Immigrant deaf students in the United States: Linguistic injustices brought to light

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the United States, racialized discourses about immigrants intersect with ableist discourses about deaf people, making deaf immigrants a multiply vulnerable population. For students at the intersection of these identities, experiences of linguistic injustice often occur at the very place where equitable language access should be ensured: school. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in the northeast United States with immigrant high school students at a school for the deaf as well as adult deaf immigrants navigating U.S. citizenship, this research explores how the right to education in a child’s most accessible language becomes complicated for immigrant deaf students. Presently, most deaf students in the U.S. are mainstreamed alongside their nondeaf peers in general education classrooms. In 2023, the Supreme Court case of Miguel Luna Perez revealed that the challenges of equitable language access in mainstream schools – which is difficult enough to ensure for U.S.-born/raised deaf students – are only magnified for immigrant deaf students. I discuss how ideologies that devalue sign languages and the people who use them shape the perception and treatment of immigrant students in mainstream schools; and I outline how practical constraints faced by immigrant students and their families only further the invisibility of the injustices experienced by these students. I argue that U.S. deaf education must adapt to better care for an increasingly diverse deaf student body, and that, ultimately, schools for the deaf are better suited than mainstream schools to address the needs of immigrant deaf students whose language backgrounds differ from their U.S-born/raised peers.