Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration

By Donna R. Gabaccia, Professor of History and Director, Immigration History Research Center

It’s often said that bad news is real news while good news…well, good news often just doesn’t make it onto the front page. Is the only immigration news we read the bad news?

This week we went looking for the quieter immigration stories that don’t always make the headlines or even the inner pages of web and print news. Certainly in the past year, we have learned a lot about political conflicts over immigration policy in national and state capitals. Conflict and anger have been front and center in media attention to immigration. But for the reader who is willing to dig a bit, immigration stories featuring cooperation and understanding between foreign- and native-born can also be found.

In Guilford County, North Carolina—where the arrival of immigrants and refugees is a very recent development, local spokesmen, Reverend Billy Sils, acknowledge tensions and conflicts between native and newcomers. Still, Sils emphasizes how the relocation of refugees by Lutheran Family Services worked to foster cross-community understanding. According to Sils, LFS successfully appealed to locals’ religious sensibilities and to their sense of debt to those displaced by the Vietnamese War. http://www.news-record.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070121/NEWSREC0104/701210318

Here in the upper Midwest, local communities have their own, unique reasons for trying to bridge the cultural gap between long-time natives and newcomers. Precisely because it’s their responsibility to encourage order and protect all residents and to solve crimes in which foreigners are as often victims as perpetrators, many local police forces have developed innovative programs that employ immigrants as translators and co-workers in community policing programs.
http://www.startribune.com/467/story/934609.html

Minnesota readers might also want to check out the Faribault blog: http://faribodiversity.blogspot.com/

In Worthington, site of recent “raids” on workplaces employing large numbers of immigrants—with and without proper documentation—community groups like the Nobles County Integration Collaborative seek to promote community conversation and dialogue in the aftermath of the raids. Residents of many small towns in the Midwest actively sought to attract meatpacking employers offered, hoping to reverse demographic declines in their communities. Some have been surprised and shocked by the social consequences of sudden influxes of heavily male, transient workers in dangerous, low-wage packing plans. As family settlement has begun, however, community organizations seek to achieve their original goals of community-building while welcoming as members of the community foreign worker.
http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/node/3302

Even Girl Scouts—scarcely an organization that we association with conflict OR radicalism—attempts to create opportunities for immigrant girls and daughters to discuss the problems of adaptation to life in a new environment. http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/node/3242

Perhaps the least newsworthy, but nevertheless important, stories of growing familiarity and intimacy between Americans and immigrants can be found in the marriage registers of towns throughout the United States. Intermarriage between older and newer Americans is not a trivial phenomenon and it is growing in importance. Over ten percent of women immigrants from Asia marry outside their own group, most often with white, native-born men. Among children of immigrants, rates of intermarriage with persons of other backgrounds typically double.

Even though we looked long and hard we were unsuccessful in finding much media attention to this phenomenon. The reader who wants to learn about this quiet, slow story of cultural accommodation must still be willing to read a highly specialized and academic and scholarly literature on the topic. There, at least, a different and more peaceful story of immigration and accommodation is slowly unfolding.
http://www.ilw.com/articles/2006,1218-stevens.shtm

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Posted by Dan Ott at 02:41 PM | Permalink

By Donna R. Gabaccia, Professor of History and Director, Immigration History Research Center

Here in Minnesota, where refugees form a larger part of the foreign-born population than they do anywhere else in the U.S., it’s easy to assume that the U.S. offers refuge and a peaceful landing to most of the displaced persons of the world. Many of the refugees currently in the upper Midwest—certainly the Hmong, Somalians, and Vietnamese—fled regions that had seen both significant political violence and the engagement of U.S. military forces. So are we likely to see a large flow of refugees from Iraq in the years ahead?

Maybe not.

The emerging refugee crisis in Iraq provides a surprising introduction to larger patterns of refugee distribution around the world. This week the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) announced that during parts of the past year as many as 100,000 persons a month have fled Iraq, largely to escape the escalating violence there http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6193775.stm.
Yet a report by the refugee advocacy group Human Rights Watch suggests that in 2006 the U.S. resettled only 202 refugees from Iraq, with plans to re-settle perhaps 500 more in the year ahead. By contrast, Sweden welcomed 2300 refugees from Iraq in 2005 and 8951 in 2006.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/16/world/europe/16sweden.html

Why Sweden? Relatively welcoming laws of asylum provide only part of the answer. Even before the U.S. military deposed Saddam Hussein, 80,000 Iraqi’s lived in Sweden; they have become the foundation for—and provided aid to-- what scholars call a “chain migration,” in which friends, relatives, and acquaintances, and co-ethnics follow previous migrants to their new homes.

Most persons who flee natural disasters and political violence hope to return home. They rarely travel very far—at least at first. According to U.N. data, there are about 20.8 million refugees and internally displaced persons (people who remain within their own countries but who have fled local and regional violence or natural disaster) worldwide. Most have fled homes in Africa and Asia and the vast majority of these have sought refuge in those same two regions. http://www.unhcr.org/basics.html

These patterns hold true even where U.S. military action has given the U.S. a sizeable, and often controversial, role in the homelands of refugees. Most who escaped Afghanistan during the violence that accompanied first Taliban rule and then U.S. military engagement to oust the Taliban fled to nearby Pakistan.

Similiary, to date, Jordan, Syria and Egypt have been the destinations for the largest groups of refugees from Iraq.

The case of Afghanistan’s refugees suggests a possible scenario for the future of Iraq’s refugees. After years of housing 2.6 million refugees from Afghanistan, Pakistan now seeks to close its refugee camps, hoping to re-patriate the Afgani living in them. http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/954a29179ac3c37554895928a7203309.htm Unfortunately, many refugees remain fearful to return home so some as-yet undetermined numbers of Afghani refugees will undoubtedly soon be looking for more distant places of asylum.

U.N. evidence suggests that when refugees look for more-distant homes, many more find a place in Europe than in the United States.

The Hmong refugees of the upper Midwest (most whom also lived long years in refugee camps in southeast Asia) mounted a years-long campaign to convince the U.S. that it had a special responsibility to provide refuge to a group that had been a U.S. ally during the Vietnam war.

Most refugees from Iraq did not flee the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. They have tried to escape the political violence that has accompanied Hussein’s ousting. What, if any, responsibility does the U.S. have for assisting the millions of Iraqi who have fled their homes?

This may be a complicated question for Americans to answer, but it is not a question that is likely to disappear any time soon.

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Posted by Dan Ott at 12:32 PM | Permalink