This essay investigates the challenges involved with enacting bell hook's vision of education as the "practice of freedom" in the midst of the current growth of societal inequality for immigrants. Based on their scholarly analysis of the current political and educational setting, and on their experiences, the authors organized the essay in two sections. First, they bring their backgrounds to explain how the recurring history of exclusionist immigration and refugee policies can provide insight into the situation facing the academy today. They examine how problems of the present are fundamentally similar to the injustices of the past. By examining contending positions in the debates with particular focus to the rhetorical strategies and the subject positions constituted, they accentuate the communicative factors that construct community on exclusionary grounds. Second, the authors discuss a pedagogical approach to this issue that is situated in the concept of "moral imagination" (Lederach, 2005): listening to the voices of migrants articulated in the literature and statements of activists and contextualizing those voices in the lives of their students, enabling us to focus on learning as a joyful immersion and integration of life and knowledge.