November 2006 Archives

By Katherine Fennelly, Professor of Public Affairs at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute, IHRC Affiliate

The American press has been filled with news stories on the rapid increase of the Latino population in both traditional and non-traditional immigration states (“Hispanics driving population growth in Georgia� The Telegraph, “Lee minority population young, soaring� Newspress.com, “Beaufort County leads state in growth� The Beaufort Gazette). At the same time local officials in some parts of the country are proposing legislation that would deny benefits to the US-born children of undocumented immigrants, a majority of whom are Latinos.

By Donna R. Gabaccia, Director, IHRC, University of Minnesota

What country in the world has the highest proportion of foreigners living on its national territories? If you think the answer is the United States—as well you might, given the passionate debates about immigration in recent months--you’d be wrong.

By Jeff Manuel, PhD Student at the University of Minnesota. IHRC Affiliated Faculty

Election day. Today voters around the U.S. will travel to their polling places and elect the individuals who will govern them for the next several years. And today the news media will shift from endless rounds of prediction to endless rounds of analyzing election results. Given all that’s been said about immigration in the political sphere this year, from the substantive to the idiotic, it’s tough to believe that any new information will sink in. Instead, we might take a step back from the details and consider how “immigration� has been told as a political story in recent months. Telling a political story—whether in the news or in the academy—involves organizing the chaotic mess of the real world into meaningful patterns, which in turn means bringing some agents into the story line and pushing some agents outside of the narrative. Organizing “immigration� into a coherent political story has been no different and it’s worth considering who and what has been included in this story and what has been left out to make the story coherent.