Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration

by Katherine Fennelly, Professor
Humphrey H. Institute of Public Affairs
University of Minnesota
IHRC Affiliate

The rights of immigrants –both authorized and unauthorized—have steadily eroded as the result of actions and policies of the US Department of Homeland Security.

Unauthorized immigrants.
In the absence of meaningful immigration reform the Bush Administration has recently begun selectively targeting unauthorized immigrants (individuals without legal visas). The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has described “Operation Return to Sender” as a program to arrest individuals who have missed deportation hearings or returned to the US after having been deported, but many of those arrested in well-publicized raids do not fit this profile. Instead, some appear to have been randomly selected on the basis of their appearance. The example of Joel Baltazar Reyes was cited in an article in the San Bernadino Reporter. http://www.sbsun.com/news/ci_5148968 He was walking down a street in Pomona, California when he was stopped and asked if he had immigration documents. Because he had no papers, he was arrested and deported to Mexico the following day. Furthermore, among those individuals detained, and later released in raids on Swift meat processing plants several weeks ago were permanent residents and citizens who ‘looked Latino’.

Continue reading "The Erosion of Immigrant Rights" »

Posted by Dan Ott at 04:50 PM | Permalink

By Donna R. Gabaccia, Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota

Americans have long associated immigration with the images that Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus” affixed to the pedestal supporting the Statue of Liberty—images of the “tired” and of the “poor” and of “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Historians now dispute whether the immigrants of the past were either tired or particularly poor. Most were working age people, full of energy, and in possession of sufficient cash to pay their own passages, as the truly poor of their times were not. Today, those images of huddled masses seem even less appropriate than they did a century ago.

Continue reading "Huddled Masses Yearning to Breathe Free?" »

Posted by Sylvie Thao at 09:09 AM | Permalink

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.

Continue reading "The Consequences of Denying Healthcare to Undocumented Individuals and" »

Posted by Sylvie Thao at 09:23 AM | Permalink

By Andy Urban, PhD candidate in History at the University of Minnesota. IHRC Affiliated Faculty

A recent article in the Economist [link] attempts to complicate the current debate surrounding immigration by reiterating the point that undocumented immigrants typically do not compete with native-born Americans for the same jobs. The article focuses on Jim Pederson, a Democratic candidate for senator from Arizona. Pederson has been touting a guest worker program as a “sensible” alternative to the impossible task of securing and closing-off the border with Mexico. In part, the Economist article draws from a scholarly report recently published in Foreign Affairs by Tamar Jacoby [link], a member of the conservative Manhattan Institute think-tank. Jacoby critiques the arguments of her conservative counterparts seeking to restrict immigration by asserting that, “The market mechanisms that connect U.S. demand with foreign supply, particularly from Latin America, are surprisingly efficient.” Essentially Jacoby promotes a free market approach to immigration, whereby a cheap labor supply from abroad will provide construction and service sectors with a labor supply that they cannot attract from the native-born American population.

Continue reading "On Efficiency and Immigrant Labor" »

Posted by Sylvie Thao at 11:36 AM | Permalink

By Louis Mendoza, associate professor and chair of the Department of Chicano Studies at the University of Minnesota. IHRC Affiliated Faculty.

This week’s immigration news was dominated by proclamations either celebrating or condemning President Bush’s signing into law a new homeland security bill that includes a 1.2 billion dollar appropriation for building 700 miles of fence along the U.S.-Mexico border to stem unauthorized immigration.

Continue reading "The Borders Between Us: On Building and Bridging the Divide" »

Posted by Sylvie Thao at 09:25 AM | Permalink

By Andy Urban, PhD candidate in History at the University of Minnesota. IHRC Affiliated Faculty

As the November election approaches, immigration remains a key topic of debate. It can be a bit disconcerting how decisions and policy changes that will potentially affect millions of humans, seem to be implemented with an immediacy that belies months of inaction. There is nothing quite like the fear of losing office to get politicians to act; unfortunately, campaign politics do not always display the type of nuance that would best serve such important decisions.

Continue reading "Gimmicks and Games" »

Posted by Sylvie Thao at 09:10 AM | Permalink

By Erika Lee, associate professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota. IHRC Affiliated Faculty

Ellis Island and Angel Island were both in the news in recent weeks. And the
stories about these two sites where immigrants from around the world were
admitted into the United States tell us a lot about which immigration
histories get remembered and celebrated and which ones do not.

Continue reading "A Tale of Two Islands" »

Posted by Sylvie Thao at 10:16 AM | Permalink

By Erika Lee, associate professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota. IHRC Affiliated Faculty

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 mark a definitive turning point in many aspects of American life. We tend to think in terms of "before 9/11" and "after 9/11." On the morning of the attacks, I was getting ready to teach my Asian American history class at the University of Minnesota. I can't remember what the prepared lecture for the day was, but I do remember abandoning the lesson plan and instead spending the next hour talking with students about what we knew and what might happen. Given the subject matter for our course, we were highly aware of America's history of racial profiling, race-based immigration restriction, and incarceration. Many of us wondered aloud if Muslims or Arabs might experience similar treatment that many Asians did before and during World War Two.

Continue reading "A Short History of Immigration Policy since 9/11" »

Posted by Sylvie Thao at 10:47 AM | Permalink

By Donna R. Gabaccia, Rudolph J. Vecoli Professor of Immigration History and Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota

I regularly surf a worldwide web awash in information about immigration. Yet almost every day a student or a journalist tells me “I can’t find good information.”

What’s going on here?

Continue reading "Rants, Raves…and Reason: Thinking about Immigration Online" »

Posted by Donna Gabaccia at 10:21 AM | Permalink

By Donna R. Gabaccia, Rudolph J. Vecoli Professor of Immigration History and Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota

Human beings continue to act like human beings--to fall in love, marry, have babies, and want to preserve family ties--even as they migrate across national boundaries. Their completely normal choices pose fundamental
challenges to common assumptions about citizenship. They complicate the already-complex politics of devising and implementing immigration policies.

Continue reading "Love, Babies...and Migration" »

Posted by Immigration History Research Center at 12:40 PM | Permalink

By Erika Lee, associate professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota.

While U.S. senators and congressmen wrangle over negotiations on federal immigration legislation, state politicians in Georgia decided to take matters into their own hands this week.

Continue reading "Georgia's End Run Around the Federal Government" »

Posted by Immigration History Research Center at 12:34 PM | Permalink

By Donna R. Gabaccia, Rudolph J. Vecoli Professor of Immigration History and Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota

Through an accident of professional travel, I was in France on March 28, as
a million protestors hit the streets. Young people were objecting to a law
that would allow employers to dismiss them without cause. They carried
signs that said “”No to trial employment!”

The protests were effective: this Monday the French government dropped the
proposed legislation. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4865034.stm)

Will we see equally swift and dramatic responses in Washington to the
millions demonstrating in American cities over the past 10 days?
(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/us/11immig.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)

Continue reading ""I am a worker, not a criminal"" »

Posted by Immigration History Research Center at 12:28 PM | Permalink

By Donna R. Gabaccia, Rudolph J. Vecoli Professor of Immigration History and Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota

In recent weeks President Bush has asked for a “temporary worker” program
that would create visas for low-skill workers. Such low-skill workers have
almost no access to visas under current immigration law. They make up the
largest group of immigrants without proper documentation, the so-called
“illegals.”

Continue reading "Temporary Workers, Temporary Workers, Braceros?" »

Posted by Immigration History Research Center at 12:24 PM | Permalink

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

An amazing thing happened this week. Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets across the US, and the Senate Judiciary Committee appeared to listen. Only a few weeks earlier political pundits had predicted that moderate proposals for immigration reform were ‘dead in the water’ in the Senate, and likely to be supplanted by punitive ‘enforcement only’ bills, such as those passed by the House of Representatives in December of last year (see footnote 1).

Continue reading "Democracy at Work" »

Posted by Immigration History Research Center at 12:20 PM | Permalink

By Joel Wurl, Head of Research Collections and Associate Director of the Immigration History Research Centerat the University of Minnesota

The recently completed World Baseball Classic may seem an unlikely starting point for commentary on migration, but as this Miami Herald article illustrates, it actually furnishes an interesting window on a host of complex, inter-related issues.

Continue reading "Migration, Asylum, Transnationalism ... and Baseball?" »

Posted by Immigration History Research Center at 12:11 PM | Permalink

By Donna R. Gabacia, Rudolph J. Vecoli Professor of Immigration History and Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota

Minnesotans may not realize that angry debates about immigration are not
limited to their home state—or to the present.

Continue reading "Immigration: Federal Policies, Local Conflicts" »

Posted by Immigration History Research Center at 12:05 PM | Permalink

By Andy Urban, PhD candidate in History at the University of Minnesota and member of the IHRC Advisory Council

Not surprisingly, this week’s media coverage of immigration was dominated by the nationwide rallies organized by immigrant advocacy groups, protesting the recently passed House of Representatives’ Bill that seeks to harden the policing of the border and to increasingly criminalize undocumented immigration. The rallies reached a pinnacle on Monday, when hundreds of thousands of immigrants in cities large and small ("Hispanic residents quietly show muscle in St. James" The Star Tribune) boycotted work and school in order to demonstrate their importance to the US economy.

Continue reading "Oh say can you…sí?" »

Posted by Immigration History Research Center at 11:45 AM | Permalink