The Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) and Fordham University’s Initiative on Migrants, Migration and Human Dignity hosted the 2025 Immigrant Integration Convening, Supporting Migrants and Refugees: Finding Hope in a Time of Peril, held September 14–16. Over three days, scholars, community leaders and advocates discussed policy challenges, shared stories, and shared visions for immigrant justice.

Fordham University Ph.D. candidate Layla Mayorga Gonzalez presented both a personal account of growing up undocumented in the United States and a philosophical framework for reimagining belonging and citizenship. Mayorga Gonzalez’s scholarship bridges academic research, lived experience and public advocacy in Social and Political Philosophy, Ethics, and Technology and AI.

Mayorga Gonzalez began by sharing a moment of rupture that occurred at age 15. While in a class to help high school students prepare college applications, she was asked to provide her social security number. Unlike her classmates, she had never been told what that was. Her counselor chastised her, and when she questioned her mother the stark truth was revealed: “Mija, you don’t have one because you are Mexican. You’re not from here.”

That moment, Mayorga Gonzalez recalled, “destroyed me. All my dreams, goals, shattered on that day.” Her mother’s advice—“You can’t go to college, get those dreams out of your mind”—forced her to confront her exclusion and invisibility, all due to a number she didn’t possess.

Layla Mayorga Gonzalez speaking at the Immigrant Integration Convening.

Eventually, Mayorga Gonzalez became a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Introduced in 2012, DACA provides temporary protection from deportation for undocumented immigrants who arrived as children. While DACA allowed her to become a DREAMer and pursue her educations, she stressed its fundamental precarity: it does not grant permanent legal status, must be renewed every two years and can be revoked at any time. “That precariousness stays with you,” she explained.

This urgency fueled her academic path, driving her to complete her bachelor’s and two master’s degrees in rapid succession. “I felt like I had no time to waste,” she said. “Every achievement had to be seized before the door closed.”

Mayorga Gonzalez’s personal history directly informed her scholarship. “My experience of having to hide who I am because of a digital number that separates my humanness from you and me was the reason I chose philosophy,” she said. It became her determination to prove that categories like ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ should not define human existence.

Now a legal permanent resident, Mayorga Gonzalez introduced a concept that she calls “open border-heart.”

Open border-heart is the understanding that human identity cannot be reduced to legal categories like “undocumented” or “citizen”; instead, it calls us to recognize one another as fully human beyond borders, grounded in both the moral duty of hospitality and the theological truth that, in the Kingdom of God, there are no passports or legality, only shared belonging.

This framework insists that labels like undocumented, alien, refugee, citizen are not the essence of human identity. True recognition requires seeing one another as human beings beyond such hierarchies. She connected this to Gloria Anzaldúa’s imagery of the “bridge called my back,”, and to Christian theology, citing Pastor Matthew Colwell and Ched Myers’s book Our God Is Undocumented. Mayorga Gonzalez concluded: “In the Kingdom of God, there is no passport or legality. There are no borders. We are all one.”

She highlighted Immanuel Kant’s principle of hospitality as a moral imperative, a philosophical Golden Rule: “If I want to be treated with hospitality, I must also extend my welcome to my neighbor.” She argued this ethical duty applies as much to undocumented students in classrooms as to strangers at national borders.

Mayorga Gonzalez concluded by addressing the sobering reality of life under the threat of political rhetoric calling for the self-deportation of DREAMers. She outlined practical steps educators and institutions can take to support undocumented students:

• Provide scholarships that do not require social security numbers;
• Ensure students keep copies of their legal documents safe;
• Maintain communication with trusted mentors.

“This is the reality we live in and solidarity must be both pastoral and practical,” she emphasized.

“Being undocumented,” she concluded, “is to be an ‘imperfect human’—one who has to work harder to be recognized, but who is still fully human in the eyes of God and in the reality of existence. Open borders are not just a political position, but a moral and spiritual value. They are an American value, one of hospitality, one of allegiance to one another as human beings under God.”

Her message showcased the essential role of philosophy in grappling with questions of migration, dignity, and belonging reminding attendees that true change requires open borders of the heart and the world.

Layla’s full talk is available here.