Given the recent selective and retrograde ways that the Supreme Court has invoked history, it’s more important than ever that historians get engaged.
Yael in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico explaining to people in the Remain in Mexico program how to access counsel for when they have their hearings in El Paso immigration court.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about what historians do and how they work?
My sense is that most people don’t think much about what historians do. They are likely to think historians are out of touch with the present, and I strongly believe historians need to spend more time analyzing the very recent past. It bothers me that things that happened a decade or two ago aren’t really topics most historians engage with yet (in research or teaching). Most people also tend to think historians are radical critics that are out of touch and can’t solve problems. The corollary is that historians tend to think people who work in policy have sold out, lost their critical edge, are by necessity pragmatist compromisers.
If money, time, and distance were not issues, what’s a dream project you’d love to tackle?
I would write poetry and plays about the work that I do and the people I have met.
If you weren’t a scholar, what other kind of work do you think you’d be doing?
No question I would be a lawyer representing immigrants; I’m pretty sure I’d like being a judge. I would have gone to law school already if it weren’t so expensive and still think about doing it in the future.
- From the end of my undergraduate education until the start of my graduate training, I spent two years around the turn of the century working first as an editorial assistant and then as a reporter for the New York Law Journal, a daily legal newspaper that is part of American Lawyer Media. At first I mostly edited technical legal columns and did profiles of state judges. Later I got a chance to do policy reporting; I wrote, for example, on court innovations that interested me like mental health courts (after the passage of Kendra’s Law) and community courts. While there I helped lead an effort by the Communications Workers of America to unionize the newsroom. Also, towards the end of my time at NYLJ I did some freelance writing and an internship at the brand new Slate.com, where my focus was on arts and culture. My office was– wait for it– in the CHRYSLER BUILDING! It was exciting to work in this brave new world of online journalism – with the potential to do so much with video and photos and hyperlinks. But the experience made me want to go back to graduate school to do more analytical writing and in-depth research. I was also turned off by the culture of the media world, its lack of diversity, and some of the political positions Slate took (though I was told that each columnist/writer represented only themself), especially on issues like the WTO protests.
- The AAUP is a membership organization of university faculty with chapters at institutions across the country. It advocates for faculty governance and academic freedom and, at some universities like UConn, also engages in collective bargaining.