A Heart Connects Us: Digitizing letters written in languages other than English exchanged by international migrants and their loved ones in the years between 1850 and 1970 and providing access to and interpretation of the letters. These were written both by immigrants (the so-called "America letters") and to immigrants ("Europe Letters"). Explore this collection

Minnesota 2.0, a new digital archive created by the University of Minnesota Immigration History Research Center (IHRC), aims to document how 1.5 and 2nd generation Mexican, Somali, and Hmong youth use social networking sites to express their emerging sense of identity and social connection. The archive explores the youth's connections to Minnesota and the United States, to their parents and communities, to each other and to the homelands from which their families arrived. News Release, Explore this collection

Sheeko - Oral histories with Somali youth. This project was begun in Fall 2010 and is currently underway.

Heritage preservation activities:

• Nov. 2010, Understanding Archives: Intro to Archival Principles & Practices #1122

In their analysis, Hacker and Dreifus juxtapose the multiplication of educational administrators (84 coaches, "queer life coordinator," etc.) at the 2000-student Williams College in Massachusetts to the large numbers of research centers at the University of Minnesota with its 65,000 students.

Can we really equate the two developments or find a threat to undergraduate education in either?

As a long time faculty member, I have certainly been aware of the growing numbers of educational administrators in all institutions of higher education. Administrative costs have generally outpaced the costs of faculty and instructional staff. But even Hacker and Dreifus are forced to admit that most research centers (including the IHRC) are usually funded by private endowments and grants and not by tuition or funding from state legislatures.

Are there more research centers now than in the past? Probably. But the IHRC was created in 1965, well before the supposed trend the authors identify.

The authors also call attention to the rise of what they call "educational executives." It's not a label I recognize in my own life as Director of the IHRC. I'm a half-time member of the faculty, responsible for teaching undergraduate and graduate students. A large part of my job furthermore is to integrate IHRC research into the university educational programs. In the five years since I arrived at the IHRC, our administrative staff has been cut almost in half, while the numbers of undergraduate students involved in our programs and research activities has increased tenfold.

"Isn't education the purpose of college?" the two authors conclude provocatively.

It certainly is. And the IHRC--like most Minnesota research centers--is actively involved in that education. On a research budget of about $80,000 this past year, twelve undergraduate researchers--some working for pay, some for academic credit--assisted the IHRC staff and faculty in doing original research on the lives of immigrants and refugees in the United States. The undergraduates helped create a new digital archive of Facebook writings by immigrant youth, sorted through rare foreign-language books and pamphlets, did background research for an exhibit on immigrant letter writing, analyzed newspaper content on nineteenth century immigration, and explored the lives of foreign-born from the Midwest.

Last I checked, every one of those undergraduates was happy to include "research" among the accomplishments of their undergraduate education at Minnesota. The undergraduates who participate in research teams at the 200 plus Minnesota research centers thus easily surpass the total number of undergraduates at Williams College. And that's an educational achievement we should celebrate!

I am reminded of the importance of oral history every grading season when I read sixty or so oral history projects conducted by undergraduate students in my Asian American history course. The project consists of an assignment to conduct an oral history interview with an Asian American subject or someone who has worked closely on Asian American issues or with Asian American populations. Students then take the interview and contextualize their interviewee's experiences within larger contexts of immigration and Asian American history. I have been assigning this project for eleven years, and it is absolutely my favorite undergraduate assignment.

My students' subjects reflect the great diversity of Asian Americans in the 21st century, but also the unique regional characteristics of Asian Americans in the Midwest and in Minnesota. About one third of the papers focused on Hmong refugees or Hmong in America. Post-1965 immigrants from China, South Asia, the Philippines and adopted Korean Americans were also common. My international students from China interviewed other international students from China. A few interviewees were multiracial Asian Americans. Most projects focused on the migration narrative of why their subjects came to America as well as the immigrant narrative of finding success in the U.S. Common themes included: post-1965 opportunities to pursue education and professional training in the U.S., the escape from Communist persecution in Laos, adaptation to the U.S., struggles, hardship, and discrimination. But the interviews also documented refugees and immigrants who earned their GEDs, opened up nail salons, restaurants, and engineering firms, and who took pleasure in seeing their children pursue higher education. A significant change from years past is the decrease in the number of interviews involving grandparents and an increase in the number of projects on 1.5 and second generation Americans and on issues that reflect internal divisions and disparities within ethnic communities. Older siblings, cousins, and teachers who came to the U.S. as refugee children and who are now teachers, police officers, and counselors involved in the Hmong American community were common subjects. One student interviewed a Hmong lesbian activist whose parents refuse to acknowledge her sexual orientation. Another interviewed Hmong families with children with developmental disabilities who feel marginalized and ignored by mainstream Hmong social service organizations. Other students have begun to more critically analyze the ways in which history and family narratives are produced and why. One student focused on his family's "family nights" during which his parents tell and retell their reasons for coming to the United States and the hardships they faced once here as a way to inspire the second generation to achieve educational and economic success.

I finished grading at midnight last night (grades are due today!) and I am tired from a lack of sleep. But I have learned a lot about this snapshot of Asian Americans in the twenty-first century. I'm already looking forward to next year's papers.

By Erika Lee, Director, Asian American Studies Program; Associate Professor, Department of History and Asian American Studies, University of Minnesota.

Theories about immigration policy help us understand the factors that influence politicians' decisions but they also make the world more comprehensible. Without simplification and conceptualization, and without some regularity and patterns, it would be more difficult to understand how the world works now and what is likely to happen in the future. In addition, politicians can shape their decisions as well as their policy goals based on the alternatives offered to them by different theories in all aspects of politics.

Eytan Meyers offers a good comparison of the main theories in immigration policy in his article "Theories of International Immigration Policy - A comparative Analysis", published in the International Migration Review in 2002. In the article, Myers compares the six most influential theories of international migration: Marxism, realism, liberalism, the "national identity" approach, domestic politics, and institutionalism. He examines pros and cons of each theory in a very clear manner and even though the article appeared in an academic journal, Meyers has a writing style that enables readers outside of the academic community to understand his message. The aim of Meyers' article is to fill a hole in the academic debate; even though it is well understood that immigration policy shapes immigration patterns, the theories behind these policies are not well defined and not compared with each other.

Among other things I found to be intriguing in this article is the fact that the six most influential theories are the same ones that can be found in the theories of international security. However, in international security the six theories presented are usually placed inside only three different theory groups; realism, liberalism and constructivism. Treating each of these approaches as their own theory is one of the advantages of Myers' article. It enables him to discuss and compare them with more depth. However, as Myers points out, there is no one theory that can explain everything. Therefore trying to study and understand the theories can feel frustrating and seem pointless to both readers of the article and to the politicians who are supposed to use them as a background to their policy decisions. In addition, and probably due to the limited space of the article, Meyers does not offer specific examples of how politicians use these theories as a decision making tool.

By Anna-Maria Nykänen, Bachelor of Political Science, Good Governance Consortium Exchange Student in the University of Minnesota.

From mid-April to mid-May 2010, selected students from Professor Katherine Fennelly's course "PA5452: Immigration and Public Policy" are sharing thoughts on their readings with IHRC readers.

In the article, Huntington warns the nation's citizenry that as a result of thriving Latin American "political and linguistic enclaves," America faces the imminent threat of cultural divide and confrontation over the fundamental identity of the country. He goes so far as to say that Hispanics have the potential to "challenge the existing cultural, political, legal, commercial, and educational systems" and foresees resistance in the form of a new "White Nationalism."

As a multiculturalist and hispanohablante, I was inclined to react to Huntington's argument with the following, callow response: So what? Why is this impending cultural transformation a problem?

A quotation presented by Huntington as evidence for burgeoning Hispanic influence, however, offers a different insight. Huntington cites a Hispanic man explaining his situation in Miami. "Here, we are members of the power structure," he remarks. This man's use of the descriptor "here" discredits Huntington's generalizations about the future of the American identity.

It is an unfortunate truth that outside of a handful of cities like Miami, Hispanics are not members of the national power structure. Hispanics are the largest ethnic minority in the country. Still, Hispanics make up only five percent of the 111th Congress of the United States; there is one Hispanic governor in the country. White, Christian men continue to dominate our political system and business community despite notable progress in terms of racial, gender, and religious equality. America is not a nation of rich, white men. Why, then, are our representatives this way? Clearly, influential America has not strayed too far from its Anglo-Protestant foundations.

Huntington affirms that the reconquista of the Southwest United States is underway, that Miami is the prototype, and that this region could become the country's Quebec. He fails, however, to recognize that numbers do not equal power, and that in this country, it is power that matters.

By Kristen Lynn, Master of Public Policy Candidate, Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota.

From mid-April to mid-May 2010, selected students from Professor Katherine Fennelly's course "PA5452: Immigration and Public Policy" are sharing thoughts on their readings with IHRC readers.

There's No Jose Here follows the harrowing experience of one Mexican immigrant family living in New York City. Forced to live in a dilapidated apartment overrun by rats and roaches, while working multiple jobs at sub-minimum wages in order to pay even for such abysmal conditions, Enrique's family is hardly living the American Dream.

Enrique, the main character, was born in Cuicatlan, Mexico. His father left to work in the US when Enrique was just two years old. Enrique suffered the abandonment of his father, yet followed in his footsteps, arriving undocumented in 1986. Enrique and his father became citizens through amnesty in the late 1980s.

Life in the US was anything but easy for Enrique and his family. Enrique's first daughter suffered from lead poisoning, leaving her mentally challenged and eventually pregnant at 14. The substandard living conditions in which they are forced to live inspires Enrique to become an activist; his persistence leads to passage of a tenant protection law to abolish lead paint in New York City apartments.

Enrique directly addresses the issue of undocumented immigrants several times in the book. He and second generation Mexican-American, Manuel, are arguing over the issue when Enrique asks, "What do you think your parents did? If they hadn't crossed, you would be the same as me... What are people supposed to do to survive? Hay que comer (p. 134)."

There are many statistics about immigrants--especially undocumented immigrants--in the US today. But if legislators do not take stories such as this one into account, immigration policy will continue to breed exploitation of undocumented immigrants. It will not address the life-threatening journey Mexicans are forced to take so they can feed their children. Without putting a face to the crisis, how can legislators truly create policies to give everyone--citizens and newly arrived--the opportunity to thrive in the United States?

By Molly Illes, MPA Candidate, Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota.

From mid-April to mid-May 2010, selected students from Professor Katherine Fennelly's course "PA5452: Immigration and Public Policy" are sharing thoughts on their readings with IHRC readers.

Legraine makes convincing economic and moral cases for open migration (Melissa Lafsky, "The Case for Open Immigration: A Q&A with Phillipe Legraine," October 17, 2007). Why, he asks, is it acceptable for migration across national boundaries to be limited to the rich and skilled workers of the world? Migration both between and within nations is one of the most effective means to better the lives of the poor. We all agree that it is good for Americans to migrate throughout the nation in search of better opportunities. Why does this same principle not apply to Mexicans? Why should their human concerns be worth any less consideration?

Economically, Legraine says that removing immigration controls could more than double the size of the world's economy. Further, the diversity engendered by immigration helps to fuel the innovation that keeps economies strong. Look no further, he says, than the founders of high-tech giants Google, Intel, eBay, or Yahoo!, all of whom immigrated to the United States as children. Of course, this viewpoint implies fully open borders, which will not happen anytime in the foreseeable future. Fair enough.

Legraine's moral case for immigration is what hits this reader hardest however. Short of fully open borders, a new viewpoint that stops viewing immigrants as apart from ourselves, as foreigners, but instead recognizes their common humanity would have very real policy implications. Immigrants would be treated as members of families, not simply as workers, and family reunification would be made more accessible. Immigrants would be seen as members of communities, not as invaders of American space, and more active integration polices would be proposed. Immigrants would be seen as the contributors to the economy rather than as drains on social services or job thieves, and work visas could be made more easily available.

The moral viewpoint of law and order has to this point prevailed in discussions of immigration. Perhaps it is time to push forward more prominently an alternative morality that acknowledges the accident of birth that determined that I would be prosperous and others would be left needing, and that the interests of the rich are not worth more than the interests of the poor. Pie in the sky? Probably. But nothing ever changed by doing nothing.

By Walker Bosch, Graduate Teaching Assistant and Master of Public Policy Candidate, Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota.

From mid-April to mid-May 2010, selected students from Professor Katherine Fennelly's course "PA5452: Immigration and Public Policy" are sharing thoughts on their readings with IHRC readers.

If you were one of the 390 undocumented immigrants working at a plant in Postville, Iowa on May 12, 2008, these would be your options. Although using a false social security card carries a jail sentence of 0-6 months, the careful manipulation of circumstances and distortion of congressional intent allowed the federal government to charge the Postville detainees with identity theft which carries a two year jail sentence. Yet, as author Erik Camayd-Freixas explains in his article, "Interpreting after the Largest ICE Raid in US History: A Personal Account" (2008), less than .5% of the detainees may have been guilty of identity theft.

Freixas asks why the U.S. government would spend tax payer dollars to imprison and provide legal counsel for detainees held under false charges rather than immediately send them home. His investigation led him to conclude that this activity has been undertaken to justify the expansiveness of the DHS budget - it was a means of creating work. Last fall, I attended an information session for a DHS fellows program. DHS now has 16 offices and most are only vaguely, if at all, related to border enforcement. Can we hope that this expansion into other fields of tremendous national interest and importance will reduce the urge to manipulate U.S. law and unnecessarily persecute undocumented immigrants?

Yet, it is too easy to simply demonize ICE, immigration judges and other immigration officials. Throughout the article, Freixas subtly suggests that we do not need more reasonable executors of the law, but rather a more reasonable law to be executed. We need a system of accountability that assures that appropriate authorities are interpreting the law according to constitutionally defined roles and that publicly-funded assignments are justified by potential public benefit, and not to retroactively justify a budget.

Just prior to his deportation, one Guatemalan arrested in Postville summed up the paradox nicely when he said, "God knows you are just doing your job to support your families, and that job is to keep me from supporting mine."

By Kelly M. Anderson, Master of Public Policy Candidate, Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota.

From mid-April to mid-May 2010, selected students from Professor Katherine Fennelly's course "PA5452: Immigration and Public Policy" are sharing thoughts on their readings with IHRC readers.

"I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination." (Jhumpa Lahiri: Interpreter of Maladies)

This is how an Indian man who has migrated to the United States describes his life in Jhumpa Lahiri's short story "The Third and Final Continent". I have felt a similar sense of bewilderment when interviewing refugees who have arrived in Finland or when reading accounts by victims of trafficking for prostitution. Their experiences of leaving their war-torn homelands and traveling across the globe with human smugglers have sometimes been beyond my imagination and understanding. Yet I have wanted to hear their stories, engage with them, and share them with a wider audience through my artworks.

Since my artwork and research began to circle around the topics of migration and dislocation, I have found myself constantly immersed in fiction dealing with the same themes. Some of the most memorable and powerful novels I have read in the last few years are - to mention just a few - What is the What by Dave Eggers, Jhumpa Lahiri's short stories, Edwidge Danticat's biographical narratives of the Haitian diaspora, and Dinaw Mengestu's melancholy novel about an Ethiopian immigrant in Washington DC: The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.

But only after I moved to Minneapolis a year ago did the themes of my work and the fiction I was reading start to feel strangely familiar and somewhat more personal. When reading Jhumpa Lahiri's stories last January I remember recognizing her characters' deep feelings of isolation and disconnectedness - not to mention their bewilderment and frustration with the American way of life. Many of the immigrants in her stories are, like myself, educated middle class people coming to work in American universities.

I finally started to accept my friend's suggestion that in some ways the topics of my art and research could also be rooted in my own life history: living in different countries; experiencing persistent feelings of exclusion and not-belonging; and facing the as yet unresolved question of 'where is home?' I stubbornly protested her idea of my work being based in any way on personal experience, and pointed out that I belong to the privileged elite of globalization; I am an educated western citizen who travels and moves around according to my own free will, and I always have the option to return to my native country. Ignoring my objections my friend calmly continued that even though my socioeconomic and cultural situation is very different, the psychical experience of moving to another country is not necessarily completely dissimilar. Maybe she was right after all.

As the character in Jhumpa Lahiri's story mentions, there is nothing extraordinary in the experience of migration. Whether it is voluntary or dictated by circumstances, every year hundreds of millions of people cross borders and move around the globe. But as Sara Ahmed has pointed out, "[t]he question is not simply about who travels, but when, how and under what circumstances?" It is paramount to understand the historical and political causes and effects of patterns of migration and dislocation.

However, maybe art and fiction can shed light not only on the historical and political conditions of migration, but also give us insights into the inner lives of people who have experienced it. I still maintain my position in emphasizing the difference between my migratory experiences and those who have left their countries fearing for their lives or to escape poverty. Nevertheless, perhaps the acknowledgment of a certain, albeit limited, shared human experience through art - whether it is fictional narratives, film or visual art - will help me gain a deeper understanding of my research topic, which, although so commonplace in today's world, is at times still beyond my imagination.

By Minna Rainio, Visual Artist and Researcher, Visiting Associate Professor, Department of Art, University of Minnesota.

In the first two months of research I have seen many fan pages where most group members are from the United States or European countries and are talking about how much they love Mexico. There are also many fan pages where the members are Mexican and are talking about how much they love Mexico. There are various groups and fan pages dedicated to Mexican restaurants. This speaks to the fact that the Mexican culture and identity has been commodified. Many of the most active members in groups such as "Sayulita, Mexico" are not Mexican and the way that they see the culture is quite different than the Mexicans that are from Sayulita. Many Mexicans have posted on the wall that the way the tourists see them as a "sleepy" town is incorrect. This is important because, although there may be thousands of groups where white Americans claim to love Mexico for being authentic, what these white Americans may love is less "authentic" and is instead more the result of a commodified image of Mexico.

As I continue my research I hope to hear more from the Mexican and Mexican American community rather than the white Euro-American community talking about Mexico. Groups with words like "Mexicano" in the title will surely yield better results. There are groups like "Soy Mexicano y no tengo influenza!!!!" "I am Mexican and I don't have the flu" and "un Mexicano sin tacos...no es mexicano" "a Mexican without tacos...is no Mexican." These kinds of groups bring up what it means to be Mexican and I look forward to researching more fully into this aspect of how Mexican and Mexican Americans use Facebook.

Beatriz Carrillo is an IHRC Undergraduate Research Assistant.

My work on MN 2.0 includes gathering information from these particular sites by looking at uploaded links and pictures, reading the comments posted by members, looking for specific themes, and taking snap shots of the comments and the discussion boards.

In particular, with the research I have done, I am finding central ideas that are present and discussed in the majority of the larger Hmong Facebook groups. In the "Hmong of Today" group, education is one theme of discussion that appears frequently. There are agreements and disagreements amongst the members to why Hmong youth are failing or succeeding in academics. Ideas of culture and financial problems seem to be two recurring explanations offered by the members. These same concerns about education can also be seen in many other Facebook groups.

As a young Hmong male and part of the Hmong youth who are searching for a more solid Hmong identity, there are comments expressed by the Facebook group members that I agree and disagree with. Most of the time, whether for or against a certain issue, I can see why the person chose to say what he/she did because Hmong youth are creating and re-creating their identity, trying to negotiate what it means to be Hmong. For example, ideas of Hmong culture are an important and controversial issue that I agree hinders and/or motivates Hmong youth to succeed in the American educational system. Since the American and Hmong cultural values are very different, the cultural expectations from the Hmong youth individuals vary. In the process of trying to meet the expectations of these two distinct cultures, Hmong youth are met with ambiguity and failure, and many Hmong do not make it in the educational system. In exploring these and other issues through my continued research with Minnesota 2.0, I hope to gain a greater understanding of Hmong youth identity and contribute to the discussions and shaping of that Hmong identity.

Suk Her is an IHRC Undergraduate Research Assistant.

One Facebook group entitled "A Unified Somalia-The Only Way Forward for the development of Somalia" addresses how to create unity and stabilize Somalia. The creator of the group argues that Somalis need to put aside their differences and work to build and develop Somalia. Furthermore, in his opinion, Somalia itself needs to create jobs, schools, and healthcare in order to influence Somalis in the diasporic community to return. Members of this group inform each other of problems in their own diasporic communities as well, including the lack of educational achievement and the risks of drugs and gangs.

Yet we are not just researchers that stand on the sidelines and wait for things to analyze in this project: we are also participants. All of us have engaged in Facebook discussions, something that is unique about this research project. For example, Salma wrote on a Facebook Fan Page entitled "The Ugly Towers in Minneapolis with all the colors on them." The buildings it condescendingly refers to are those of the Cedar Riverside plaza, a neighborhood that she volunteers and works in. Even more disheartening, though, were the comments of young people attending various colleges and universities referring to the buildings as "crack stacks," and even at times calling them "Somali projects." Through interaction with some of the individuals who posted on the page, they were able to realize the hate that was evident in their writings. Many were simply trying to be sarcastic, but soon realized that they were doing so at the expense of putting down an entire ethnic group.

In addition to these topics, we have read other young Somalis' views on subjects that range from peace in our motherland to preservation of identity to succeeding in school. It has been extremely interesting to see how people can be so far in distance yet share so many things in common. We are both excited to be part of such a dynamic and important project.

Salma Hussein and Mustafa Jumale are IHRC Undergraduate Research Assistants.

... document and understand how social networking sites have opened ways for 1.5 and 2nd generation Mexican, Somali, and Hmong youth to express their emerging sense of identity and social connection - to Minnesota and the U.S., to their parents and communities, to each other, and to the homelands from which their families arrived.

The students involved in the project--six undergraduates as well as well the two of us--have spent the majority of our time "reading" Facebook. We are focusing on the more publicly-accessible Fan Pages and Groups of the three ethnic groups, and how themes such as the following are discussed and debated:

• Ethnic identity and pride, as well as connections across a given diaspora
• Gender and sexuality
• Discussions about language as it relates to cultural and ethnic identity
• Education
• The struggles of living life as an immigrant and refugee
• Homeland politics
• Religion
• Americanization and assimilation

The research we are doing overturns assumptions that social networking sites are ephemeral time-wasters that distract youth from more meaningful pursuits. Instead, we have found that participating in discussions on social networking, while potentially a means of distraction, are also crucial spaces of identity formation. Our research has also shown a more popular culture-oriented conceptions of these ethnic groups, whether it be discussions around the Hmong actors in Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, the huge number of Groups and Fan Pages dedicated to Mexican restaurants and vacations, and, on a more depressing note, the often vicious jokes and stereotypes imagined through Somalia. Overall, Minnesota 2.0 has shown how much Facebook is a medium of connection, not only amongst the profiles and pages we've looked at, but also amongst those working on the project.

In the next three blog entries, the undergraduate research assistants working with us on the project will write entries detailing their initial research with Somali, Hmong, and Mexican Facebook materials. As you will find out from their entries, Facebook and other instances of Web 2.0 are a dynamic and wide-ranging platform for immigrant and refugee youth to shape their own identities as well as connect with other youth--and even some adults--across the Twin Cities and across the world.

Andy Wilhide is a Ph.D. Student in History, and Justin Schell is IHRC Graduate Research Assistant and Ph.D. Candidate in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature.

This week my graduate students and I are reading world historians. The scale of their analyses is breathtaking. See one effort to re-tell the history of the earth and its peoples in a seven-minute video: http://worldhistoryforusall.sdsu.edu/movies/flash_large.htm. A focus on the long-term history of human movements is equally humbling.

Historian Patrick Manning for example tells the story of how, in 30,000 years ago or so, "homo sapiens" walked out of Africa, along rivers and coasts, through mountain valleys and across vast plains to populate every corner of Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Manning stops short of describing humans as a mobile species, although in his book Migration in World History, he distinguishes humans' cross-cultural movements to the migratory habits of birds and wildebeests. He also suggests that migration may be the most important source of innovation and change in human history.

Dirk Hoerder too portrays a world on the move in every era and indeed every decade. Hoerder demonstrates how normal migration has been and how many human beings have expected to move at some point in their lives. The Lucasssen brothers, Leo and Jan, put to rest a common assumption that it was modernization that transformed "naturally" sedentary people into restless migrants. And historian Adam McKeown dismisses the notion that Europeans have been uniquely mobile or innovative for he documents Asians as equally restless, whether in crossing the Pacific or expanding relentlessly into every corner of their own vast continent.

It's hard to read the world historians without forming a graphic image of the earth as a kind of teeming anthill, where people are constantly venturing off in one direction or another, for shorter or longer times, in search of food, of adventure, of opportunity, of material comfort or of a better meal, of education, of work or of safety. Historians like Hoerder do acknowledge the emotional stresses, the separations from loved ones, the cultural shocks and even the exploitation and oppression that can accompany migration. But almost no one can read these world histories of migration without questioning whether most humans would prefer a sedentary life or whether barriers to movement can easily be erected to "stem the tide." On the contrary, if humans are a mobile species, and if mobility is the engine of development, why have so many nations around the world sought to restrict it? That is the question world historians pose.

Recently, at a forum sponsored by the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, I invoked Michael Chabon's wonderful diasporic novel, The Yiddish Policeman's Union. In the novel, Chabon imagines that the FDR administration, rather than ignoring the coming storm of the holocaust as it did, granted the Jewish people a lease to land in Sitka, Alaska. As a result, far fewer Jews perished in Europe, and at the time of the novel's setting, the 1970s, Yiddish is a thriving, creolized language, with wonderful specific vernaculars, like the cop talk that graces its pages.

In my talk, I explained that the situation of contemporary migrants from Mexico and Central America is in some ways very much like that of European Jewish refugees from Europe in the late 1930s. While Mexican and Central American migrants flee the economic devastation of free trade, rather than a genocidal regime, their collective survival is nonetheless at stake.

Presented in this way, the parallel generally goes over well. Many in the Jewish community recognize the situation of contemporary migrants as eliciting a specifically Jewish sympathy. As an issue, immigration has progressive currency in contemporary Jewish communities, specifically because it is a diasporic issue: it addresses Jews as wanderers, rather than nationals. So a conversation about migration avoids the third rail of Israel, which has so often, since 1948, divided the Jewish left, Jews from the left.

This is instructive to me as an im/migration historian. When contemporary Jewish communities remember ourselves as migrants and wanderers, we conjure a history easily shared with other communities, not one that rests on our connection with a particularly imagined homeland. Allegiances to the homeland, argues Matthew Frye Jacobson, were part of the constitution of American ethnic identity for Jewish, Polish and Irish immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (2002).

The creation of ethnic identities has been of central concern to historians of immigration. But perhaps, as we move towards a transnational history of immigration, it is time to move away from ethnic exceptionalism, towards a comparative history of migration. Such a history recognizes cultural specificity and historical exigency, as well as the diversity within ethnic communities. At the same time, such a history speaks powerfully to our current moment of global transformation and displacement.

The first set in post World War II Germany, vividly and with incredible detail covers the experiences of pre-teen Wolfgang Samuel and his broken family in their daily fight for survival as they suffer arbitrary arrest, rape, hunger, and constant fear. Wolfgang quickly leaves childhood behind as he watches his mother's indomitable spirit, even when forced to exchange sex for food to keep her family alive. In the end, the Samuels come to America where Wolfgang has an impressive career in the Air Force.

In the second, Kao Kalia Yang lyrically relates the moving story of her family from the war-torn jungles of Laos, to the overcrowded Thailand refugee camp, and ultimately to the United States, beautifully weaving in Hmong folklore and culture. Even after settling in Minnesota, the family continues to struggle as they adapt to a new world - a world that often does not understand nor welcome them.

These books helped me ponder the universality of the refuge experience in living through cataclysmic change, struggling to survive while seeking a homeland, and adapting to a new world. What traits did the Samuels, the Yangs, and my parents have in common that helped them succeed?

My Flag Grew Stars: World War II Refugees' Journey to America, capturing the story of my parents Olga and Tibor Zoltai, has just become available on Amazon.com. Their world destroyed in the war, teenagers Olga and Tibor flee Hungary - Olga minutes ahead of advancing Russian troops and Tibor conscripted by the Germans almost dies as an American Prisoner of War. Their experiences on the losing side provide a unique perspective of war, the actions of Americans, and the daily fight of refugees to survive. Immigrating as indentured agricultural servants, they unite, embarking on a cultural journey to become Americans. Through perseverance and creativity, they learn how to thrive, Tibor as a world-renowned professor at the University of Minnesota and Olga counseling refugees, earning the title "area immigrants' patron saint."

For more information, come to the IHRC celebration of the book's release on December 1, 2009 or visit http://kittygogins.books.officelive.com. A talk at the celebration will relate how Olga leveraged her own refugee experience to help newer refugees through her work at the International Institute.

Recently, I was able to observe and take part in "A Day on Diversity," led by Keith Woods, Dean of the Poynter Institute, which provides continuing education in journalism for professional and potential journalists. Woods addressed a continuing debate in journalism education: how to describe people sought by the police as suspects. News stories have stopped mentioning race and ethnic descriptors. In the journalism classroom, students challenge instructors, arguing that this is important information because readers need to know "who to look for." Woods then asked us to draw the face of a "Hispanic" person. Most of us were stumped.

The exercise could have focused on any ethnic or racial group, but it seemed to me that the choice of "Hispanic" was particularly relevant since many Americans claim to "see" illegal aliens in the Hispanic population. What does an illegal alien look like? Woods showed us the 1950s George Reeves portrayal on the "Adventures of Superman" television series. It occurred to us that Superman too was an illegal alien: he arrived from another planet, without identifying papers or legal permission to enter the country!

Why was this American cultural icon and symbol of the nation's ideals never identified as an illegal immigrant or undocumented alien in our popular culture, or in news coverage of all the various forms in which this character has been portrayed for more than 70 years? Why were Superman's adoptive parents never criticized for creating a false identity for him, complete with false documents? Could they have gotten away with it if Superman was not white, and would they have even tried? To what extent would mainstream America have questioned Superman's origins and right to be in the country if he were not white? Would mainstream America have accepted his superhero status and benevolent nature if he were not white? What are some links between the origins and activities of superheroes and their apparent race or ethnicity, and their acceptability in American society and continuing popularity in American culture?

Clark Kent - that is to say, Superman's false human and American identity - is a journalist but as Superman Kent is frequently interviewed or photographed by his colleagues Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen. To what extent can we say they were doing their job as journalists when they failed to issues of illegal immigration and undocumented alien-ness when covering the Superman story? It seems to me these kinds of questions could be used in discussions about the bases and characteristics for being perceived as a member of "an acceptable group" in American society, and how they change over time.

As evidence to the contrary, I recommend Karen Tintori's shocking but grippingly readable book, Unto the Daughters: The Legacy of an Honor Killing in a Sicilian-American Family (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2007). In Detroit, Michigan, in 1919, Tintori's great aunt - who had arrived from Sicily with the rest of her family - fell in love with a young barber in her neighborhood. When she eloped and married him, defying her father's orders to instead marry an older man with ties to the "mob," her brothers killed her. Tintori's grandmother and grandfather then destroyed all pictures of the dead girl, scratching even her name from family records. No one in the family or in the community went to the police. The community accepted the murder in silence; community and family, not American laws or police, defined justice in immigrant, Sicilian Detroit.

No one in Tintori's family ever mentioned the dead girl's name again. Until, that is, the patient, resourceful and fiercely determined Tintori overcame resistance to piece together an account of the horrific crime.

Tintori's book forces readers to think hard about very difficult issues. Violence against women within families knows no religious or cultural boundaries. But is the murder of a woman whose lapsed morality is understood to shame an entire family fundamentally different from other violent domestic crimes? And if it is different, what can and should a society do to guarantee that daughters and wives are safe in their own homes?

We'll never know if Tintori's family story was unique in immigrant Italian America. It probably was not, since honor crimes continue even today in modern, Catholic Italy. Yet Tintori's book shocks readers precisely because they cannot imagine Italian Americans committing or tolerating such violence. Did honor crimes disappear with immigrants' Americanization? Were they relegated to the arcane world of mobsters and mafia? Tintori strongly suggests instead that it was the empowerment of subsequent generations of Italian-American women along with waning distrust of governmental authority that rendered honor killings unacceptable among these earlier immigrants. Tintori's insights should provide at least some guidance as Americans and Europeans think about the honor killings that continue to shock them today.

Phyllis Michaux, the author of The Unknown Ambassadors: A Saga of Citizenship (1996), married a Frenchman after World War II and has lived in France ever since. Michaux founded the Association of American Wives of Europeans (AAWE) in Paris in 1961 "to protect the citizenship rights of Americans married to Europeans and the children of these bicultural and bilingual families." Her book provides interesting glimpses into how Americans view those who leave the U.S., and how Americans who live abroad view themselves and their relationship to the U.S.

What is striking in both perspectives is that an American living abroad is expected to remain just that - an American living abroad. Common American expectations of immigrants moving to the U.S. - abandonment of native languages and assimilation into the "American way of life" - do not apply to Americans when they are immigrants in other countries. Michaux laments that American emigrants are often regarded with mistrust and suspected of disloyalty to their home country. "There is widespread suspicion that Americans who leave the U.S. will no longer think of themselves as Americans," she writes.

Facing suspicions that Americans living abroad are "tax avoiders, living it up in the sunny climes of the Mediterranean or the Caribbean," Michaux is determined to show how she and her country women in the AAWE are, first and foremost, loyal, tax-paying U.S. citizens who want to transmit their citizenship, language, and culture to their children. As Michael Adler, one of the members of the AAWE proclaims: "We or our children are neither immigrants nor refugees. We are Americans..."

The story of the U.S. is said to be that of a "nation of immigrants." Yet the story of Americans who have chosen to emigrate has little, if any, resemblance to this view.

The Glimmer Palace (by Beatrice Colin) and The China Lover (by Ian Buruma) are both works of historical fiction. Both are about the early film industry. And both focus on the lives of movie stars. The Glimmer Palace explores the biography of a fictional film star, Lilly Nelly Aphrodite, in interwar Germany; The China Lover is instead based loosely on a real person--known variously as Ri Koran, Yoshiko Yamaguchi and Shirley Yamaguchi. Of the two, The China Lover is by far the more sophisticated of these two historical novels.

But there was to be no late-summer escapism for me. Film stars, too, I quickly learned, are labor migrants and refugees.

Lilly Nelly Aphrodite's lover, a refugee Russian named Ilya Yurasov, toils in the fictional editing room while Lilly responds to the siren call of Hollywood. (I'll not describe in any detail the improbable plot twists that has her returning again to work for Goebbels but escaping him at the last minute for a boat again sailing west across the Atlantic). The China Lover is actually narrated by several expatriated lovers of film who travel as she also does between Japan, Manchuria, China, Japan, and the United States. With all this moving about, the reader sometimes struggles to keep track of all the shifting identities of the film star and of the star-struck men who work around her in the film industry.

For an historian, reading historical fiction is a busman's holiday. We inevitably look for anachronisms and wonder which bits of historical fiction are actually fictional. For the specialist on migration, I've now concluded, there are no busmen's holidays. Perhaps that's because the lives of the migratory just more interesting than the lives of the sedentary?

The Ukrainian Fraternal Association Collection offers a wealth of information about ethnic life in the United States during the 20th century, but until 2008-2009 the collection -- which is mostly in Ukrainian for early years -- simply was inaccessible for most researchers. In the past year, the IHRC began translating and digitizing records from 1918 to 1920 as part of "The Ukrainian American Health, Mortality and Demography Project," funded by a seed grant from the Minnesota Population Center. The pilot database provides a powerful tool for analyzing the effect of a pandemic on an ethnic community.

Infections from the influenza A (H1N1) virus identified in Mexico are now appearing in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 1918, a flu virus was identified in the United States, with waves of infection following as the virus mutated and traveled to Europe, across the globe, and back to the United States the following year. The UFA database provides a range of demographic information that allows both multivariate analysis of social patterns and, with the support of manuscript holdings, access to long-term correspondence revealing the context of Ukrainian migration to the United States.

The horror of World War I overshadowed the 1918 pandemic in public memory, but about twice as many people died from the early 20th-century virus as from the war. The fact that the virus seemed to target healthy victims has remained a hallmark of that pandemic. Recent deaths in Mexico have also been among those in the prime of life rather than the youngest or the elderly, but this parallel should not be overstated, because the course of the disease is not fully predictable, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Health scientists have begun mathematically modeling the social interactions of communities to devise effective ways of reducing transmission, and the UFA data can be incorporated into such models.

The UFA database includes information much broader than mortality and health, however. The new data set, available for onsite use at Elmer L. Andersen Library, reveals the crossroads of immigrant life. The level of information for individuals is deep and includes village of origin in Europe, changes in family size, and type of occupation, among many possible variables. Fraternal associations often were the only institutional providers of assistance for new immigrants. The insurance policy records of organizations such as the UFA are a vital source for reconstructing evidence about ethnic communities and migration.

For the 2009 virus, the World Health Organization has raised its designation of the threat level because of recent findings of human-to-human transmission and the ability of the virus potentially to spread at the community level. Although the WHO has not advised travel restrictions, the CDC has issued guidelines for travel to infected areas.

As in the opening decades of the twentieth century, global travel has increased dramatically, making a truly world-wide threat extraordinarily difficult to halt. Understanding the global aspects of how diseases operate is important, but it is even more critical to determine the specific patterns of interaction within communities, where containment and mitigation efforts can be implemented successfully.

Institutions in the United States have begun implementing procedures to ensure preparedness. The University of Minnesota is among those institutions with plans in place to deal with public health disasters, whether the spread of swine flu or another threat.

The IHRC currently is working to obtain a grant for expanding the project to the beginning of the Ukrainian Fraternal Association's files in 1911 and extending, in time, across the 20th century. Digitizing the collection will allow the IHRC to provide individual-level information while putting in place controls for ensuring confidentiality as the project moves forward. The UFA data set for 1918-1920 creates a window for new scholarship with significant public health applications, and especially for careful analysis of historical parallels with the 1918 pandemic.

Global health concerns have provided special urgency for making the IHRC's vast collections of fraternal association records available, and they can be used for much more than the study of immigrant and ethnic health. The three-year snapshot of UFA records allows scholars to analyze linguistic patterns and literacy, occupational mobility, and the effect of nation-state formation on diaspora identity. As the UFA project expands longitudinally and IHRC databases broaden to include other collections, the value of preserving the records of American immigration will only increase.

The Ukrainian Fraternal Association Collection offers a wealth of information about ethnic life in the United States during the 20th century, but until 2008-2009 the collection -- which is mostly in Ukrainian for early years -- simply was inaccessible for most researchers. In the past year, the IHRC began translating and digitizing records from 1918 to 1920 as part of “The Ukrainian American Health, Mortality and Demography Project,” funded by a seed grant from the Minnesota Population Center. The pilot database provides a powerful tool for analyzing the effect of a pandemic on an ethnic community.

Infections from the influenza A (H1N1) virus identified in Mexico are now appearing in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 1918, a flu virus was identified in the United States, with waves of infection following as the virus mutated and traveled to Europe, across the globe, and back to the United States the following year. The UFA database provides a range of demographic information that allows both multivariate analysis of social patterns and, with the support of manuscript holdings, access to long-term correspondence revealing the context of Ukrainian migration to the United States.

The horror of World War I overshadowed the 1918 pandemic in public memory, but about twice as many people died from the early 20th-century virus as from the war. The fact that the virus seemed to target healthy victims has remained a hallmark of that pandemic. Recent deaths in Mexico have also been among those in the prime of life rather than the youngest or the elderly, but this parallel should not be overstated, because the course of the disease is not fully predictable, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Health scientists have begun mathematically modeling the social interactions of communities to devise effective ways of reducing transmission, and the UFA data can be incorporated into such models.

The UFA database includes information much broader than mortality and health, however. The new data set, available for onsite use at Elmer L. Andersen Library, reveals the crossroads of immigrant life. The level of information for individuals is deep and includes village of origin in Europe, changes in family size, and type of occupation, among many possible variables. Fraternal associations often were the only institutional providers of assistance for new immigrants. The insurance policy records of organizations such as the UFA are a vital source for reconstructing evidence about ethnic communities and migration.

For the 2009 virus, the World Health Organization has raised its designation of the threat level because of recent findings of human-to-human transmission and the ability of the virus potentially to spread at the community level. Although the WHO has not advised travel restrictions, the CDC has issued guidelines for travel to infected areas.

As in the opening decades of the twentieth century, global travel has increased dramatically, making a truly world-wide threat extraordinarily difficult to halt. Understanding the global aspects of how diseases operate is important, but it is even more critical to determine the specific patterns of interaction within communities, where containment and mitigation efforts can be implemented successfully.

Institutions in the United States have begun implementing procedures to ensure preparedness. The University of Minnesota is among those institutions with plans in place to deal with public health disasters, whether the spread of swine flu or another threat.

The IHRC currently is working to obtain a grant for expanding the project to the beginning of the Ukrainian Fraternal Association’s files in 1911 and extending, in time, across the 20th century. Digitizing the collection will allow the IHRC to provide individual-level information while putting in place controls for ensuring confidentiality as the project moves forward. The UFA data set for 1918-1920 creates a window for new scholarship with significant public health applications, and especially for careful analysis of historical parallels with the 1918 pandemic.

Global health concerns have provided special urgency for making the IHRC’s vast collections of fraternal association records available, and they can be used for much more than the study of immigrant and ethnic health. The three-year snapshot of UFA records allows scholars to analyze linguistic patterns and literacy, occupational mobility, and the effect of nation-state formation on diaspora identity. As the UFA project expands longitudinally and IHRC databases broaden to include other collections, the value of preserving the records of American immigration will only increase.

A lot of jobs have been lost, forcing us to live on our savings or take out loans. On the bright side, we know how to ride the waves. This is not our first recession, and we’ve spent our whole lives learning how to navigate around the waters of the US financial system.

But what of those who are new to this socio-economic terrain? There are about 70,500 refugees living in Minnesota, and many of them are finding it extremely difficult to stay afloat financially. Refugees are hard pressed to pay for rent and utilities, often spending 85 to 90 percent of their income on rent alone.

Of course, refugees do receive some support from the government. In Minnesota, refugees receive a $450 one-time payment per person by the State Department plus cash and medical support for the first eight months through voluntary resettlement agencies. After this, refugees are eligible to receive employment and language support from community based NPOs for another four years and four months. (For an example of a community based NPO mentioned above, visit www.capiusa.org.)

Despite such efforts of the government and community organizations, however, many refugees find it difficult to obtain financial self-sufficiency after government support dries up.

Why?

One factor may have to do with differences in the education accreditation system. Even refugees who possess higher education degrees (e.g. recent Iraqi refugees) find it hard to get their degrees recognized by U.S.-based institutions. Naturally, refugees and the children of refugees have a hard time climbing up the social ladder, because they need to first relearn how the ladder looks like in the US.

Of course, some refugees do come with little formal education. For instance, as of 2003 only 23% of minors age 5 through 17 were enrolled in school at UNHCR-sponsored refugee camps. This makes it difficult for students who have spent their youth in refugee camps to complete their secondary education and go on to university and beyond.

Differences in the structure of the economy play a big role as well. As of 2007, the top five countries of origin for refugees admitted to the US were Burma, Somalia, Iran, Burundi, and Cuba. The economies of these countries are based on industries different from that of the US, which causes a structural disadvantage to admitted refugees. In other words, refugees find that the skills that served them well back home bring few dividends in their new home. It is especially difficult for them to initiate entrepreneurial projects, as they cannot access the credit market (due to lack of credit history as well as lack of working knowledge of the system) to cover upfront costs.

The language barrier and differences in cultural/religious norms are also major factors. Such factors make communication difficult between refugees and employers on multiple levels, which sometimes bring about xenophobic actions from the latter. This presents a challenge for refugees to acquire and maintain higher paying jobs. (A recent conference titled "Racism vs. Xenophobia" at the University of Minnesota discussed this important issue in a comparative perspective.).

Refugees, by definition, have fled from a well founded fear of persecution in their home countries. America is indeed the land of the free for these people: freedom of expression, freedom of choice, and freedom to pursue happiness. It is therefore ironic indeed that these freedoms should be shackled by a more subtle form of collective socio-economic persecution from our capitalist society.

About the Author: Taehohn Lee is a Graduate School Fellow in the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. This article appears as part of a policy research project conducted by graduate students in "Immigration and Public Policy" (PA 5490, Prof. Katherine Fennelly).

This framing of security risks is how the PATRIOT Act was passed, as George Lakoff and Sam Ferguson write in “The Framing of Immigration.” Their argument was that we needed a tougher agency to find and restrain terrorists and criminals. However, that is not what is happening.

ICE is rounding up foreigners who do not have proper documentation to work in the United States and deporting them. This is not how ICE has stated its purpose and goals to congress.

The unintended consequence is that instead of making our nation safer, it is actually contributing to the problems of the economic crisis! These meatpackers go to work every day; taxes are automatically taken out of their checks. They are paying mortgage or rent, paying taxes, buying food and clothes, and living otherwise normal lives.

When hundreds are deported, taxes are no longer collected, nor mortgages or rents paid, nor goods bought. Families are separated, and children suffer -- which requires more social services, as reported at the Urban Institute, Immigration Studies Program.

The businesses are suffering, with a shortage of trained meatpackers, losing money daily. This affects the food supply as well as the economic conditions of everyone in an area that rely on the meatpackers to spend their hard-earned money in town. “It’s chaos out there; the shortage is all over the country,” said Menachem Lubinsky, the editor of koshertoday.com, which monitors kosher food markets. “Everybody has begun to scramble.”

Deporting meat packers is not keeping America safe .

Businesses that rely on these workers need to advocate for immigration reform. Having these jobs filled is good for business, for the workers and their families, and helps keep America stronger in this economic crisis.

About the Author: Debra Kay Markert is a candidate for a master's degree of public affairs in the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. Her article appears as part of a policy research project conducted by graduate students in "Immigration and Public Policy" (PA 5490, Prof. Katherine Fennelly).

The year 2008 marks the 75th anniversary of Holodomor (which literally means murder by starvation). Ukrainian Americans, along with their countrymen and Ukrainians throughout the world, are commemorating this tragedy in November of this year, the month officially designated by Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko.

Many of the eyewitnesses to the tragedy perished, leaving empty villages that in time were populated by incoming Russian settlers. Survivors who came to the United States commemorated the famine, but few shared their personal stories until the latter 20th century.

Famines still occur even in the 21st century. Darfur, Rwanda and other countries are often on the news and in the press. However, little if anything is known about the horrific tragedy of a man-made famine that took place in Ukraine during the years 1932 and 1933. An estimated 6 to 10 million people died of hunger. Historically, Ukraine was considered the “bread basket�? of Europe. Although there was a drought prior to those years, the grain harvest was average in 1932 and there was no danger of famine. Instead, it resulted from forced appropriation of harvests, harsh measures against peasants who refused to participate in collectivization, and attacks against the social importance of Ukrainian villages, which were at the heart of the Ukrainian national revival (Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Toronto, 1984).

Reports of this horrific event reached the West but were played down by the Soviet government. Individuals like British correspondent Malcolm Muggeridge and Welsh journalist Gareth Jones traveled to Ukraine to investigate reports. Jones wrote eyewitness accounts of Holodomor based on his travels through Eastern Ukraine in early 1933 (www.garethjones.org). Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty, a New York Times correspondent, publicly denied that there was a famine. However, privately he acknowledged that peasants were dying in the thousands.

With the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the establishment of an independent Ukraine, access to archives previously closed to scholars is shedding more light on the famine as genocide. People in areas affected by the famine are finally able to speak of the horrors of those years, previously forbidden to mention the famine – were told to forget and that it never happened. There are about 400,000 famine survivors still living in Ukraine today.

Archival sources documenting Holodomor in the IHRC’s Ukrainian American Collection include the papers of Alexander A. Granovsky, Luba Mensheha, a community activist; Oleksander Kaniuka, a graphic artist; and Ivan Baczynskj. Baczynskj’s materials include a questionnaire from a survey conducted in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany of famine survivors. The IHRC also holds the records of the Ukrainian National Association’s Washington Office, the lobbying arm and national office of the largest Ukrainian fraternal organization.

Secondary sources available on this topic include, among others, Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the terror-famine (New York, 1986), The Man-made famine in Ukraine (Washington, 1984), and The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (London, 1968); Dmytro Solovey’s The Golgotha of Ukraine: Eyewitness Accounts (New York, 1953), Viktor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom; the personal and political life of a Soviet official (New York, 1946); and the three volume Oral History Project of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine (edited by James E. Mace and Leonid Heretz, Washington: 1990). The latter has recently been translated and published in Ukraine. A more recent publication to consult is Famine in Ukraine 1932–1933: genocide by other means, co-authored by Taras Hunczak and Roman Serbyn (New York, 2007). In Ukraine 17 regional, Kyiv city and all-Ukraine volumes of the National Memory Book have been published just in time for the November commemoration.

World community awareness of the Ukrainian famine-genocide Holodomor has brought some positive results for Ukrainians everywhere. In America, thanks to efforts of Rep. Sander Levon (D-MI) the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously approved H. Res. 1314 – a resolution recognizing the 75th anniversary of the Ukrainian Famine (Holodomor). The latest development is that The National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) has approved and awarded a parcel of federally-owned land to the Ukrainian Government as the site for the Memorial to Victims of the Ukrainian Genocide of 1932-33.

Ukraine has been seeking acknowledgement of the famine as genocide by submitting a resolution to the United Nations. The UN didn’t pass the resolution but instead tabled it; the United States also hasn’t. Canada has, however, recognized Holodomor as genocide. Canada also was the first to recognize independent Ukraine. Most recently, the European Parliament has recognized Holodomor as a “crime against humanity.�?

Many commemorative events taking place in Ukraine and the Ukrainian Diaspora include the International Holodomor Remembrance Flame traveling through 33 countries, starting in Ukraine and returning in November for nationwide observances of the 75th anniversary. This torch of light is being carried in remembrance of those who perished during the famine. Also a number of national (Harvard, Columbia University) and international (Kyiv) conferences are underway, as are screenings of documentary films such as Harvest of Despair (1984) directed by Slavko Nowytski and Eternal Memory: Voices from the Great Terror (1991) directed by David Pultz and narrated by Meryl Streep, and exhibits in New York at the Library of Congress, The Ukrainian Museum and Ukrainian Institute of America. Documents related to Holodomor can also be found in the archives of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in New York.

Scholars have begun to explore the music made in the United States by immigrants (see for example Victor R. Greene’s A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants between Old World and New, 1820-1930 from Kent State University Press in 2004). Here in Minnesota, the IHRC in 2006 hosted a special exhibit on music-making among the state’s newest Lutherans, featuring photography by Wing Huie.

Archives are full of documentation on immigrants who sang, played musical instruments, conducted musical groups, or wrote music. Some of that music will be performed this fall at First Fridays in Andersen Library on Nov. 7, in the “Caveret: Performing Arts from the Archives.�? Some immigrants–for example the Latvians who arrived in the United States as refugees in the aftermath of World War II–transformed their music into a medium that expressed their politics, their connections to their homelands, and their emerging American identities.

Vänskä’s Finnish origins certainly mattered to those attending the recent performances in New York. There he appeared as part of a Finnish-themed “Mostly Mozart�? program. Recently, he also led the Minnesota Orchestra in a program of “Finland’s Finest Pieces�? as part of FinnFest 2008.

Like many immigrants, Osmo Vänskä came to the U.S. to pursue his career and to work. Like others, too, he may or may not remain all his life in the U.S. (Americans often assume that immigrants commit permanently to life in the United States but that’s never been a requirement of those seeking green cards.) Highly skilled and well-educated foreigners may face shorter waits for visas than immigrants with more modest qualifications, but their status is otherwise little different once they are here.

So what’s going on here? Would journalists insult Vänskä by calling him an immigrant? Despite continuing paeans to the United States as a nation of immigrants, increasing numbers of Americans apparently do understand the label immigrant to be a pejorative term. Maybe that’s why so few Americans know of the large numbers of immigrants–more than one-third entering the United States–who are professional, middle-class, and extremely well-educated. They’re part of the nation of immigrants, too.

This year I have the pleasure of serving as acting director of the IHRC, a unit of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, during the 2008-2009 sabbatical of Donna Gabaccia. I look forward to promoting partnerships with local and international institutions documenting migration, programs for ethnic communities, and research services for scholars at the U and around the world.

The IHRC’s research agenda focuses on how individuals experience migration and cultural identity across the boundaries of nations and time periods. Whether by promoting a greater understanding of large-scale immigration or by remaining vigilant yet innovative in our caretaking of historical materials entrusted to us, our work builds upon the work of others.

Donna Gabaccia has been at the helm of the IHRC for three years; our past director, Rudi Vecoli, retired after serving for nearly four decades at the IHRC; and before them, and before the IHRC, the University of Minnesota was the fertile ground in which immigration history as a field was seeded and thrived.

Our community has gone through a tremendous loss this year with the passing of Rudi Vecoli. His imprint upon the IHRC was profound, and I am reminded nearly every day of how the partnerships and programs that I carry forward often are the fruit of labors begun years ago. We welcome your remembrances of Rudi as contributions to the IHRC tribute page.

The passion that Rudi brought to the mission of preserving and creating access to ethnic materials continued the work of George Stephenson and Theodore Blegen dating from the early 20th century. It is important to note the recurring theme of the personal and the global, of the individual and large historical events, and of how ethnic self-awareness lies at the heart of working in concert across ethnic identity so that all histories may be preserved.

My outreach efforts and the IHRC’s work toward closer relations with diaspora studies centers around the world stem from the conceptual outlook of these scholars. The IHRC’s correspondence files with diverse centers and ethnic communities often go back decades, initiated by personal connections made by Rudi Vecoli, Joel Wurl, Timo Riippa, and Heather Muir, as well as our long-time staff member Halyna Myroniuk and, with “only�? seven years at the IHRC, Daniel Necas. Continuity in the midst of change, indeed.

These personal connections resulted in a long-term commitment by and trust of the IHRC, keeping the University of Minnesota’s students and scholars in contact with ethnic communities and unique historical materials.

I recently culled from IHRC correspondence files a letter from the Latvian publisher Hugo Skrastins to Director Vecoli that could have been written today, rather than three decades ago:

“Being a historian myself, I have discovered along the American countryside a tremendous amount of material showing the different nationalities and the cultural values they brought to this country…. All of this material will disappear in a decade or two if it is not documented today.�?

Each generation feels the urgency of preserving the material culture and intellectual legacies of its cultural footprint, and that continues to be as true today as in the 1970s.

At the IHRC, it is our goal to encourage more people to consider themselves historians and to become aware that all of us have a great interest in understanding the experiences of those who have come before us. As we at the IHRC continue our decades-long tradition of bringing together scholars and public communities, we stand on the shoulders of those who themselves stood on the shoulders of others.

Outside of school they may be experiencing many of the challenges faced by other immigrants, like intergenerational conflict and identity loss. My work at the University gives me the opportunity to do “youth work�? that allows students to document themselves, their families and their communities.

This summer I had a great opportunity to attend and present at the 6th International Conference on the History of Youth and Community Work. Before the conference, I hadn’t really considered the work I do as an instructor here at the University of Minnesota’s Commanding English Program “youth work,�? but this conference moved me from my usual thinking about writing and language into seeing connections to youth as an important part of teaching and working with immigrant and refugee students. The conference asked key questions, including “How can we be most helpful to immigrant and migrant youth and families as they attempt to enter society’s mainstream with an intact sense of cultural continuity?�? A project here at the University of Minnesota takes on just this issue.

My students, most of them immigrant and refugee youth, have been involved in creating history and historical records. They do this through a project called a “Life History Project�? in WRIT 1301, currently offered by PSTL in the College of Education. As part of their research and writing, they interview and document the life of elders from their own communities. The students do primary research as they interview a subject and document the elder’s life. To really understand all the forces affecting the life of the individual, they also look at other sources and conduct research that contextualizes that person’s life. In the end, students create a 15- to 25-page document preserving a person’s story for future generations. Usually the interviews are conducted in the elder’s native language, but written in English, giving future monolingual generations the chance to know about an important family and community member’s life. The writers give the story as a gift to the elder. Selected histories, with an elder’s permission, are archived at the Immigration History Research Center to be read by future researchers.

Students learn more than how to research and write in my classroom. At the History of Youth and Community Work, I had the pleasure of being accompanied by a former student, Shukri Guled. She read from her paper, the story of a Somali woman she had met on the bus. This elder had escaped from the Somali civil war and come with her family to resettle in Minnesota. Shukri interviewed her three times, focusing on her childhood, middle age and current life. Shukri reflected that the project had allowed her to realize that this woman, highly educated in Somalia, shared the same interest as her own – psychology, which was then her major.

Other students have commented that the project helped them maintain their identities. One young man commented that “as a Somali boy who feels that the identity of his people is endangered, getting advice and a historical perspective from a Somali elder has great value.�? Other students have mentioned new perspectives on intergenerational conflict, with one describing his personal change in attitude through completing the project. “When I heard of an elder, I pictured elders in the Somali community…I doubted their significance since they cannot even drive to the Health centers or talk to their own doctors, let alone [be] helping others.�? But he said the experience of researching and writing about an elder in the community provoked new understanding within him. The Commanding English class project “gave me a new perspective and helped me realize their importance.�?

Connecting academic progress with individual growth in just this way is what undergraduate education should be and do, for immigrants as well as for all students.

The love letter, with its expressions of love, longing and desire written between confidants and lovers living apart, is a document that for centuries has been regarded as the ultimate form of the art of letter-writing. Yet, we rarely associate love letters with migration.

In fact, when we think of migration we often forget the lovers separated in the process; instead we recall parents separated from their children, siblings separated from each other, or friends writing to stay in touch across borders.

What about lovers? Surely, they too were separated as a result of migration, both in past and current movements around the globe. When lovers wrote letters to stay connected, what did they say? And, how did the writing of love letters help them to navigate their relationship at a distance and bridge the inescapable distances that threatened to sever their love? More broadly, how did the experience of migration make migrants’ love letters different from other love letters?

My research utilizes love letters. As I discovered, one of the first tasks awaiting a migration scholar interested in studying such rare and extraordinary documents is the simple challenge of locating them. Few, if any, are available in public archives such as the IHRC and the possibility of finding these documents in private family archives requires much more than simply asking migrants or loved ones left behind if they have kept them.

Next comes the challenge of making sense of the letters once they have been found. These are complex documents—fragmentary, highly subjective, silent on key issues, providing little if any context.

Yet, once these rare documents are located, read and analyzed, they do open an amazing new gateway for understanding migrants and their migrations. They allow us to gaze through intimacy at transnational love relationships being negotiated, modified and challenged by migration and separation. They urge us to enter the hearts and minds of individuals whose emotional energies, frozen in these writings, force us to experience migration through the language of longing and desire, of nostalgia and demand, of elation and frustration, of creative imagination and hard realities—all occurring while these emotions were being experienced daily, and in the moment of a distant past. Through these letters, we experience the emotional charge of communication as lovers practiced the art of writing, articulating creatively their reflections, confidences, needs and demands to distant lovers.

In love letters, lovers created worlds of their own. These worlds were not merely family-centric, as the scholarship on Italian migration movements often suggests. By examining love letters in tandem with migration, we are including the voices of women and men as lovers, reformulating our definition of migration as a process of imaginative and personal change and pushing the boundaries of the usual immigration history paradigm of families and communities in motion.

Time brought us together this year at the IHRC as postdoctoral scholars from Canada, Italy and Poland. Because we work with different methodologies, sources, and themes, we discovered that different concepts of time exist across our fields in migration studies. Indeed, time is relative in migration. Not only is time conceived and perceived differently across global spaces in various disciplines, it is also experienced differentially by migrants.
Sonia Cancian, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at the IHRC
One question we need to ask ourselves is how migrants and loved ones in the homeland negotiated their separation and the distances of time that it brought? Until very recently, the letter was among the most popular and most affordable means for migrants and loved ones to communicate with each other and reach out across distances, near or far. With the advent of the telephone, and later, the internet, communication across distances has changed significantly. However, while spatial distances between homelands and host countries have remained virtually the same, the letter has been instrumental in compressing and extending temporal distances. By looking at letters of migrants and those who remained behind, we can identify how time is relative and non-static in the act of “missing�? loved ones. Letters allow us to observe how time was compressed by letter-writers in order to feel their loved ones closer. They did this by writing frequently, receiving mail from them, dreaming about them and recounting their dreams in the letters, by asking questions in their letters and expecting replies, and even by speaking about them to friends and family nearby so that the presence of their loved ones could be felt despite the realities of physical separation. Paradoxically, the slow passage of time and its resulting extension in the minds of correspondents manifested itself through letter-writers’ consciousness of “missing�? their loved ones. “Missing�? made time move very slowly. Days felt like months and months felt like years, even as time kept moving forward.
Ania Mazurkiewicz, University of Gdansk, Kosciuszko Foundation Fellow at the IHRC

Interestingly enough, the notion of longing and the compression of time is also found in the ways that Cold War exiles from Eastern Europe perceived time while away from their homelands. People who fled their homelands fearing persecution from the Communist regimes tended to perceive their forced migration as a temporary state. Therefore, for them awaiting and longing their ultimate return to the free homeland entailed a time in which exile felt longer than the real passing of time. Furthermore, many of them envisaged that time in their homeland had stopped, with the understanding that once the imposed regime would be taken down the idealized conditions of pre-subjugation period would return. Exiles believed they carried the last hope for the survival of their nations’ culture and tradition. On the one hand, just like separated lovers, the exiles measured time by their heartbeat. On the other hand, the “time of the mind�? prompted them to act for the sake of future liberation of their beloved homeland. In either case, the notions of yesterday and tomorrow were more important than today. The biggest disillusions were created when those who eventually returned to their free homeland subsequently realized that time had not only continued to move forward, but that rapid changes had occurred much faster than they could have ever imagined.
Matteo Pretelli, Fulbright Research Scholar at the IHRC
The fluidity of time has had enormous consequences even in migrants’ identities. By definition, language is fluid and constantly changing, and it also plays an important part in migrants’ identities. For instance, the 1st generation of immigrants – who usually preserved a mythical image of the homeland – maintained the use of their native tongue. Yet, this language often has melded with the language of the host society as these immigrants learned to live in their new surroundings. Conversely, immigrants understood their native language as temporally “frozen�? in the moment when they left home. The younger generations of immigrants more fully acquired their host society’s language, which is an integral part of their daily lives and their identities. They then had two choices: They could share the use of their parents’ native language (which in the case of Italian immigrants, was often a dialect of the standard Italian) in their domestic space; or they could renounce it, and learn their parents’ language afterwards in its standard form as part of their effort to rediscover their own ethnicity. In the former case, once they visit the homeland they -- and their parents – are amazed that the native language they have spoken all their lives is no longer the language of the homeland, where language continued to change. On the other hand, in many cases, 1st and 2nd generation immigrants speak a kind of hybrid language that has developed over time as a result of linguistic interferences with the host society’s language. In the latter case, the younger generation of immigrants who visit their parents’ homeland have an easier time communicating with native speakers because of their lack of knowledge of their parents’ language that was “frozen�? in time.

I was tempted to label this a “Perspective from Inside the Beltway,�? but this is going to be more about things “near�? the beltway and beyond. As some readers will recall, I had worked for many years at the IHRC, through September 2006 when I moved to the Washington DC area and currently living in Northern Virginia.

The evolving dynamics of immigration and its impact in this area are fascinating to observe. Taking a ride on the local bus system in Alexandria, Arlington, Falls Church, or Annandale is like shuttling between events at the United Nations. The spectrum of languages, attire, appearances, and more is a potent demonstration that this region contains one of the nation’s most broadly diverse populations. Some excellent research and analysis of this has been done by George Washington University’s Marie Price and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Audrey Singer (see, for example, The World in a Zip Code). As they have noted, the extraordinary heterogeneity and dispersion of the foreign born here don’t fit neatly into patterns and norms of settlement, past or present.

What does, however, ring familiar is a counter response to the growing non-native population. Interestingly, the locus of intensity for this reaction isn’t to be found in Fairfax and Arlington Counties, with the greatest number and percentage of foreign born, but in neighboring Prince William County, on the outer ring of suburban DC. And intense it has been. In October of last year, the county board enacted measures aimed at curtailing illegal immigration, including a policy that directs police to check the residency status of any criminal suspects they believe might have entered the country unlawfully. Almost no day goes by without some news coverage pertaining to this decision, its after effects, and its varied reception by locals. (For a couple of the most recent items in the Washington Post, see:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/27/AR2008042702432.html
and
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/20/AR2008042002136.html.)

As I sat down to make note of these circumstances, I received in the mail a little piece of analog comfort food to offset what sometimes feels like an unrelenting electronic diet – the latest publication catalog from the University of Illinois Press with history-related titles. Besides being thankfully reminded that knowledge still, indeed, can come from books and not just new media, I felt a little tinge of sadness to think, I believe accurately, that so many of the really exceptional-looking volumes listed will be read only by other specialists. How many of the newer Latino/a immigrants and those who live among them in Northern Virginia will read the new book Memories and Migrations, which has the promise of “introducing readers to the ways in which Latinas have shaped history?�? The historical insights in a book like Making Lemonade out of Lemons, on Mexican American labor and leisure, could likely bring substance to ideas and attitudes as they continue to be shaped in places like Prince William County. Will such insights be discovered and learned in such places where the contest has been joined? It appears that the extraordinary new compendium American Dreaming, Global Realities, edited by Donna Gabaccia and Vicki Ruiz, has the true potential to help readers re-think immigration history, as the sub-title says, something that could be profoundly important in the way the general populace approaches today’s migration developments. Will this fresh approach to the subject be experienced and absorbed outside of the scholarly guild?

Probably the answers to these questions, as they long have been, are that ultimately the pure research and scholarship does wind its way down to the larger public, through the media, through adaptations in other forms directed at more general audiences, or through the gradual updating and reshaping of pre-collegiate education. But these forces are indirect and eventual. Of course, the disconnect between town and gown is nothing new, and I should add that few academic institutions I know of have worked harder to address this than the IHRC, with the very active engagement of staff, supporters, and advisory council members in historical documentation efforts, local community-driven research initiatives, and public history student projects, to name just a few.

I believe that people who make enforceable decisions about immigration do so with some notion of history. The past -- their sense of it -- is almost always invoked as a basis for their thinking. This happens inside the beltway, near the beltway, and beyond. Professional historians have a huge challenge to find better, more immediate ways to get their informed sensibilities directly into the minds of these people. It’s a challenge worth persistent response and attention – and maybe even some rethinking.

In 2002 Hispanics outnumbered African-Americans and they have become the largest minority in the country, counting circa 32.8 million of people (60% with a Mexican ancestry). As the numbers of Latino voters increase, they are becoming an influential political lobby. Indeed, since the beginning of 2007 the National Association of Latino Elected Officials and the Hispanic Television Network Univision have promoted a national campaign to help Latinos obtain U.S. citizenship and vote in the next election. The reasons behind this strategy lay in the uncertain feelings many immigrants when faced with nativist feelings expressed in discussions of immigration. According to Stephanie Pillersdorf – speaker for Univision – after six months, this campaign is estimated to have increased the number of applications for citizenship in Los Angeles County by 146%.
In the presidential elections of 2004, President George W. Bush obtained 40% of Latino vote. http://www.pewtrusts.org/news_room_ektid34802.aspx ;http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/us/politics/07immig.html?ref=politics Yet, Federal agent raids against illegal immigrants and the enforcement of the Southern border soon lowered Latinos’ support of Bush.

Earning the Latino vote has become a main target for all Presidential candidates. Although it is not viewed by the public as important as arguments over Iraq and the war on terrorism, immigration law reform has become a priority in the political agenda. In 2006 and 2007 President Bush failed to gain Congressional support for new legislation. This political fiasco was only partially solved with the 26 October 2006 signing of the Border Secure Fence Act. This law authorizes the construction of a 700 mile fence along the U.S.-Mexico border in order to deter individuals from illegally entering the United States.

In the debate over the reform of immigration law candidates have differed. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/19/us/politics/19candidates.html?scp=2&sq=immigration+presidential+candidates&st=nyt; http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9805EFD91038F933A25751C1A9619C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2; http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/us/politics/05debate.html; http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/23/opinion/23brooks.html
Among the Democrats, Hillary Clinton, strenuously searched out the Latino support, and obtained the endorsement of Antonio R. Villaraigosa, mayor of Los Angeles and one of the most outstanding figures of the Hispanic community. Senator Clinton endorsed a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants in the United States who have a job, pay taxes, and have a clear command of English, whereas she proposed hard penalties to employers who exploit illegal workers. Yet, in Spring 2007 she opposed a bipartisan bill to reform immigration law because it did not include a measure for immigrant family reunification. These positions have mostly been shared by the two other main Democratic candidates, Illinois Senator Barack Obama and South Carolina Senator Johnny R. Edwards.
In the Republican field, candidates’ voices were less homogeneous. Arizona Senator John McCain maintained the most moderate stance. He has called illegal immigrants sons of God who compassionately deserve a chance in the United States. But, seeking votes among a conservative electorate, he has also emphasized the reinforcement of the Southern border over reform of immigration law.
Italian-American candidate Rudolph Giuliani was even more ambiguous. A moderate Republican when he was mayor of New York City, Giuliani adopted policies against the criminalization of illegal immigrants, who become eligible for the city’s educational and medical public services. In 1996, he even intervened to impede public officials and physicians from denouncing illegal immigrants. Giuliani welcomed to New York any immigrants - even if illegally in the United States – who wished to work hard. However, in search of conservative voters Giuliani too switched his former stance, emphasizing instead the need to fight illegal immigration through the introduction of identification card. Pointing out the importance of a “safe�? border and recalling his mayoral policy of using policemen to end criminality in New York (“Zero Tolerance�?), he endorsed an increasing allocation of Patrol agents along the U.S.-Mexican border to deter further illegal accesses.
Giuliani was harshly criticized by another Republican candidate, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who made the fight against illegal immigration a cornerstone of his presidential campaign. Despite talking positively of a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants in 2005, during his bid for Republican ticket he accused Giuliani of having transformed New York City into a illegality “sanctuary�?. Romney then proposed severely curtailing Federal funds to cities, such as San Francisco, which avoid criminalizing immigrants without documents. Both Giuliani and Romney had criticized the bipartisan bill in 2007: the former considered it as a compromise, the latter remained adamantly against the idea of conceding temporary visas to individuals illegally residing in the United States.
Two minor Republican candidates, Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, had tough anti-immigrant stances as well. Thomson even proposed to curtail funds to cities and states which did not turnover illegal aliens to the Federal authorities and he requested to officially declare English as the national language. Huckabee advocated for curbing immigration from countries which sponsor terrorists. Furthermore, although during his governorship he provided support to illegal students, he proposed a national plan to expel illegal immigrants within 120 days

Traditionally the Chinese language had been taught mainly within Chinese immigrant communities to preserve cultural heritage among next generations. The normalization of US-China relations in the 1970s led to the establishment of Chinese language programs in American schools. However, up to the early 2000s, the Chinese language was still much undeveloped compared to other commonly taught languages such as Spanish, French, German, Italian and Japanese. A 2002 survey of college and university courses shows that less than 3 percent of total enrollment in foreign language is in Chinese, and the number of the enrollment at American elementary and secondary schools was even lower, with only 0.3 percent. (http://askasia.org/chinese/publications.htm, www.actfl.org/files/public/Enroll2000.pdf, http://www.adfl.org/projects/index.htm).

Realizing (again) its lack of understanding of non-Western societies and cultures after 9/11, the US government designated several languages as critical for its national security and launched the National Flagship Language Initiative (NFLI) in 2002. NFLI provided funding to major US universities to develop institutional and national infrastructure required to produce highly proficient language graduates in strategic languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Hindi/Urdu, Korean, Persian/Farsi, and Eurasian languages (Russian, Central Asian). http://www.nflc.org/nfli/languages.asp; http://www.nflc.org/projects/recent_projects/nfli; http://www.iie.org/programs/nsep/flagship/ In 2006, President Bush launched the National Security Language Initiative (NSLI) which was designed to increase the number of Americans learning strategic languages through new and expanded programs from kindergarten through university and into the workforce. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2006/58733.htm; http://exchanges.state.gov/nsli/fact_sheet.htm

With China’s fast economic development and increasing global influence, Mandarin Chinese has been given intensive attention as one of the critical languages. In 2005, the National Security Education Program chose Chinese as the prototype for a new major development of the NFLI: the Chinese K-16 Flagship http://www.actfl.org/files/public/NFLIChineseK-16PilotProjectPR.pdf In Congress, Senators Joseph Lieberman and Lamar Alexander introduced the US-China Cultural Engagement Act in May 2005 which aimed to provide $1.3 billion to enhance Chinese-language education in K-12 schools, expand the exchange of artists, scientists, and students between the US and China, and promote scholarly studies on contemporary China. http://www.nccaonline.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=22&Itemid=36

This surging public interest in Chinese language and culture contributes to Chinese immigrants’ interaction with and integration into the American society. In the Twin Cities, social and cultural events organized by Chinese immigrants have attracted more and more Americans not of Chinese origin (http://www.caam.org/modules/wfchannel/index.php?link=home;
http://www.mn3c.org/home.php). The Ha Family Entertainment, a local troupe performing Chinese dance, has witnessed increasing demand for Chinese cultural performances in American schools and local festivals (see this audio slideshow of its lion dance in the New Year’s party of Yinghua Academy, the first Chinese immersion school in MN: http://www.startribune.com/slideshows/15475716.html). During the late December 2007 and mid-May 2008, it has been scheduled for 18 performances in various circumstances including the grand opening of a law firm and other cultural activities of large corporations such as Target, Best Buy and the Marriott Hotel (http://www.ha-family.com/)

While the surging American public interest in Chinese language and culture has provided unprecedented opportunities for Chinese communities in the US, a historical reflection cautions us about the potential challenges and risks as well. There had been similar American public interest in the Russian language in the 1950s and 1960s and in the Japanese language in the 1980s, and both cases remind us that American interest in foreign languages and cultures had been usually triggered by the fear of the US government of those cultures as existing or potential challengers: the Soviet Union as an “evil�? communist rival and Japan as a formidable economic competitor. In the current case of China, things may be even more complicated as China may be perceived as a combination of both. This in turn will place Chinese Americans in a trap of being perceived as potentially disloyal and harmful to the US national interest.
Recent history indicates that this potential risk is not imagined but is lurking right around the corner. In 1982, with increasing Japanese economic competition, Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, was mistaken as Japanese and beaten to death by two white Americans working in the declining auto industry hit hard by its competitive Japanese counterpart. In 1999, Dr. Wen-ho Lee, a Chinese American scientist from Taiwan, was falsely charged as a spy for mainland China, a case clearly revealing the US government’s fear of the “red China�? and its readiness to cast suspicion and exert persecution on Chinese Americans.
This potential risk has been made even more delicate by recent efforts of the Chinese government of boosting Chinese language programs abroad. Since 2004, the Office of Chinese Language Council International (Hanban), a government agency promoting the spread of Chinese around the world, has started opening Chinese language and cultural centers (Confucius Institutes) abroad. It has sent over 2000 voluntary teachers abroad and up to July 2007, there had been more than 170 Confucius Institutes established in more than 50 countries. The US has the largest number of Confucius Institutes (18), followed by Thailand (13). http://www.hanban.org/en_hanban/index.php

While current American attitude towards the spread of Chinese language programs is welcoming in general, there has been no lack of concerns and suspicions about China’s political influence and expansion of power (http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0104/p17s01-legn.html, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89350477) Therefore, while emphasizing its purpose of promoting cultural exchanges and friendship, the Chinese government needs to be cautious about both guarding against any tendency to misuse its energy for unwarranted purposes and avoiding being mistaken by other countries as disguised expansionism or neocolonialism (http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10853534). Also importantly, the Chinese government needs to be cautious about the delicate impact of its increasing global influence on Chinese immigrants and their descendants abroad.

On the part of the US, a more efficient way seems to be supporting the learning of Chinese and other foreign languages not simply for national security but for long-term solid cultural understanding. Its support for foreign languages cannot be just responsive to constantly rising and ever-changing crises but should be based on sincere respect for and acceptance of different cultures. A fundamental guiding principle for foreign language programs in the US should not be “clash of civilizations�? but be cultural coexistence, mutual enrichment and co-prosperity. By enlarging foreign language programs, the US also gains a great opportunity to engage and understand its own diverse ethnic communities and to better integrate them into the mainstream society rather than single certain groups out as suspicious aliens when needed or convenient.

Those who study families make use of systems theories to understand that what happens to one individual or smaller group with the family (subsystem), affects the entire family system. Through such a multidimensional lens we can discern the basic elements needed in comprehensive immigration policy reform so that families and communities are not pulled apart by the process instead of reunited and integrated.

The importance of one person in the family getting a foot in the door to citizenship through military service has become obvious since 9-11 when it became possible for “non U.S. citizens�? to earn the right to become citizens through active duty and honorable service. During the past 6 years, more than 37,000 “green card warriors�? have achieved citizenship through this program; more than 7300 requests are pending the 7-10 month review process; and 20,500 non citizens are estimated to be currently serving in the armed forces. In some cases, soldiers have served 2-3 tours in Iraq and/or Afghanistan before making application.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/27/greencard.marine.folo/

Although one or more family members may be citizens, that does not guarantee that immigration laws and judges will treat other family members who are not citizens with the best interests of the family in mind. In a lecture focusing on this topic Professor David Thronson reports that some “mixed status�? families, where a child has one parent who is not a natural born or documented American citizen, can be problematic when it comes to deportation. Although he argues that family and immigration laws are closely related, the family part is “often missing�? from debates about immigration reform. When one aspect of immigration policy encourages family reunification and another aspect promotes family separation, it is clear that the systems are not working well together.
http://www.unlvrebelyell.com/article.php?ID=11788

There are numerous examples in the news every day. Because Congress has failed to act on reform and it is politically popular in the post 9-11 environment, more than 40 states have been busy trying to crack down on undocumented immigrants whether they are parents or minors. Under the guise of the rule of law, families are separated when parents are pulled away from jobs, arrested, and deported. An estimated 2 million mixed families are living in fear that their breadwinner won’t be home for dinner if stopped for an auto violation or found to be working without appropriate documentation.
http://www.columbiatribune.com/2008/Mar/20080328Feat002.asp

Another example of a family who has played by all the rules but still found themselves in a difficult situation is a South African family living in Ohio who were recruited to teach in the U.S. and later applied for permanent residency. Although the married couple’s application has been processed and their pathway to citizenship made clear, this is not the case for their 18 year old son. Due to immigration law stipulations, they were not able to apply for their son’s residency until after theirs was approved in 2005. Meanwhile, the son was becoming ineligible as a minor as he waited for the delayed paper work to be reviewed and approved. The parents are worried that he could be picked up and deported since technically he is no longer a minor and does not have documentation.
http://www.limaohio.com/story.php?IDnum=51001

The problems confronting children and immigration agencies are the topic of a forthcoming conference in Chicago that is addressing the absence of communication and collaboration between child welfare and immigration systems. One sponsor of the program pointed out that “many families today are dealing with both the immigration and the child welfare system - –yet the professionals representing these systems rarely work together.�? The hope is that the conference will bring together both parties to stimulate dialogue and cooperation for the benefit of families and communities.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/03-28-2008/0004782136&EDATE=

There are other ways that families and communities can benefit from dialogue about immigration and what kind of nation we want this to become. Since the winnowing of the more extreme candidates who were running for their party’s nomination for the presidency, we are less likely to be hearing nativist and reactionary rhetoric about immigrants from the remaining three candidates. In the absence of comprehensive reform some states (New Jersey and California) are trying to make a positive contribution by passing state versions of the Dream Act—a proposal to enable children of immigrants to pay in-state tuition at state colleges and universities even if there parents are not documented. In other states (Minnesota is an example), the governor and some legislators are arguing against state Dream Act laws as a way of enforcing the rule of law while punishing the children of parents who came to work in the U.S. without papers. Depending on the outcome of the November elections, it may be possible to reintroduce a federal Dream Act that would make it possible for all children, regardless of parental heritage, residency, or legality to achieve a higher education.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/80643/

In a op-ed column entitled “disorder at the border�?, Timothy Egan applauds the fact that the political demagogues have left the stage, leaving the three most moderate voices on comprehensive immigration reform still standing. This fact may well put an end to the seemingly futile and very expensive effort to build a wall across the Mexican-U.S. border. Property rights seem to conflict with where the wall needs to run and not many are seeking to have their agricultural land, back yards, or college campus divided by a wall topped with razor wire and patrolled by armed borders guards and minutemen vigilantes. The deportation of undocumented immigrants and the separation of families that results is also not going very well in Arizona—a state with an estimated half million undocumented workers. Although a new state law has been passed placing penalties on the businesses who hire them, not a single person has been found, despite numerous reports and profiles that have been followed up on by police. Whatever the results of the fall election, it is likely that persons from Arizona and the southwest will be involved in brokering a deal that leads to comprehensive reform.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/opinion/29egan.html?ref=opinion

Drawing heavily on the cadences of the Declaration of Independence, Obama illuminated the rhetorics of the Black church.
In the speech, Obama drew on his own writings, in Dreams from My Father, to describe his conversion to Christianity in the Black church:
I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world.
This story is a religious conversion narrative. But it is also a story about the Americanization of “the son of a Black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas,�? as Obama explains his history.
Immigration historians have much to teach about Americanization. We talk about pressures on new immigrants to acculturate; about the idea and the realities of assimilation; about the ways in which immigrants and their children create an ethnic culture based on, yet distinct from, the cultures from which they came. Drawing on the vibrant literature of the past twenty years, we discuss the inequalities generated by race and immigration policy, and the complexities of “becoming American�? for people with less than equal access to the full rights of citizenship in this country. Because terms like Americanization come out of a literature based on the experience of people we might now call, with David Roediger, “not yet white ethnics�?, perhaps we tend less to theorize what Americanization means for immigrants who, because of law and history, do not become white.
A disciplinary gap divides African American and immigration history. For this reason, the Middle Passage, which comprised one of the largest migrations in human history, is not considered as migration. Because enslaved Africans were forced to leave their homes, their experiences during and after the Middle Passage differ from those proposed by an immigrant paradigm based on voluntary migration from Europe. So do those of migrants from Asia and Latin America. But their lives, and the lives of their children in America, are also stories of Americanization.
African America is increasingly diverse. In states such as Florida and New York, foreign born Blacks comprise up to a quarter of the African American population. For the million foreign born Africans residing in the United States as of 2002, becoming American will entail legal naturalization, for some; for all of them, it will involve the balancing of transnational allegiances – what historian Matthew Frye Jacobson has brilliantly describes as the “special sorrows�? of immigrants with deep political ties to their homelands – and the acculturation necessary to survive and flourish in this country. Becoming African American invariably means encountering the withering realities of American racism. And understanding this racism, its long history on this continent, often calls for powerful language, like that of Jeremiah Wright and the prophetic tradition in preaching he represents.
In this teachable moment, immigration historians are well positioned to illuminate the complexity and promise of becoming American.

In a blog on the New York Times website that has elicited a lot of comments [http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/?scp=1-b&sq=Egan&st=nyt], Timothy Egan provides a brief history of the city of Butte, Montana, which in the early-twentieth century had a larger per capita population of Irish immigrants than any other city in the United States. Egan argues that rather than dwelling on the “blarney and excess in celebration of all things Irish�? that St. Patrick’s Day typically engenders, Americans would be better off remembering the Irish diaspora’s troubled history and the fact that in his Irish-American opinion, “misery is our currency.�? For Egan, this means focusing on the various famines that drove the Irish to leave Ireland in the first place, and the often brutal conditions that greeted them in places like the mines of Butte.

Although I appreciate Egan’s point about infusing the holiday with “real�? Irish and Irish American history, he misses the point that from its very beginnings, St. Patrick’s Day in the United States was about playing up the good and ignoring the bad. In the nineteenth century, Irish American leaders praised Protestant Scots-Irish who contributed ideological ammunition to the American Revolution alongside the Irish Catholic foot soldiers who died for the Union Army.

I think that St. Patrick’s Day would best be refitted as an ecumenical holiday celebrating all immigrants and their contributions, as an editorial from MIT’s newspaper argued a number of years back [http://www-tech.mit.edu/V118/N14/ring.14c.html]. Irish Americans could maintain their special connection to the holiday by presenting their forbearers as the first significant non-Anglo, non-Protestant, and non-coerced migrant group to come to the United States. In this regard, the Irish had to bear many of the burdens (although not all) that immigrants from around the world would later face.

If activism can be introduced into this new-fangled holiday: even better. Although in the past decade a greater number of Irish immigrants have left the United States to return to Ireland and take advantage of the country’s thriving economy than have come here, as an article in the San Francisco Chronicle notes, there are still approximately 50,000 undocumented Irish immigrants living in the United States [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/03/15/IRISH.TMP]
. Activists in San Francisco have sought to use St. Patrick’s day as a forum and opportunity to discuss immigration reform and the fact that undocumented immigrants do not only come from Mexico and other Latin American countries, despite popular conceptions. I’ll drink a beer to that.

The remote lands of Poland and Vietnam share an unhappy history of foreign domination in both the 19th and 20th centuries. But in today's world, a direct connection has been established by Vietnamese immigrants to Poland.

Soon after diplomatic relations were established in 1950, the first tiny wave of Vietnamese students arrived in Poland. Due to the protracted armed conflict in Indochina many of them decided to stay. The failures of Poland’s so-called “real socialism�? did not offer many economic opportunities in Poland, but it did offer hope for change. Over the next twenty years the numbers of Vietnamese students and professionals increased. But the major influx of the Vietnamese people to Poland came later, along with democratic changes in Poland in the 1990s.

In 2001 the Polish Office for Repatriation and Foreigners counted as many as 40 thousand Vietnamese living in Poland. Today's estimates suggest their number from 30 to 50 thousand, third only to France (500 thousand) and Germany (100 thousand). However, in a recent census, only 1,808 declared their nationality as Vietnamese and only 436 as having Polish citizenship. (A total of 775,000 people in Poland did not declare any nationality at all.) http://www.stat.gov.pl/cps/rde/xbcr/gus/PUBL_PUBL_Demographic_yearbook_of_Poland_2007.pdf

The reasons for giving ambiguous answers are complex but the single most important factor is Polish government’s very restrictive visa policies. Although the numbers of deported Vietnamese nationals are relatively low, the threat of forced repatriation to Vietnam is enough to influence any “head count�? of this group. Especially that the repulsive immigrant policies resulted in the increase of the illegal immigration. At the same time, Poland’s attractiveness was further elevated with the country’s accession to the European Union. http://www.cafebabel.com/en/article.asp?T=T&Id=8039

For some, Poland is just a transit point en route westward but for many others Poland is “a promised land�?. The European Commission’s report of 2003 informs us that only Ukrainians were granted more permits for settlement in Poland than the Vietnamese, followed by Russians, Armenians, and Belarusians. (http://ec.europa.eu/justice_home/doc_centre/asylum/statistics/docs/2003/country_reports/poland.pdf )

Migration and trade have developed in tandem. The single largest Vietnamese company in Poland sells its products not only in EVERY Polish grocery store but also Europe-wide. (http://www.tan-viet.com.pl/index.php?mod=ofirmie&kat=&id=&lang=en).

The Vietnamese embassy in Warsaw points to an increase in bilateral trade from $20 to $330 million between 1992 and 2006. http://www.vietnamembassy-poland.org/nr070521165956/news_object_view?newsPath=/vnemb.vn/cn_vakv/euro/nr040819110934/ns070919142436

How are the Vietnamese perceived by Poles? The majority of Poles regard the Far East newcomers as hardworking, intelligent and honest (E-polityka; TNS OBOP, Jan. 2008). An article by Nguyen Thi Hoa, Wiktor Kaspian and Pham Viet Anh found the Vietnamese immigrants are predominantly highly educated professionals, not always able to secure a job that would enable them to employ their professional skills (http://nigdywiecej.org.pl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=93&Itemid=15). Many have been trained in engineering and art. Some even hold Ph.D.s in Polish language arts!

The first poll that asked Poles about their attitude towards the Vietnamese people (not the immigrants) was conducted in 1998. It showed that among various nations, they were close to the middle of the ranking, the most liked being the Americans, the least – the Gypsies (Chart on page 2 http://www.cbos.pl/SPISKOM.POL/1998/K_158_98.PDF ) The same poll in 2007 showed that Polish attitudes towards the Vietnamese had become less favorable ( Chart on page 3 http://www.cbos.pl/SPISKOM.POL/2007/K_144_07.PDF ), perhaps as a result of increased immigration.

The most prevalent stereotype of the Vietnamese in Poland is that of a market stall merchant, fast food bar or restaurant owner. The image comes from the single largest Vietnamese community in Poland residing in Warsaw. Dariusz Bartoszewicz and Tomasz Kwaśniewski of Gazeta Wyborcza estimated that in the "Deccenary markeplace Stadium�? alone there are over a thousand trading booths operated by Vietnamese retailers. There are over 30 big restaurants and 300 bars in Warsaw operated Vietnamese immigrants. As a result, a majority of Warsaw residents incorrectly believe Asians to be the single biggest immigrant community in Poland. (In fact it is peoples from the former USSR.) Three-quarters of respondents to a poll admitted that they either shopped or ate at the Asian facilities. http://miasta.gazeta.pl/warszawa/1,34862,2956397.html

According to Teresa Halik, many poles perceive Vietnamese migrants as a tight, hermetic and isolated group. (In fact, she titled her book--written with Ewa Nowicka--The Vietnamese in Poland. Integration or Isolation?). Warsaw is still not London; Vietnamese people admit they do feel they are outside the mainstream of Polish society. 


Still, one can find Polish initiatives aimed at discovering and promoting Vietnamese culture. One of the major Polish dailies „Gazeta Wyborcza�? helped to promote an event organized by Polish young artists’ organization. A cultural project “Viet Nam at Play�? included a “Vietnamese village�? staged in the Warsaw Mokotów Fields. The event promoted the painters, photographers, musicians and naturally - the cuisine of Vietnam. Poles attended a “Vietnamese week�? in October of 2005 and a film documentary by Anna Gajewska “the Warsavians�? about the Vietnamese living in Warsaw. (http://www.warszawiacy.art.pl/film.php) (The trailers from a Vietnamese movie festival can be viewed at http://www.arteria.art.pl/5smakow/smak_gorzki.php ).

Scholarly research on the Vietnamese in Poland has followed. Teresa Halik has recently published The Migrant Vietnamese Community in Poland, which focuses on state policy and public opinion. She concluded that the Vietnamese are not only a “stable element of ethnic landscape of Poland, but also present one of the major and better-organized communities of immigrants aiming to stay in Poland�?.

Krystyna Iglicka of the Center for International Relations in Warsaw has even observed that: “Today, Poland is probably the most striking example of a Central European country that is gradually shifting from a major sending country into a country of net-immigration and transit migration.�? (http://www.migrationinformation.org/Profiles/display.cfm?ID=302 )

Clearly, Poland is undergoing rapid change. Many Poles are ready to open their homeland to strangers. However, 65% of them state that they have not yet personally met an immigrant. It can only be hoped that they will not change their attitudes to foreigners as they do so.

No one can be unmoved by the deaths of several children after a twenty-three year old woman apparently ran a stop sign and crashed into a school bus in Cottonwood, Minnesota. However, it is chilling to see the speed with which the tragedy has been exploited as an opportunity to rant against all undocumented immigrants, and—in some cases—against all immigrants. A colleague in south Central Minnesota sent out a plaintive email today decrying the media frenzy and the many loud demands to “send them all home�?. What is the relevance, he asks, of her ethnicity or her immigration status? Ironically, the relevance of the case lies not in the characteristics of the driver, but in current legislation that denies drivers licenses (and thus opportunities for driver education and automobile insurance) to undocumented residents.

For one thing, the numbers of immigrants choosing citizenship has increased sharply in the past year in places as diverse as Minnesota and Arizona. http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/ss/local/64591.php

Immigrants have many reasons for becoming citizens. Some want to sponsor the immigration of relatives. Others want to act now in order to avoid paying fees for naturalization that have increased rapidly in the past few years. Others want to share the citizenship of their children or to express loyalty to their new home.

At least some recently naturalized citizens also admit that an important motive has been the desire to participate in American politics and especially to express their choices in the upcoming presidential election. Historically, naturalizations have increased during presidential election years.

Newly naturalized Latino voters are particularly concerned about immigration policy in this year’s elections. Recent news reports quote immigrants as feeling upset by local and federal campaigns that target illegal immigrants: they maintain that too often the result of these campaigns is hostility expressed against all Spanish-speakers or against any person who “looks Mexican,�? regardless of legal status or citizenship. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/us/politics/05hispanic.html?em&ex=1202360400&en=90b43483ea8b4d1f&ei=5087%0A

Even more than other Americans, newly naturalized citizens pay attention to candidates’ positions on immigration policy. Some claim not to find much difference between front-runners Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain, all of whom favor some version of the immigration reform bill that failed to gain Congressional approval in 2007. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-dustup5feb05,0,50671.story Still, Hillary Clinton seems to be doing particularly well in attracting the votes of Hispanic voters, both old and new: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18718803

Overall, too, those candidates who focused most intensively on the threat to Americans of illegal immigration have not done well in this primary season. Cuban-Americans in Florida were especially vigorous in supporting for McCain over Mitt Romney, who ended his presidential campaign last week. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120217267552142823.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Ironically, it appears that newly naturalized immigrant voters are in other ways not all that different from longer-time American citizens. Polls in 2007 showed that between half and four-fifths of all American citizen support the creation of a pathway to legalization for undocumented workers.

In nineteenth century Minnesota, high proportion of Scandinavians distinguished the state; today it is high proportion of refugees, from both Southeast Asia and Africa, and large numbers of international students from China. In many respects, however, Minnesota’s foreign-born resemble their counterparts in other parts of the country. Thus, for example, a recent Minnesota Public Radio report on record numbers of Minnesota immigrants applying for citizenship, and experiencing long waits for the processing of their applications, (http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/01/10/immigration_numbers/
could have been about most any state in the northeast, west, or southeast.

The University of Minnesota has good claims to having actually “invented" the scholarly study of immigration way back in the 1920s. Here at the U, it was historians who began the study, focusing on some the groups that made their own state distinctive. Blegen Hall, on the University of Minnesota west bank campus, is named after one of these historians, Theodore Blegen, the son of Norwegian immigrants who specialized in the study of Norwegian migration to the United States. His colleague in history, George Stephenson—a descendant of and specialist on Swedish immigrants--offered what may have been the first immigration history course in the country in the early 1920s and published one of the first general introductions to the history of immigration his book in 1926. Blegen and Stephenson were early practictioners of what is today called “transnational" history. Both lived and taught for in the homelands of their ancestors; they also attracted graduate students from abroad during their long careers at Minnesota.

By the 1960s, younger historians hired by Blegen’s and Stephenson’s generation took up the study of immigration anew, focusing on the immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe who were attracted at the turn of the twentieth century to the mines, industries and cities of the Great Lakes economy. These new historians—Rudy Vecoli, Hy Berman, Clarke Chambers, Timothy Smith—helped to found important research collections, including the Immigrant Archives which eventually became the Immigration History Research Center (IHRC). The IHRC soon also began to collect documents and encourage scholarship that focused on the shift from labor migrations to refugees arriving from war-torn Europe after 1945.

As new waves of refugees began to re-shape Minnesota’s population in the 1970s and 1980s, a third generation of scholars quickly recognized scholarly opportunities and organized the Center for Refugee Studies. During its two decades existence, the center collected rich materials both on refugees from Southeast Asia and on the organizations that worked with these newcomers. Its archives are now housed in Andersen library at the IHRC.

Today, over 100 scholars at the University of Minnesota study migration or the cultural pluralism that accompanies histories of migration. For over 90 years, a distinctive “Minnesota" school of scholarship on immigrant and refugee life has used the changing population dynamics of its home state to grapple with issues of continuing importance not merely to the region but to the nation.

Interested in reading more about the “Minnesota school? http://ihrc.umn.edu/publications/pdf/MinnesotaSchool-1.pdf

The findings of a recent special report of Poland’s Office of the Committee for European Integration (UKIE)
describe the most likely travelers of this holiday season. They are young (in the U.K. 84% of Polish employees are under 34), educated (57% have graduated from high school), grew up mid-sized or small towns in Poland, and found job elsewhere in service occupations (30% for U.K).

In March 2007 the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked the Institute of Public Affairs to prepare a socio-demographic analysis of Polish job migration within the European Economic Area before and after Poland joined the EU (May 1st 2004).
http://www.msz.gov.pl/files/docs/DKiP/ekspertyza-isp-finalny%2024%2004%2007.pdf
The results are the same. For the last 3 years, it has been is the young, the educated, and the articulate that leave Poland. Open job markets in the West (except for Germany, Austria, Belgium, Luxemburg) lure the young. According to a study cited in the UKIE’s report 32% of Polish respondents under age 24 declared a willingness to leave Poland. By contrast, only 20% of Poland’s unemployed and 22% of Poland’s blue collar workers declared their willingness to seek employment abroad.

Is this a “brain drain�?? With higher education still free in Poland, many get their diplomas and leave in order to wash dishes in British, Irish, Swedish or Spanish restaurants and bars. Conversely, Polish news magazines feature stories of the most successful migrants who have begun careers in engineering, banking, and science.

Some Europeans have even suggested that the EU create a “Blue Card�? policy. (Does that sound familiar to American readers familiar with “green cards�?—which are actually not green at all?) It should--for the blue card proposed by the European Commission on October 23rd would offer two years legal residence and work permits in any EU country but only for a highly-qualified non-EU citizen. Upon the completion of the two year period, it would be possible to move to another EU country, provided a job offer is secured, or one would have to return to his/her country of origin. Hence the big difference between green and blue.
http://euro.pap.com.pl/palio/html.run?_Instance=cms_euro.pap.pl&_PageID=1&s=szablon.depesza&dz=szablon.depesza&dep=72291&data=&lang=PL&_CheckSum=1799484197

It is not easy for the European Union to compete with the U.S. or Canada to attract well educated immigrants. For example, EuroPap found 85% of well-educated immigrants from the Maghreb countries residing either in the U.S. or Canada. At the same time highly qualified immigrant employees constitute 1.72% of EU’s workforce (the comparable figure is 9.9% in Australia 9.9%, 7.3% in Canada).

Many Poles see this “blue card�? proposal as restrictive in yet another way since it protects but also potentially drains the educational resources of newly admitted member-countries such as Poland. If a company receives a job application from an engineer from India, it would be able to employ him with a “blue card�? only if no Polish or Hungarian engineer applied. Poles do apply for such highly qualified jobs since they can earn 10 times what they would for the performance of similar tasks in their country of origin.

To read more on this initiative go to European Commission’s webpage

So is Polish exodus to Western Europe just another wave of Polish emigration, comparable to early migrations of laborers to France or the United States. Not quite. Today’s departers often expect to return and it is easy for them to do so. Migrating within the EU they need not give up their Polish citizenship. Maintaining close family ties poses no major troubles. In my view, a person moving from Gdansk to Dublin is little different than an American moving from Detroit to a better job in Seattle.

Over the next few weeks the new cheap airlines, that have opened direct connections between the Old and New Europe, will once more carry loads of people who want to be HOME for Christmas. Some will soon return for good. Others will choose to remain in the West and thus add to the new wave of well educated, predominantly young people who no longer tend to think of themselves as Poles only, but rather consider themselves Europeans of Polish origin.

In Europe, the times are definitely a-changing!

Take the case, reported last week, of “A Mother Torn from Her Baby.�? A breast-feeding mother from Honduras was detained by immigration officials. She had been living illegally in the U.S. with her three children and with a sister and brother-in-law who were both workers and parents. In their household of 9, three were foreign-born adults without papers, and six were children, four of them young citizens of the United States.

The case is not an unusual one. Recent raids have revealed that about two-thirds of unauthorized immigrant workers are parents. About two-thirds of those children are citizens who cannot be deported with them. Experts estimate that three million American children have deportable parents. Unlike other citizens, furthermore, these children cannot sponsor their parents’ applications for family reunification visas: only adults can do that.

Deporting large numbers of “illegals�? sounds easy but it isn’t. When deported parents cannot support their American-based children from abroad, as many cannot, (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2007/11/18/AR2007111800871.html), the children inevitably become dependent on social services.

Angry commentators who insist “illegal immigrants�? are using their children as “human shields�? must either accept American responsibility for the long-term care of the citizen children of deported parents or insist that children inherit their parents’ guilt.

Few Americans will easily accept the punishment of children for parental errors, especially when most evidence suggests children of foreign-born parents are meeting or exceeding the integration of earlier generations into the American mainstream. The vast majority possesses strong English language skills. Immigrants’ children do as well in school as other low-income American children. Recent reports note immigrant children’s involvement even in mainstream groups like the Boys Scouts and Girl Scouts.

In fact, the angriest few are willing to punish children. To date, however, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution—passed to guarantee birthright citizenship to emancipated slaves—has been upheld by the courts for the children of even hated and excluded foreigners. Denying or revoking the citizenship of the children of unauthorized immigrants would require constitutional amendment. It’s unlikely that many Americans would support this kind of tinkering with the 14th Amendment.

However, in the lives of real human beings, the need to work and the decision to marry and form families are not so easily separated. Moreover, an increasing number of migrants experience multiple migrations in their lives. Thus, the traditional idea of migration as a unidirectional movement from one place to another based on a single motive – work or family – is outdated. In reality, multiple motives and multidirectional movements are involved.

A case in point is my own research, which focuses on transatlantic marriage migration. But can we really talk about ‘marriage migration’? Can it be distinguished from other forms of migration? In my view, in most cases it cannot. There are migrants who first move to a country to study or pursue a career on a temporary basis and who meet their future life-companion during that stay. As a result, the temporary stay evolves into a permanent one. Should this migration be categorized as work or family-related? An ever-increasing number of people move from one country to another because of work, study, or travel. Consequently, unions between people from different cultures are becoming all the more common. In many cases, the result is not sedentary family life in one location but a transnational life that, especially in the case of professional migrants, often involves several migrations from one location to another. Therefore, rather than viewing migration as a one-way and one-time movement, it should be seen as a process that often has no definite end.

Even in cases in which the migrant is categorized as a ‘marriage migrant’ by the state, the separation or ranking of motives on an individual level may prove impossible. Take the case of brokered marriages, for example unions formed through Internet-based marriage brokers or matchmaking sites. As an interview with a Russian ‘mail-order-bride’ Nataliya Robertovna Yamayeva reveals, in the decision to look for a foreign partner, multiple motives are at play (http://www.star-telegram.com/600/story/297522.html). In Yamayeva’s case, her disappointment with Russian men, feelings of marginalization, and the dream of having a financially stable life all contributed to her decision to submit a profile on match-making agencies’ websites and finally to migrate and marry an American man. Is this decision to migrate motivated more by economic or other considerations? Even Yamayeva herself could probably not decipher.

Migrants moving because of family or economic reasons are not easily separated in public discussions on immigration either. It is not uncommon to label marriage migrants as opportunists looking for economic advancement. In my native Finland, for example, Russian women marrying Finnish men are often stigmatized as fortune-hunters who want to exploit Finnish welfare services. The possibility that the union between the Finnish man and the Russian woman could be based on reciprocity and equality is dismissed, and the complexity behind every human decision is ignored. In a Western society that idealizes marriage based on romantic love, marrying for economic reasons is condemned. This viewpoint, however, shows a remarkable historical amnesia as throughout most of the history of the Western world, ‘marriages of reason’ have been the norm rather than the exception.

States passing immigration legislation are not prepared to deal with these complexities in migrants’ lives. Most countries make a clear distinction between family and labor migration, often preferring the former to the latter. Sometimes states do realize that people’s motives are not that easily separated. However, this realization often emerges as a concern stemming from the potential misuse of the family reunification law; the use of family ties as a strategy for bringing economic migrants. An extreme example of this concern is, I would say, France’s decision to use DNA tests to ensure that family ties are authentic (http://www.star-telegram.com/468/story/304782.html). This case also raises the question what constitutes a family? Is it merely a biological unit as this decision suggests? The decision is based on a narrow biological construction of the family that does not correspond with the reality of transnational family lives and different cultural constructions of the family.

Restrictive laws that distinguish between types of migration, as if they were completely different, encourage scholars and the public to do the same. But how different are they really?

I’m Dan Ott, an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota and the coordinator of IHRC’s “Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration.�? I have been responsible over the last two semesters for finding articles related to immigration for our weekly student and professor columnists. I have noticed while scouring the news that there is no shortage of articles about immigration policy enforcement, about policy reform and about presidential hopefuls that want to chip in their two cents on policy reform. Noticeably missing from the media coverage are stories about the migrants and immigrants themselves—the human stories beyond commentary on the most recent ICE raid or border bust. Never having to look that human migrant in the face allows fanatic xenophobes to believe that all immigrants are degenerate criminals. Media coverage that ignores the human stories further alienates immigrants (legal or otherwise) from the majority culture.

All this “news�? does not encourage understanding but rather vilification of people looking for a better life. These people are human beings, not simply statistics or criminals, but rather valuable parts of our society and economy. Dehumanization of migrants leads to exploitation of them, (such as this recent case in Florida or this one in California ). It pushes migrants further into the shadows to allow further exploitation to occur or it outright drives them away. I’m sure it doesn’t help matters much, that some members of the ICE take their jobs lightly, as at least one recent story suggests.

This week, there was only one prominent piece that handled the effects of the changing political debate on immigrant culture. It details the immigrant reaction to New York Governor, Eliot Spitzer’s wavering on his promise of drivers licenses for illegal immigrants. The article enlightens the reader on how immigration policy and debate actually affects the real people that the politics are geared towards. Readers need more of this kind of media coverage in order to form balanced opinions. Stories like this one bring the humanity back into immigration coverage and tell the story of how policy and political debates actually affect the people it is designed to regulate. If there were more stories like this one, maybe migrants wouldn’t seem so different from the rest of a society that has been historically constructed of people just like them--immigrants.

_________

Dan Ott is a Senior Undergraduate of History at the University of Minnesota. He has worked at the IHRC for the past 11 months as a blog coordinator.

Following is a list of ten prevalent myths, and some facts to counteract them. For more details and a list of sources, see the ‘Ten Myths’ slide presentation on the Humphrey Institute web site at http://www.hhh.umn.edu/people/kfennelly/writings.html

Myth #1: Most immigrants come to the US for economic motives
Reality: About two thirds of immigrants come to the US to be reunited with family members.

Myth #2: Contemporary immigrants to the US ‘don’t assimilate’ as rapidly as immigrants who came in the 1900’s
Reality: Large percentages of European immigrants who came to the US in the early 1900s returned home to Europe. Among those who stayed, many did not give up their home language, religion, food or dress until the third or fourth generation.

Myth #3: Americans do not welcome new immigrants/ Americans do welcome new immigrants
Reality: These statements are both true. America takes pride in being a nation of immigrants and accepts more immigrants and refugees than most other countries. However, Americans are divided in their attitudes toward immigrants.

Myth #4: Immigrants are not as healthy native-born Americans
Reality: Numerous studies have shown that first generation immigrants are actually healthier than US-born residents on a wide variety of measures (fewer disabilities and chronic health conditions and risk behaviors; better birth outcomes and longer life expectancies). However, these health advantages are lost over time in the US.

Myth #5: Immigrants are less educated and less skilled than US-born residents
Reality: In fact, there are higher proportions of immigrants at both extremes: among the highly skilled and highly educated, and among the lower skilled, less educated.

Myth #6: Immigration hurts the economy
Reality: To summarize a recent report by the national Council of Economic Advisors, “careful studies of the long-run fiscal effects of immigration conclude that it is likely to have a modest, positive influence.�? Furthermore, a young, foreign-born workforce is essential in a country that is rapidly aging.

Myth #7: Immigrants cost more than they contribute.
Reality: As the National Research Council reminds us, ‘studies often over-state the cost of immigration by measuring costs before adults reach working age.’ Furthermore, many Americans don’t realize that, while immigrants use services, just as US residents do, they also pay taxes –income taxes, property taxes, business taxes and sales taxes.

Myth #8: Immigrants don’t learn English as rapidly as European immigrants did.
Reality: There is no evidence to support this claim. In fact, it took many generations for some European immigrants to learn English, while today the vast majority of children of immigrants are fluent in English.

Myth #9: Immigrants are ‘criminals’.
Reality: A number of studies have shown that contemporary immigrants (including undocumented immigrants) are less likely to commit crimes or to be in prison than are US-born residents

Myth #10: A border fence will solve the problems of undocumented immigrants
Reality: There are millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States for a simple reason: companies need young workers and recruit immigrants to take many jobs, but the federal government issues almost no visas to low skilled immigrants. Until this ‘mismatch’ is fixed, the current trend will continue-- increases in border spending that coincide with increases in the number of undocumented residents.

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Katherine Fennelly is Professor of Public Affairs at the Hubert H.
Humphrey Institute, University of Minnesota, and the 2006-2007
Fesler-Lampfer Chair in Urban and Regional Affairs. Her research,
teaching and outreach interests include immigration and public policy,
leadership in the public sector, the human rights of immigrants and
refugees in the United States, and the preparedness of communities and
public institutions to adapt to demographic changes. Recent projects and
publications focus on the determinants of attitudes toward immigrants
and their successful integration into US communities.

As in the U.S., arguments for tighter controls over migration around the world mix fears of terrorism with anxiety about rising welfare costs. Residents of rich countries also fear the morality of foreigners, whom they perceive as lacking respect for their restrictive laws. Fears focus on the poorest migrants but no traveler is completely exempt.

In Japan, for example, where 8.1 million foreigners regularly enter the country, mainly as tourists, fears of terrorism have risen along with Japan’s continued support for U.S. military action in the Middle East. The solution? Borrowing from the U.S., Japan will require all adults to be photographed and fingerprinted. http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gAdFCReRS6bvBkZwVcg7X3qIWkgQD8SGP0P80

Syria meanwhile has announced it will close its border to persons fleeing from nearby Iraq. More dramatically it will require 1.5 millions Iraqis residing in Syria to return home again. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/world/middleeast/21syria.html
Syria’s decision may please Iraq’s government but it’s unclear whether the Iraqis fleeing their war-torn country will show proper respect for the new law.

Certainly that’s something that worries France. There, a new law requires far more of potential immigrants than merely demonstrating knowledge of the French language or knowledge of French political customs. France proposes DNA testing for visa applicants. Why? The French fear that families sponsoring their relatives lie about their biological connections. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20071025.FRANCEDNA25/TPStory/TPInternational/Europe/. In Switzerland, this mingling of biological with security concerns recently found even more direct expression. A right-wing political poster featured an image of three white sheep kicking a black sheep off the Swiss flag in order to “produce security.�?

Even European proposals that acknowledge the region’s growing need for labor reveal high anxiety about migration increases. The “blue card�? recently suggested for the EU would be available only to the highly skilled. And it would impose such high income restrictions that few engineers or computer technicians could meet them. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2726912.ece

Is it any surprise, then, that in Ireland, even a sympathetic public official in city struggling to cope with the educational needs of growing numbers of immigrant children concluded “We're just victims of our times, really"? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/23/AR2007102302162_2.html

In a world where the rich consider themselves the victims, the poor will find their own alternatives. Perhaps, as one recent report suggests, they will increasingly chase their dreams not to Europe, Japan or the U.S. but to China: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpyn/content/article/2007/10/20/AR2007102000530.html

The most prominent example in the past few weeks is on the federal level, where on October 10, a judge for the Northern District of California ordered the indefinite delay of a new Department of Homeland Security rule. The new rule would have taken the Social Security Administration’s existing practice of sending a letter to employers indicating when an employee’s Social Security number did not match the agency’s files (so-called “no match�? letters, intended to be used solely for managing employees’ social security withholdings) and used it to require employers to fire any employee who received such a letter, within 90 days of receipt. The judge in the case stopped the rule from going into effect because Homeland Security did not take the required step of analyzing the consequences of the new rule for small businesses. The judge indicated the effect on small businesses could potentially be quite large, and could also cause irreparable harm to thousands of employees who were legally authorized to work, and received no-match letters due to clerical errors or other administrative problems.

In many ways, this was a simple case for the court. There was a clear cut procedure to follow when implementing a new rule, the Department of Homeland Security failed to follow it, and the Social Security Administration could show that thousands of legally authorized workers would be adversely affected if the new rule went into effect. Most issues surrounding the recent zealous attempts at enforcing immigration law are much murkier. At the heart of this murkiness is the question of to what extent do immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, have the same legal protections as citizens?

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents conduct immigration raids, they not need warrants to detain or to enter the home of individuals suspected by the agency of being in this country illegally. They do not need to read these individuals their rights when detaining them. However, as raids by ICE get more aggressive, and more and more state and local law enforcement agencies are teaming up with ICE to enforce federal immigration standards, or passing legislation creating their own immigration enforcement standards, the constitutionality of a separate standard for immigrants is being questioned. Federal lawsuits have been filed against county law enforcement agencies in, among other states, Connecticut, New Mexico, Tennessee, and Virginia, and against the state of Oklahoma. Two separate lawsuits have been filed against ICE, in New York and Texas; the latter by individuals who say ICE violated their rights during the raids at a Swift meatpacking plant.

While most of these suits have just recently been filed, in July of this year the first case of this type was decided by a federal district court. The district court in Pennsylvania struck down the town of Hazleton’s local immigration ordinance as unenforceable under federal law, and in the process noted that the court’s analysis “applies to illegal aliens as well as to legal residents and citizens. The United States Constitution provides due process protections to all persons.�?

---------

Claire Urban is a Law Student at the Boston College Law School

The debate about immigration costs are particularly heated in southern border states. In California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, newspaper editorials and pronouncements from civic leaders and elected officials often use phrases like “being overrun,�? “under assault,�? and “inundated�? as if from a tidal wave of unauthorized immigrants—migrants who are seen as sapping the life from these states. Indeed, this is part of the motivation for the lawsuit against the federal government seeking compensation for health care and other costs. For the past few years I have been looking at the labor market dynamics of immigrants and low-wage workers in California, and quite frankly, the cost/benefit debate fundamentally misses the point. Costs associated with immigration should not be seen as costs, per se, but rather subsidies to employers.

The costs/benefits of immigration have been estimated by nearly 30 different studies over the past 10 years, and the results have largely been mixed—some find a net gain from immigration, others a net loss. A recent and widely cited report from the Center on Immigration Studies (CIS: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscal.html) finds that households headed by undocumented immigrants generate $26.3 billion in costs for the federal government in 2002 and paid only $16 billion in taxes, creating a net fiscal deficit of almost $10.4 billion, or $2,700 per undocumented household.

When the public hears this number, it is largely seen in black and white terms: immigrants cost, it is unjust for us to be subsidizing them, kick them out. In policy debates, this also leads to a fairly simple set of assumptions: immigration is a net cost, to control costs we must have urgent policy reform. Unfortunately for those who are quick to use these figures as reason to clamp down on immigration, the estimation of costs and benefits is far more complex.

There are many assumptions people have about undocumented immigrants that are simply incorrect—that these are low-skilled workers—for instance. The reality is that there are many undocumented immigrants in the country who are highly skilled—they overstay work, study, or tourist visas. What I am more concerned with here are the assumptions regarding how to fix the problem of immigration costs. The implicit assumption of most cost/benefit studies is that shutting off the flow of lesser-skilled (less than a high school education) labor, and only allowing H-1b visa holders (highly skilled) immigrants to arrive, would fix, or at least move towards fixing the problem. This assumption follows general economic theory, and is held not only be economists, but the general public. The underlying logic runs as follows: shutting off the flow of low-skilled labor would force employers to hire native-born labor. This, in turn, would raise wages and reduce unemployment (as employers would have to pay more to hire fewer workers). This in turn would reduce the public sector costs of undocumented immigrants, because we would have native born workers earning good wages and not relying on public service programs. The problem, however, is that there is not strong enough evidence that removing immigrants raises the wages dramatically or reduces the public sectors program dependence of native-born workers. Could we really imagine retail sales clerks, cashiers, janitors, and landscapers seeing wages increase from $8.00/hr to $12.00-14.00/hr (the rates at which full time workers become ineligible for most public programs)? Even the most extreme labor market models do not suggest that there would be such a dramatic wage increase. The other problem is that most low-wage workers on public assistance in the United States are native born.

What people fail to recognize is that regardless of nativity or citizenship status, low-wage workers simply earn too little to move off of many forms of public assistance. Hypothetically, even if we could expel the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, and then kept any more from arriving, we would still need a growing pool of labor to work in the lowest paid sectors of our economy—retail sales persons, customer service representatives, janitors, waiters/waitresses, food service workers, and so forth. These are just some of the occupations with the greatest job growth projected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the next 10-15 years, yet none of them pay adequate wages to move people off of public assistance, even when working full time.

Using 2002 data, I worked on a study that found that low-wage workers—those households earning less the minimum wage are eligible for up to $23,417 per year in public assistance through programs like food stamps, supplemental insurance, and section 8 housing, while paying $3,454 in total state and federal taxes.(http://www.onlinecpi.org/article.php?list=type&type=62 ) This leaves a potential gap of approximately $20,000 per minimum wage household. This is an amount far greater than the estimated $2,700.00 per household that undocumented immigrants are estimated to cost in public assistance. Fortunately, very few workers actually earn the minimum wage in the United States, and those that do are not taking full advantage of the public services available to them. If we move higher up the wage scale, however, the rates of public service utilization and the costs remain very high for low-wage workers.

Using a similar methodology, the Institute on Labor and Employment at UC Berkeley found that in California, two million working families received public assistance in 2002. The price tag for this assistance was $10 billion per year, with most support going to families with full-time workers who earned near the minimum wage. (http://repositories.cdlib.org/ile/scl2004/01) This is a cost of approximately $2000.00 per working family—a significant subsidy on average per household, but far less than the amount that the working poor qualify for. Significantly, the majority of households have a high-school degree or higher and working full time—that is to say, they are not dependent on public assistance because of less than a high school education or failure to work, but rather because of the low wages and benefits available through employment. What this means is that the other side of the coin on the immigration costs/benefits debate is the costs of the native-born working poor. In fact, the costs to subsidize native-born working poor are higher than undocumented immigrants who are working and poor.

As the CIS study notes, on average, the costs that illegal households impose on federal coffers are less than that of other households (the reason they are a net cost is because their tax payments are only one-fourth that of other households). However, is this cost differential because the immigrants are undocumented, or because they are employed in low-wage occupations that do not pay enough to move beyond public assistance? Even CIS acknowledges that if undocumented immigrants were given amnesty and began to pay taxes and use services like households headed by legal immigrants with the same education levels, the estimated annual net fiscal deficit would increase from $2,700 per household to nearly $7,700, for total net cost of $29 billion. What this figure represents, assuming their model is accurate, is the total subsidy to low-wage households would increase because of their greater access to public sector programs. In other words, it is far cheaper to keep workers undocumented! What this study and other fail to recognize is that we already subsidize low-wage households by billions of dollars each year who are citizens—welfare reform has not eliminated the need for health care, shelter, subsidized meals and other vital programs.

So then are undocumented immigrants really such a great burden? Looking at Current Population Survey data for 2003, if we compare immigrant men to native born men, they tend to have higher rates of labor force participation, earn less, and use far less in public services. This represents a boon to employers—a cheaper labor force, one with a lower rate of unemployment than native-born workers, and they use less in public services than native born workers. The total costs for taxpayers—assuming it is roughly $2,700 per household—is really a subsidy to the employer to the extent that these are households which are working, but don’t earn enough to be disqualified for public assistance programs. We could add to this the massive subsidy to the economy that lower labor costs provide in keeping inflation down, and the additional economic activity generated by immigrants.

What the public should be concerned with is not that they are footing the bill for undocumented immigrants, but for low-wage work, that is, for employers. Hiring native-born workers would not fix the problem—the costs would still largely be there because low-wage workers do not earn enough to move beyond the need for public assistance regardless of citizenship. But as rates of employer provided health insurance continue to fall, wages for less than high-school educated workers are stagnant and falling, yet we have massive growth in the low-wage sector of the economy, it is time to take a hard look at the direction of the US economy overall—immigrants have just become a convenient scapegoat, and a smokescreen for the problem—an economy that isn’t working well for the working poor.
__________

David Karjanen is a Professor at the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota

I have indeed been blessed to meet people from all walks of life—farm workers in the fields of Northern California, organizers in Eugene Oregon, Nampa and Boise, Idaho, and Worthington, Minnesota. I have spoken with students, retirees, cabdrivers, restaurant workers, entrepreneurs in small towns of the Midwest and Northeast, a state trooper in Wyoming who gave me a ride when my bike broke down. Included in this group are people who gave me rides when I needed help, including two young carefree hippies and a Mormon family returning to Idaho from a family reunion in California. Each of them has taught me something as we talked about the state of the country—of the prevailing dis-ease that lingers in our national body. I spoke with a Mexican immigrant worker in Leimington, Ontario who compared his experience as an undocumented worker in the US South where he felt he had to constantly be on the watch for immigrant authorities and hostile locals to being a welcomed participant in a government sponsored immigrant worker program in Canada.

What I have learned through their profound example is something I already knew yet had not fully integrated with experience, and that is that we are in this together. That is, that our destinies are intertwined. Despite the dramatic media characterizations of an ongoing cultural, social, and political battle, I believe that on the ground level most people aren’t invested in maintaining this war, nor do they live their lives in fear of change. This is not to say that fear and ignorance don’t exist and don’t drive the creation of absurd policies, such as the local ordinances that would outlaw the hiring or renting property to undocumented immigrants. Nor am I blind to the fact that the people I meet may be a self-selecting population of more tolerant or progressive folks because anti-Latino hate mongers don’t go out of their way to speak with me, but too much experiential, anecdotal, and data based evidence exists to deny the facts that change is indeed occurring.

From the many Latinos I met who are active agents in change, I heard about victories, about successes in building allies across terrains of struggle, about the emergence of a critical mass of activists struggling to counter conservative politicians. From many small town residents I’ve seen and heard about how the industriousness and entrepreneurial spirit of new immigrants has saved the local economy. In a strange irony, it is the new immigrants who have made it possible for white elders of these communities to maintain their way of life even as the local culture is undergoing a profound cultural shift.

My journey is only half complete, and I cannot assume as I head to through the south that what has been true of the Northwest, Midwest, and Northeast will hold true in the new geography of Latino immigration, but I believe that the immigrants of today are extraordinarily aware of their human rights and are prepared to defend and advocate on behalf of their community as needed even as they maintain a strong sense of their continental American identity.

I invite you to join me on this adventure by following updates of my ride that I am maintaining on a blog: http://journeyacrossouramerica.blogspot.com/. Here you can read more detail about my encounters and challenges.

In an editorial I wrote for La Prensa de Minnesota last year immediately following the huge pro-immigrant marches held around the country, I noted with dismay that Latinos are once again having to prove that we belong here. Conspicuously absent in debates on immigration by the pundits, the politicians and the populous is an understanding of historical relationship of Latinos to this land and the causes of contemporary immigration that are a direct consequence of our failed foreign policy.

Part of this denial of our national heritage is the denial of the history of colonialism that this country was built upon: first in decimating and displacing the indigenous peoples of the continent and secondly in denying that the Latino presence in North American precedes the establishment of the U.S.; we have been here for centuries shaping, building, and contributing in myriad ways to this country. Debates have reached such fervor now that a bedrock principle of the US, birthright citizenship, is in danger of being discarded.

Much of the hysteria around unsuccessful immigration reform revolved around enforcement, resistance to what is being labeled as amnesty, and making sure that strong provisions are in place to ensure that Latinos culturally integrate into society as quickly as possible. If you listened only to the media and politicians you would think that all recent Latino immigrants do is drain the social service and educational systems even as they go out of their way to “steal�? jobs and live in isolation from the mainstream.

Most of these claims are overblown and don’t withstand scrutiny. I believe we have to search out ways to discover the truth about this nation, about our past as well as our future. The U.S. is not made up of a single culture, language, or point of view. Not now. Not ever. For that reason, I decided to use my research sabbatical to travel the country by bicycle to talk to people about their perspective on how immigration from yesteryear and today has made us who we are.

On July 1st I departed from Santa Cruz, California to begin an 8,500 mile journey that will take me across 35 states and into Canada and Mexico. I write this from Richmond, Virginia, about halfway through my trip. Along the way, I have been speaking with people from all walks of life (young and old, rural and urban, minority-non-minority, and across economic class, immigrant and non-immigrant) about their views on the emergence of Latinos as the nation’s largest ethnic minority and the impact this is having on the United States’ national identity and culture.

The inspiration for my trip was an 1891 essay by Cuban patriot and poet-journalist José Martí. In this essay titled “Our America,�? he called for a distinctively American culture, one that embraces rather than denies, the dynamic and organic relationship between place, language, and experience that shapes the American continent. It is this America that I have been re-discovering and affirming in my encounters with people—even as I know that I am bound to meet people who would like nothing more than for all of us to “go back where we came from.�? For me, this would be Texas.

(Watch for the second installment of this blog - it will be posted in a few days)

For the past two years, Americans have been listening to heated debates about immigration policy in Congress. Most probably think it’s Congress that is “in charge�? of immigration policy.

Well….not always. Often enough U.S. immigration policy is driven by international concerns. And that is when the executive branch—today that means mainly the President and the Department of Homeland Security—become important decision-makers. Anyone who explores the Liberian story through recent reports will be impressed with the complex system of categories and rules that Congress and Executive branch have together created for the most desperate of immigrants-- those seeking refuge from persecution in their homelands.

The 1948 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (article 13) asserts it is the right of every person to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country as he pleases. Alas, there is no corresponding human right to enter any other country. No one is more aware of this paradox of human rights than the person who flees from home.

Refugees are persons living outside the U.S. who fear persecution at home. They can of course apply for visas under this fixed quota. But under current U.S. policy only about 10 percent of visas are made available to refugees. The application can take time. Many flee without a visa.

They become asylees—yet another category of U.S. policy. Asylees are persons who have entered the U.S. as tourists, or even without proper documents, but who have requested refugee status upon arrival. (There are no fixed limits for such applications but the decision-making process can be very slow, requiring years.)

In human rights emergencies—typically war or revolution--speed matters. Congress has also empowered Presidents to respond quickly by creating yet another category—that of the “parolee.�? Parolees typically come from countries the U.S. regards as important in some way to its national interest. Parolees admitted to the U.S. between 1988 and 1904 from the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were allowed to adjust their status and to obtain green cards as permanent residents.

Not for the Liberians who were in the news last week. They held yet another--and even more tenuous status –that was granted them by Executive decision. In 1991, when civil war broke out in Liberia, George H.W. Bush granted “temporary protected status�? to Liberians already living in the U.S. and seeking asylum. Like many of the countries from which parolees have been admitted, Liberia had a long-term relationship with the U.S. (It was originally settled and governed by emancipated slaves from the United States). Unlike those from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, temporary protected status precluded adjustment through acquisition of a green card and permanent residency.

Unfortunately for the Liberians, the Department of Homeland Security recently declared the emergency in Liberia to be over, thus suspending their temporary protected status and ending their right to continue to live in the U.S. Last week, George W. Bush extended their temporary protected status—but temporarily. Persons who have lived for 16 years in the U.S. may still face forced returns. Like many people who have lived so long in the U.S. many Liberians affected by the decisions have citizen children or spouses; they have jobs, homes, churches, and communities. They otherwise differ little, if at all, from immigrants from Liberians who now possess green cards. Some may want to return; many want to stay.

Recent debates over U.S. immigration policy that American citizens are beginning to recognize what many foreigners already know-- that U.S. policy is confusing, impossibly slow and broken, and broken as an expression of concern for human rights.

Still, any promises to “fix�? what is broken will need to acknowledge that immigration policy is not a strictly domestic matter to be settled by Congress. So long as the U.S. remains actively involved in global politics, the Presidents of the U.S. will want to use immigration law as an instrument of foreign policy, especially in decisions regarding refugees in parts of the world the U.S. regards as strategically important. And that makes finding a quick or simple solution quite unlikely.

For several years, my mom and several other volunteers have worked to create an elementary curriculum that uses gardening to teach students about diversity: of plants and people. The idea is fairly simple. Take a suburban school with a diverse student population, an open plot of land, and some active kids. Add seeds from plants grown around the world, water, and sunshine—and, presto, you have a global garden. Students work with teachers and volunteer master gardeners to grow the plants and the lesson carries over into the classroom as the children learn about plant biology. But the program also has a unique method of teaching about the diversity of people as well. The garden features plants used by different cultures around the globe and as students learn about Asian bittermelon or peppers from Central America, they are also learning about the cultures that grow and use these plants. The curriculum also allows parents to join in the cultivation. (News coverage of the program from 2006)

From the perspective of immigration scholars and historians, the global garden program is interesting because it offers one possibility—there clearly are many more—for balancing an active and informative elementary curriculum with a sensitivity to the complicated role that mandatory state-run education often plays in the lives of immigrants to the U.S. and their families. For the non-English speaking parents of elementary age youth, their child’s school can be an unwelcoming institution despite the best intentions of educators and school officials. Yet a curriculum based on gardening allows such parents to share their own expertise in a context that is not language specific. The language of gardening, it turns out, is surprisingly universal.

Teaching and learning English remains the top priority of newly-arrived foreigners and those who teach their children. Language learning is also the focus of intense and often negative scrutiny from the surprisingly large numbers of Americans who believe that schools are failing in their job of teaching English.

Not surprisingly, language is by far the most common issue explored in newspaper articles that discuss education and immigration.

Educators and scholars agree that young children can learn English very quickly (for the case of some recently–arrived Hmong refugees in Wisconsin, see: http://www.postcrescent.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070425/APC0101/70425169/1979). But for older children, and especially for those over eleven or twelve years of age, the struggle to learn a new language increases.

In discussing immigrants children’s education, many teachers remain convinced that older children—who are at the highest risk of falling behind, failing and dropping out of school—must be offered academic instruction in their native tongues while they receive English-as-a-second-language instruction. Yet bi-lingual education programs like these remain intensely controversial among parents and voters; critics continue to question their success rates. Once debated in a few, large American cities, discussions of bi-lingual and “total immersion�? strategies for teaching English now appear on the editorial pages of newspapers in the Midwest and in southeastern states like Georgia. (http://www.ajc.com/services/content/opinion/stories/2007/04/12/0413edenglish.html?cxtype=rss&cxsvc=7&cxcat=17)

For many teachers the most troubling challenges posed by the influx of large numbers of immigrants is not how to teach them English but rather the threat of losing federal funding while they struggle to do so. Will schools with high numbers of recently arrived immigrant children inevitably fail to fulfill the requirements of the no “child left behind�? act or similar state-mandated tests of teachers’ effectiveness? Last week, readers in Dallas learned about the qualities that kept at least some local, urban schools highly competitive, despite large numbers of immigrant students (http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/columnists/wmckenzie/stories/DN-mckenziepts_22edi.ART.State.Edition1.4301a64.html) while readers in Phoenix learned that the federal evaluators were themselves considering whether to exempt students in the country fewer than three years from the law’s testing requirements.

It’s somewhat jarring to recognize that debates about the “dream act�?—a program that would arguably help only English-speaking immigrant teenagers—co-exists with such intense concerns that immigrant children are not learning English quickly enough and that their schools will suffer as a result.

A century ago there was no federally or state-mandated testing of school children. At that time, New York City schools began offering instruction in English (and in foreign languages for older immigrant children) simply because teachers had discovered that older children placed on the basis of their language skills in first grade classrooms for purposes of swift immersion were so socially humiliated that they typically failed to return to school. Even with such programs in place, furthermore, not all immigrants learned to master English, especially when they arrived in the U.S. as adults. (My own grandmother never learned English, for example.)

The children of immigrants a century ago were typically bi-lingual, while “English-only�? became the most common pattern among the immigrants’ grand-children. Scholars who compare language use among immigrants, past and present, tend to find similar patterns among both groups. They fairly consistently conclude that fears about today’s immigrants’ resistance to English-learning are greatly exaggerated. (See, for example, http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?ID=282). At most they expect that the grandchildren of today’s immigrants, living as they do in a highly mobile world, may exhibit slightly higher rates of bi-lingualism than was true a century ago.

Despite studies like these it will probably be a very long time before reports on public school efforts to teach immigrants other absolutely essential skills of American life (for example how to drive: http://www.mankatofreepress.com/local/local_story_108214256.html?keyword=topstory) can challenge the obsessive focus of the American media on the language issues. We can expect to read many, many more articles about how well or how poorly public schools are doing in encouraging English usage among immigrants and their children. Ironically, it may be exactly this constant attention to the issue that will push today’s immigrants and their descendants along the same path to English-only monolingualism as it did among their predecessors.

____________________________

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“Still Present Pasts�? offers a creative approach to revisiting the Korean War. Combining oral histories with multimedia art installations, the exhibit allows visitors to listen firsthand to individual memories of the war, while also encountering art that addresses the conflict in a more abstract yet no less revealing way. The individuals who offer oral histories as part of the exhibit are predominantly Korean Americans. During the war and in its aftermath, upwards of 100,000 Korean women came to the United States as military brides married to American GIs, while white, Christian parents brought an additional 150,000 Korean adoptees into the country. The oral histories conducted with these women and with the Korean adoptees revolve around the issue of being disconnected from one’s family past, and in the case of those who were adopted, creating a new sense of family. As is often the case, humans who saw their lives disrupted by the war look back on it not in the political terms of the Cold War era that spawned the conflict in the first place, but from the vantage point of those who saw their worlds fractured.

The art deals with the sense of a broken past as well – one installation contains jigsaw puzzle pieces in a child’s room, each representing a facet of the past that needs to be reconnected. Another uses blankets that refugees fleeing battles commonly took with them; the blanket is riddled with holes seemingly representing the gaps in memories and time caused by the war. Many of the exhibit’s histories and conceptual themes could apply directly to those displaced by the Vietnam War as well. Like the Koreans who ended up in the United States, the Hmong, Vietnamese, and Laotians who were forced to leave their homelands found themselves caught up in a type of cycle of human tragedy and movement. US troops came to their country ostensibly to promote democracy, and then a few years later, they founds themselves the subjects of “democratic�? debates as to whether they should be allowed to enter America. As this exhibit on the Korean War aptly points out – not everyone forgets so easily such a history.

“Still Present Pasts�? is open at Intermedia Arts gallery until June 2, 2007. For information on the exhibit, gallery hours, and directions to the space, see www.intermediaarts.org.

__________________

Andy Urban is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Minnesota, and a member of the IHRC Advisory Council. His research focuses on Irish and Chinese domestic servants in the late-nineteenth century United States.
Contact Information: urba0090@umn.edu

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In 2005, U.S. authorities released more than 100,000 arrested immigrants after
they were scheduled for a court hearing. Because most failed to show up at court,
the policy was changed and now requires detention until after the actual the court
hearing. Every year, hundreds of thousands of non-citizens, including asylum
seekers and those charged with violating civil immigration laws, are now detained
in county jails and federal prisons. There are more than 300 facilities across the
country. According to Pat Reilly, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement [ICE], 65 percent of detained illegal immigrants are in
state or local jails and prisons, 2 percent are in federal prisons, 14
percent in ICE-owned facilities and 19 percent in contractors’ facilities.
ICE detention centers hold 28,000 illegal immigrants in an average day, up
from 18,000 in July 2006. It is clear that immigrant detention will only
increase in the future, with a national plan to triple detention space to
60,000 beds to accommodate growing numbers of immigrants caught in workplace
raids and border crackdowns.
'Immigrants Held in U.S. Often Kept in Squalor,'
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6922992&sourceCode=R

‘U.S. sued over detention of immigrants’ (Chicago Tribune, 4-9-07)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0704080408apr09,1,7753901.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed
‘ICE Official Wants to Expand ‘Alternatives to Detention’ Programs’
(Congress Quarterly, 3-16-07)
http://public.cq.com/docs/hs/hsnews110-000002472448.html

The United States has detained immigrants since the 19th century. The
immigrant barracks at the immigration station on Angel Island in the San
Francisco Bay (in operation from 1910-1940) was perhaps the most notorious
for its squalid, depressing, and prison-like conditions. But the scale to
which the United States is now engaged in "warehousing" immigrants and
asylum seekers is unparalleled. And a January, 2007 Department of Homeland
Security report has recently confirmed what most immigrant rights advocates
have been charging for years: many of the centers are cramped, unsanitary,
and infested with vermin. Guards at one facility in New Jersey used attack
dogs and beatings to terrorize immigrants. Asylee children at the Don Hutto
Residential Center in Taylor, Texas were forced to wear urine-stained
clothes, and families were threatened with separation if children misbehaved
or cried. Some critics have likened the facility to an "internment camp."
Detainees seem to have have little recourse. According to one immigrant
rights advocate, immigrant detainees are "the only group in America who do
not have a constitutional right to a free, government-appointed lawyer."

‘U.S. sued over detention of immigrants’ (Chicago Tribune, 4-9-07)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0704080408apr09,1,7753901
.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed
'Immigrants Held in U.S. Often Kept in Squalor,'
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6922992&sourceCode=R

‘Detained immigrants 'treated very badly'’ (Chicago Sun Times, 3-13-07)
http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/294488,CST-NWS-IMMIG13.article

Negative media attention and federal lawsuits, including a Texas case filed
on behalf of ten children detainees at the Hutto facility and their
attorneys, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have put pressure
on the government. In testimony to congress last month, John Torres,
director of the Office of Detention and Removal Operations of the U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, claimed that detainee families were not
mistreated and that conditions had been improved. The razor wire that had
been in place around the facility has been removed, and children are no
longer required to wear uniforms.

‘U.S. sued over detention of immigrants’ (Chicago Tribune, 4-9-07)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0704080408apr09,1,7753901.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed
‘ICE Official Wants to Expand ‘Alternatives to Detention’ Programs’
(Congress Quarterly, 3-16-07)
http://public.cq.com/docs/hs/hsnews110-000002472448.html

Closer to home, Tim Counts, an ICE spokesman based in Bloomington,
Minnesota, explained how many immigrants arrested in recent workplace raids
in the Midwest and elsewhere were being "conditionally released for
humanitarian reasons, mostly for child-care purposes" and were not being
detained.
‘Agency defends handling of families after raids’ (Des Moines Register,
4-8-07)
http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070408/OPINION03/704080309/1035/OPINION

The ICE is now considering alternatives to detention, including the use of
electronic monitoring devices and requirements that illegal immigrants
regularly report their location to the federal government. Another
non-detention program known as the "Intensive Supervision Appearance
program" would involve ankle bracelets, as well as curfews, and home and
office visits.
‘ICE Official Wants to Expand ‘Alternatives to Detention’ Programs’
(Congress Quarterly, 3-16-07)
http://public.cq.com/docs/hs/hsnews110-000002472448.html

These "improvements," however, fail to address the fundamental issue of
ongoing human rights abuses endemic to the whole question of immigrant
detention and immigrant surveillance. With our current obsession with our
borders, we are turning a blind eye to the egregious attack on immigrant
rights all around us.

_______________

Erika Lee is an Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Minnesota and an IHRC affiliate.

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The recent global discourse linking migration to terrorism, ethnic riots,
and illegal behavior has apparently had a direct impact in Japan. A recent
government survey there found that 84.3% of respondents believed that
"public safety had worsened over the past ten years." 55.1% of these
respondents blamed "a rise in crimes by foreigners visiting Japan." With
migration seen as a threat to public safety, Japan, "in line with recent
global trends," has introduced tougher immigration policies. For example,
only 34 out of 954 applicants were awarded refugee status in 2006. With its
rapidly aging population and nearly stagnant fertility rate, Japan has
grappled with the idea of massive foreign migration as a solution to the
impending future labor problem. But as a Japan Times contributor commented
this week, with the "way the wind is blowing, domestically and globally,"
Japan is unlikely to turn pro-immigrant or multicultural any time soon.
“'Multicultural Japan' remains a pipe dream�? (The Japan Times, 3-27-07)

In the European Union, alarmist reports about "the greatest migratory
emergency in [European Union] history" have spurred discussions of drastic
new immigration controls requiring the cooperation of all nations within the
EU. European Commission vice-president and Commissioner for Freedom,
Security and Justice Franco Frattini ominously reported that “demographic
data show migration will rise as the population of the world’s 50 least
developed countries is expected to double, from 800 million in 2007 to 1.7
billion in 2050.�? The report comes as the migration season involving
Africans searching for a route to the "promised land of Europe" begins
across the more serene summer seas. This year, with the human rights
situations deteriorating at a fast pace across the Horn of Africa,
immigration officials are warning of a springtime surge in "irregular
migration" along the Mediterranean. National responses to international
migration have been seen as insufficient.

In 2005, Frontex, the EU’s border control agency head-quartered in Warsaw
was established to coordinate border operations and border security training
across the EU. This year, the agency is poised to launch over 30 joint
operations spread across the central Mediterranean and along the EU's
"eastern flank." A European Patrols Network along the southern maritime
borders will begin this spring and will serve as a model for broader
cooperation among nation states. Overall, Frontex is charged with
coordinating the efforts of individual EU member states in securing the EU’s
6,000 kilometres of external land borders and 85,000 kilometres of
coastline.
‘Centre focus Irregular Immigration’ (The Malta Independent, 3-30-07)

Such coordinated efforts on such a large scale will surely be just the
beginning of a global trend. Indeed, they echo U.S. President George W.
Bush's post 9/11 call for a "North American Security Perimeter" to increase
continental security integration between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada.
Global discourses about migration and even coordinated migration policies
have played important roles in the history of migration, but the scale and
breadth of what we are witnessing today is truly unparalleled. With the
fence along the U.S.-Mexico border being built and "permanent patrols" by
the EU in the Mediterranean being planned, this week's news raises extremely
troubling questions about what our world will look like in the future.

_______________

Erika Lee is an Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Minnesota and an IHRC affiliate.

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The New York Times reported last week on several GOP presidential hopefuls cruising the state of Iowa in search of hints for their campaigns. Senator Sam Brownback seems to have been baffled (but was he, really?) by the insistence on immigration-related questions by people he met in Iowa. At the end of a meeting spent mostly answering questions related to immigration he asked the audience: “Any other topics that people want to talk about?�? And yet another immigration-related question was dispatched. Similarly, John McCain as reported by the Washington Post, or Mitt Romney as reported by IowaPolitics.

Meanwhile, on the state and local levels, authorities are occasionally trying to address some of the immigration-related issues they are being pressured about by their constituents, but, ultimately no major immigration legislation can by-pass the federal level as it is likely to touch on constitutional rights. Recent examples from Texas and Missouri can serve well to demonstrate this trend.

What everyone appears to agree on is that the immigration law is “broken�? and a major, comprehensive overhaul is necessary. At the same time, the issue is understood to be so complicated that results cannot be expected any time soon and any serious effort to make progress stalls before it even gets off the ground.

What must be luring for politicians about the widely perceived immigration crisis is that it is difficult to determine exactly who is responsible for it. Attitudes toward immigrants migrate easily across party lines, a portion of the blame can always be relegated to the immigrants themselves, and since they come from the outside of the nation USA, the “us�? and “them�? mentality so useful for nation unity building can set in. Immigration has frequently been a problem in the past and will be in the future as long as the United States is a fairly prosperous democracy and as freedom and resources available in parts of the globe are scarce. So, how to satisfy large numbers of voters who want the government to be tough on “illegal�? immigrants and at the same time not lose the equally as important if not more lucrative favor of business owners, who in some sectors of the economy could not simply maintain their profits without the labor of immigrants? And frankly, how many of those angry, patriotic Americans would be happy to pay higher prices for their produce, hotel accommodations and other products and services if the cheap labor currently extracted from immigrants would have to be replaced by U.S. citizens or “legal�? immigrants in better-paying jobs with benefits that they would inevitably (and only rightfully so) demand? At least some politicians have found a partial solution – to loudly support “border security�? (achievements in this direction can be easily documented by how much was spent on law enforcement personnel, unmanned surveillance blimps and other fancy devices, building a fence, etc.) with the awareness that migrant labor will continue to flow across the border anyway (while, sadly, more will pay with injuries or even their lives than before).

However, some sources suggest (see also research by Professor Douglas Massey of Princeton University) that with the border posing such difficulty for crossing, migrants from Mexico are more likely to permanently establish their lives north of the border rather than migrate seasonally back and forth as demand for their labor fluctuates. (A lesson one would hope the supporters of fortified borders would learn from the past is that an iron curtain on a country’s border can be made effectively tight only by totalitarian regimes – and perhaps they have but chosen not to tell us about that yet.)

For the current administration and its potential successors from the same party, the “growing immigration debate�? could be a welcome gift. (Or the result of a well-designed campaign by smart political strategists?) Instead of being questioned on the mishandled war in Iraq, the slow economy, the continuing and deepening social and racial divide, corporate fraud, the degradation of the environment, the record deficits, the chaotic and erratic health insurance system, the depletion of the social security funds, the quiet, but significant limiting of civil liberties, etc (1). – all items that the current administration can be held substantially responsible for over the past 6 years – they can comfortably swim in the ever murky waters of immigration while repeating the notorious: “Yes, it is broken, we need a reform ….�?

As always, to make sense of the information supplied by the government and the media, one needs a healthy distance from it all. As much as one might be personally interested in immigration (myself being a case in point), it may be useful not to let anyone use the escalating immigration debate as a smoke screen intended to blur from view the other crucial issues whose handling in the immediate past needs to be accounted for, and whose handling in the future is to be expected from the new political leadership.

Daniel Necas, Immigration History Research Center

(1) Most of the failures of the past 6 years do not need to be specified here, to illustrate at least the deepening social and racial divide, one can look at the declining incomes of average workers, especially those classified as African American or Latino in 2000-2005, despite growing productivity, as reported by the BBC in 2006.

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Not surprisingly, everywhere Bush went immigration was raised as a key topic – although again, maybe not the topic Bush himself wanted to talk about. In Guatemala, President Óscar Berger confronted Bush directly about a raid on a Massachusetts sweatshop that resulted in upwards of 300 undocumented immigrants being captured and processed for deportation. As an article in Business Week notes, “A number of [the undocumented immigrants] sent to Texas for deportation were Guatemalan women, many of whose children were stranded at day-care centers.�? [link] Bush’s response to Berger was, that, “I’m sure they don’t want to be sent home, but nevertheless, we enforce laws.�? So much for family values.

Alfredo Corchado, writing for the Dallas Morning News, begins his article on Bush’s visit to Mexico and his meeting with Mexican President Felipe Calderon with a clever pun about how Bush sought to “mend fences with weary Mexicans.�? [link] It is difficult to mend fences when the proposal to build a 700-mile fence still angers and antagonizes Mexicans to no end. Although funding for the project has not been approved, the fence remains on the table. Calderon expressed doubt that even a fence would do anything to stop immigration, given the close links between the two countries, and also wondered publicly whether Bush and Congress would successfully pass any type of immigration reform before he was out of office. At least he treated Bush to a tour of some ancient ruins.

As all of the above articles note, one of the consistent themes in Bush’s visits was his promotion of free trade, and a policy that he believes will alleviate poverty and therefore the need for Central and Southern Americans to emigrate. To his hosts, more concerned with other issues, this must have sounded a bit like a prerecorded message, and not a live interaction.

__________________

Andy Urban is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Minnesota, and a member of the IHRC Advisory Council. His research focuses on Irish and Chinese domestic servants in the late-nineteenth century United States.
Contact Information: urba0090@umn.edu

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The international financial system, including the World Bank, is the source of this new vision of remittances. International investors believe they can harness remittances to provide security for loans to poor countries (World Bank, 50). Better security means lower interest rates for borrowing countries and more steady interest payments for lenders/investors. Remittances may also provide basic services that governments are unable to afford in poor countries. What seems to get lost in these discussions is that migrants’ financial support of their families is not a new source of income. The pie can be cut into new shapes and slices, but in the end the size of the pie does not increase (unless migration increases, a point I will return to below).

The overly optimistic message about remittances has been getting lots of attention recently, as newspapers have been filled with remittance success stories. The New York Times, using Inter-American Development Bank statistics, reported that remittances are the "largest and most direct poverty reduction program" in Latin America, greatly exceeding the amount of foreign aid doled out by the United States to countries in that region. Celia Dugger reported in another Times article that remittances were a factor in reducing poverty in Nepal from 42 percent of the population to only (?) 31 percent. Meanwhile, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel covered the story of Guatemala President Oscar Berger Perdamo's visit to Jupiter, Florida. During a meeting with Guatemalan expatriates, the President exclaimed, "Thanks for those blessed remittances. They have allowed your families to rise from poverty." There is no doubt that remittances are important. For families that receive them, they can even make the difference between life and death.

But can remittances solve the problem of poverty globally? Despite the hype, the answer is no. First, consider that while Grandpa Cianciaruso regularly sent money to Italy, neither I nor any of his other grandchildren picked up that burden. Remittances are common for first-generation immigrants, but become very rare by the third generation. Unless they are continuous and replenished, remittances will only be beneficial to the poor in the short term. Consider that remittances have been around for a long time—and so has global poverty.

The second reason that remittances cannot solve global inequality is that they tend to track existing wealth patterns rather than change them. To better understand the flow of remittances, the World Bank divided countries into four groups based on their GDP in 2005—high-income, upper-middle income, lower-middle income, and low-income (World Bank, 91). The organization found that the remittances going to individuals in the high-income group of countries ($125.3 billion) dwarfed the remittances going to individuals in all of the other groups combined ($24.1 billion) (World Bank, 91). The top five national recipients of remittances in 2004 were India, China, Mexico, France, and the Philippines—not the poorest countries in the world by a long shot. When remittances are measured as a percentage of GDP rather than in raw numbers, more poor countries are among the top recipients (such as Haiti). Nevertheless, the fact remains that most migrants' money goes to the wealthiest countries. The World Bank’s own report on remittances to Latin America concludes that remittances are “neither ‘manna from heaven’ nor a substitute for sound development policies�? (xii).

Yet another problem is the unhealthy incentives that chasing remittances place on national governments in poorer countries. The lure of remittances from former residents prompts countries to encourage emigration. The Stabroek News reports that the “most common Caribbean export is not sugar, rice, coffee, bananas, bauxite, but its people.�? In the Nepali case “success story�? above, remittances came at a high price. Remittances quadrupled from 1996 to 2004, but by the end of that period, 1 out of every 11 adult Nepali men was working abroad. The outward flow of a country's most talented citizens will hurt that country in the long run. Encouraging emigration to enhance remittances also tends to undermine cooperation between countries, such as the U.S. and Mexico, to limit undocumented migration. Thus, chasing remittances leads to some troubling policy outcomes. It may be helpful in the short term, but it takes a serious toll in the long term.

Sending money to less fortunate loved-ones is a wonderful, generous act. It illustrates what many of us see every day—that migrants have a strong work ethic and are deeply devoted to their families. Remittances offer desperately-needed relief and special opportunities to many individuals in poor countries. Despite their benefits, however, remittances are not a cure for global poverty. They did not lead to greater economic equality a century ago; they will not do so today. And the cost of formally encouraging remittances has a high price tag; a cost that will have to be paid by poor countries eventually.

Elizabeth Heger Boyle
Associate Professor of Sociology & Law
--------
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The United States continues to remain a predominantly Christian nation, but the last fifty years have been witness to a dramatic rise in American religious pluralism as millions of adherents of Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism and more have made the U.S. their home. Take Minnesota as an example: While Minnesota is thought of by many as an American Scandinavia, it ranks second in the nation for proportion of refugees to residents. From 1990-2000 Minnesota increased its foreign-born population by 130% to 260,000. Mosques and Hindu and Buddhist temples now dot the predominantly Christian landscape of the Twin Cities.

Iraqi Immigration and Religion

The war on Iraq has placed the United States in the strange position as both the culprit of escalated levels of religious persecution in Iraq and a refuge offering asylum for those persecuted. U.S. immigration policy towards Middle Easterners tightened after 9/11, at the same time that many Middle Easterners were in greater need of immigrating. A Media Line article details the effect of changing immigration policy on the amount of Middle Eastern immigrants in the U.S. http://www.themedialine.org/news/news_detail.asp?NewsID=16754
The article reports that tension around religion – Shi’ites & Sunnis, Christians & Muslims -- seems to dissipate once individuals leave the Middle East for the U.S. A Palestinian-American journalist at the end of the story alludes to a source of “peace�? in the United States: “I think when people weigh it up, they figure if they can get good money then ‘what the hell, we can manage’.�? Can economic prosperity really reduce religious tensions? And, if so, was the conflict truly religious to begin with?

While Shi’ites, Sunnis, and Kurds struggle to create a new Iraq, the plight of smaller Iraqi groups is sometimes overlooked. A Seattle Times article posted on the 17th outlines the predicament of Mandaean Iraqis who look to John the Baptist as their spiritual leader. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/faithvalues/2003576055_mandaeanism17.html
Because of their small numbers, they are threatened by both Islamic extremists in Iraq and as a consequence of the violence against them in Iraq, by their geographic dispersal around the United States. In fact, most Mandaeans cannot imagine their religious community existing into the third generation in the U.S. and most are convinced there will soon be no Mandaeans left in Iraq.

Immigration and Religious Tension in the U.S.

As U.S. foreign policy renders the Middle East uninhabitable for many groups, it must accommodate more and more people onto American soil. Some American Jews see the expanding boundaries of religious pluralism as a threat to their lifestyle. One article in recent press reports that the increasing Muslim population in the U.S. “jeopardizes�? Jews. http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54278
Meanwhile, a conference held February 15-17 at Dartmouth College explored similarities in the migratory struggles of the two groups. http://www.thedartmouth.com/article.php?aid=2007021901060
Instead of pitting the two groups against one another, speakers sought to explore Judeophobia and Islamophobia in a comparative context, highlighting the contradiction between the western world’s self-perceived openness and growing anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic sentiment. One speaker sought to use Jewish migration experience as a template to ease Muslim integration into western life. Another drew comparisons between suburban Parisian neighborhoods largely inhabited by North Africans today and their history during WW II as Jewish immigrant neighborhoods.

Religious Plurality and the Media

Regardless of the U.S.’s self-congratulatory attitude of national unity despite cultural and religious diversity, religious plurality in the media is highlighted as a largely negative force that renders individuals unable to reconcile their differences. It is often used as an easy explanation to violence. A random mall-shooting by a teenager left five dead in Salt Lake City. Because the guilty teenager happened to be Bosnian and because the current climate happens to be anti-Islamic, the mayor sent out a vitriolic reaction to media sources stating the shooter was an “Islamic terrorist�? regardless of the fact that there is no evidence to suggest that the incident had religious motivations. http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2879307

While the American Muslim population is growing at a quick clip, the U.S.’s strong roots in Protestantism also attract Christians from around the world and often convert those that migrate here. The Chinese Christian Church is now the predominant religious institution among the Chinese in the United States. Whereas only 1-5% of the population in China is Christian, a third of American Chinese are Christian. http://religion.ssrc.org/reforum/Kim/
Despite rhetoric that increased immigration and religious plurality endangers American religious life, it is a sign that religion in the U.S. is alive and well, perhaps more vibrant than ever.

_____________________________

Allison Adrian is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Minnesota’s School of Music. Her research explores the worship music of Lutheran immigrant congregations formed within the past twenty years in the Twin Cities.

Contact information: adri0032@umn.edu

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That said, the practice of immigrants changing their names after settling in the United States was—and continues to be—a bit more common. Statistics quoted from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service indicate that today 16 percent of immigrants who become citizens change their names. An unscientific poll by the Boston Globe adds that name changes are especially common amongst Asian, Arab, and Muslim immigrant groups. The reason for changing one’s name depends on the individual. In the Boston survey, for instance, immigrants who recently completed the process for becoming United States citizens offered various reasons: the desire to avoid embarrassment and frustration when others can’t pronounce one’s name, the need to adapt to American culture, the benefits that an American-sounding name offers for advancement at work and in society. (Welcome Candy, Sam and George: Immigrants Change Countries and Their Names)

Name changes have been particularly popular among those individuals who aspire for careers in entertainment or politics. Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman, abandoned the family name inherited from his Jewish immigrant grandparents. Similarly, former vice president Spiro Agnew modified his Greek-American birth name of Spiro Anagnostopoulos for political advantage. When another political hopeful, Barack Obama, announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination this past week, the on-going debate over whether Americans would elect a black President flared up anew. One journalist from Maine’s Sun Journal mused tongue-in-cheek that voters will not vote for Obama simply because of his foreign-sounding name (Obama is, of course, the son of a native Kenyan). The writer recommended that Obama reclaim his college nickname, Barry, because “Americans like presidents with simple, short, familiar names.�? (Pop 20: What's in a Name?)

The motivation for an immigrant to change his or her name is often influenced by prejudices and discrimination encountered in the United States. “No Fly Lists�? and “FBI Name Check�? lists, for example, affect many individuals who not coincidentally also happen to be immigrants. The consequences can be maddening. A recent article in Minneapolis’s Star Tribune noted that immigrants with common last names are more likely to become entangled in security checks that can delay one’s hope of becoming an American citizen. (Immigrant entangled in post-9/11 checks) Indeed, disgust over “FBI Name Check�? lists led to the filing in San Francisco during the past week of a class-action lawsuit against the federal government. The eight plaintiffs in the suit had all completed the requirements for citizenship, but their applications had been held up for over two years as a result of the security check process. ('Name Checks' for citizenship hopefuls trigger lawsuits)

It seems then that despite the historical inaccuracies concerning Ellis Island, the prospect of a name change has been and continues to be a significant decision that many immigrants face at some juncture. Immigrants change their names for myriad reasons, not the least of which is the need to feel as if one fits into American society. But at the same time, to give up one’s birth name is, in a way, to give up a major part of one’s personal and cultural identities. “Becoming American�?—through name change or whatever means—is hardly an easy business. William Shakespeare famously contemplated the significance of a name when he told the story of the star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet. The Capulet and Montague family feud aroused his heroine Juliet to ask “What’s in a name?�? The experiences of immigrants, both historical and contemporary, suggest that the question still carries great relevance, even though it is not easily answered. Names are an element of culture and, as a result, closely related to the politics of identity.

________________________

David LaVigne is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Minnesota and a member of the IHRC Advisory Council and Collections Council. His research studies the changing meaning of race and ethnicity for European immigrants during the twentieth century, with particular focus on the white ethnic revival during the 1960s through the 1980s.

Contact information: lavig004@umn.edu

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Permanent residents applying for citizenship:
Since 9/11 security checks have greatly increased the processing delay for individuals applying for permanent residence status and for US citizenship. This week the Minneapolis Star Tribune described the plight of one such applicant, Ragab Sadek.
http://www.startribune.com/462/story/988171.html In July of 2005 Mr. Sadek received a letter from the government saying "Congratulations. Your application has been recommended for approval.�? Two years later his application remains ensnarled in a backlog, with no indication of when it will end.

To make matters worse for would-be citizens, ICE has issued a proposal to increase fees for naturalization applications by 80%, from $330 to $595. An editorial in the New York Times described the increase thusly: “With one hand, Lady Liberty lifts her lamp beside the golden door. With the other, she roots around in an immigrant’s wallet, plucking out bills.�? http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/opinion/04sun2.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

Asylum Seekers
As a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the United States accepts the right of individuals to seek asylum from persecution. However, a bipartisan federal commission warned on Wednesday that “the Bush administration, in its zeal to secure the nation’s borders and stem the tide of illegal immigrants, may be leaving asylum seekers vulnerable to deportation and harsh treatment.�?http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/08/washington/08asylum.html The commission cited a number of instances in which asylum seekers were treated like common criminals, jailed for long periods of time, and even deported.

The Future
There are indications that urgently needed immigration reform is in the offing. This week Senator Mel Martinez, chairman of the Republican National Committee urged Congress to pass guest worker legislation with provisions for an earned ‘path to citizenship.’ http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20070202-124747-8013r.htm President Bush has vowed to work with the Democratic majority in Congress to pass legislation that includes these changes. However, immigrant advocates caution that issues of administrative delays, backlogs and preservation of the rights of refugees and asylum seekers must also be part of the reform package.

_______________________________

Katherine Fennelly is Professor of Public Affairs at the Hubert H.
Humphrey Institute, University of Minnesota, and the 2006-2007
Fesler-Lampfer Chair in Urban and Regional Affairs. Her research,
teaching and outreach interests include immigration and public policy,
leadership in the public sector, the human rights of immigrants and
refugees in the United States, and the preparedness of communities and
public institutions to adapt to demographic changes. Recent projects and
publications focus on the determinants of attitudes toward immigrants
and their successful integration into US communities.

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Of course, though we often take it for granted, we would do well to keep in mind that political debates, public discussion, and media discourse on the topic shape our cultural common sense on the topic through language. Language shapes reality. The power to define people or phenomena establishes a framework of control or understanding. A University of Colorado professor reminds us that so powerful is language that the terms of the debate on immigration have already been set http://www.longmontfyi.com/Local-Story.asp?id=14340. Whether the discussion is about ‘undocumented immigrants,�? or “illegal aliens,�? about providing “amnesty�? or a “pathway to citizenship�? or any other of a number of contrasting terms does make a difference; but the battle for people’s sentiments has already been established by political and media pundits. Like stereotypes that endure over time, the images conjured up by these words have the power to invoke ready-made categories that defy reality.

Among the headlines this week were signs that local and national legislative efforts are gearing up for battle on both sides of the issue. In New York, pro-immigrant advocates expect to hold Governor Eliot Spitzer accountable for his campaign promise that would allow undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070127/NEWS05/701270345/1021. Opponents argue that such a measure compromises national security: “"To think that we would put out the welcome mat to terrorists and illegal aliens five years after 9/11 is in my opinion, unconscionable," said Assemblyman Greg Ball, R-Carmel.�? In contrast, proponents frame it as a practical matter that increases security and provides the financial responsibility that comes with insurance. “`The facts show that restricting immigrants' access to drivers' licenses does nothing to improve security,’ a Spitzer spokeswoman told The Associated Press in October. "All it does is drive immigrants into the shadows, creating a class of people with no public records." Currently, nine other states in the nation do not require lawful U.S. presence to get a license. In Massachusetts, among other states including Minnesota, legislators will be revisiting an in-state tuition bill. Though a version of the bill was defeated in the recent past some legislators who were against the legislation last time have expressed a willingness to revisit the issue. “Rep. Richard Ross, R-Wrentham, . . . agreed that legislators have a responsibility to revisit the proposal.�?

A one-sided story in Atlantic City.com, calls to mind Governor Pawlenty’s report on the cost of undocumented immigrants to the state of Minnesota, without any consideration of the income they generate in the local economy or state tax coffers http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/news/story/7153085p-7008557c.html. Reading this, an uninformed reader would think that New Jersey is facing imminent collapse because of an immigrant drain on the economy. No doubt states are looking for solutions, but many of them are not counting on deferral legislation to address the local impact of immigration. Alabama legislators are gearing up for contentious proposals that will place a large burden of responsibility on employers with those who fail to comply facing possible jail time http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/16561561.htm. Here the consequences on the economy are clearly part of the debate. Boyd Campbell, a Montgomery attorney who specializes in immigration law, notes that “a ‘get tough’ policy on hiring immigrants could harm farmers and other employers who depend on immigrant workers. … He cited instances where peach farmers have needed hundreds of workers on short notice to save their crops during freezing weather.�?

The first volley of immigration bills on Capitol Hill was passed by the senate this week http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/16547021.htm. “Federal contractors caught hiring illegal immigrants would be banned from government work for up to a decade under sanctions the Senate added unanimously to a minimum wage bill.�? Not surprisingly, the bill, which requires punishment even if the hiring occurs inadvertently, prompted opposition from business leaders who feel that while the focus on federal employees who work in jobs that pertain to national security is understandable, the wholesale application to all government contractors will be unwieldy, burdensome, and potentially unfair. "The Sessions amendments are comparable to using the nuclear option for a paperwork violation," wrote Jeffrey D. Shoaf of the Associated General Contractors of America. Small businesses also feel that the conditions for exceptions favor large companies over small companies.

A cursory glance at these legislative proposals shows why comprehensive reform at the federal level is needed. Failure to act will result in piecemeal and localized approaches that are likely to vary widely by region and state. An LA Times editorial raises the specter, however, of federal legislators, primarily Democrats, avoiding the issue altogether as a way to keep the issue alive for the 2008 presidential race http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-immig29jan29,0,7890768.story?coll=. The editorial asks: “Might Democrats be tempted to put off the issue in order to deprive the administration of a major domestic accomplishment? Will their embrace of economic populism translate into raising the drawbridge?�? Such a move would not only be a sad commentary on American politics, it would also be a travesty for the lives of so many people to be passed around like a football because politicians are trying to use the issue to their advantage.

____________________________________________________

Louis Mendoza
Associate Professor
Department of Chicano Studies Chair
University of Minnesota
19 Scott Hall
72 Pleasant Street, Minneapolis 55455
Office: 612-624-8031
Email: lmendoza@umn.edu

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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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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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Places to Go

“Open House: If These Walls Could Talk�? [http://www.mnhs.org/exhibits/openhouse/exhibit.htm] opened at the Minnesota History Center in January 2006, and looks at the history of a single duplex in St. Paul’s Railroad Island neighborhood. The exhibit allows visitors to trace the different histories of the immigrant families who called this particular dwelling home. Beginning with the German family that originally built the duplex, visitors learn about the Italian, African American, and Hmong families who have since lived there. Like most Minnesota History Center exhibits, “Open House�? is designed to captivate visitors on multiple levels. There is plenty of interpretive text but also numerous opportunities for younger visitors to have an interactive experience, whether it is seeing how sausage was hand-ground, or partaking in backyard games from the 1940s.

You have probably driven by the stately mansion at 26th Street and Park Avenue flying the Swedish flag in the Philips neighborhood of Minneapolis many times, and wondered what exactly it was. The Swan Turnblad mansion is now home to the American Swedish Institute (ASI) [http://www.americanswedishinst.org/], and is open to the public for normal tours as well as special events throughout the holiday season. Turnblad published the Twin Cities’ main Swedish language newspaper and was an influential member of the Swedish community in Minneapolis during the early-twentieth century. In addition to learning about Turnblad’s history, visitors to the ASI can learn about the Swedish communities in neighborhoods like Cedar-Riverside and Swede’s Hollow in St. Paul. Special events for the holiday season include “Sagostund�? (story time) where children get to hear Swedish tales every Saturday, and an exhibit titled “A Nordic Christmas.�?

Places to Eat and Drink

When most Americans eat Indian food, they are usually encountering a regional cuisine – more often than not the representative region is the northwestern province of Punjab, with its rich sauces and meat dishes. For a change of pace, in Columbia Heights, immediately north of Minneapolis, one has the opportunity to experience southern Indian cooking at the Udupi Café [www.udupicafemn.com]. The Udupi Café is entirely vegetarian and the dishes are much more dry then the traditional meals found in the North. It offers a wide selection of dishes that resemble nothing you would find at an Uptown lunch buffet. If you are inspired, on the way back stop at the Indian grocery stores that surround Central Avenue near 18th Street in Northeast Minneapolis. Pick up some cashew nuts, spice them up with curry and cumin, and watch a Bollywood flick.

Downtown Minneapolis boasts The Local and Kiernan’s, but there is nothing really Irish about fighting with a bunch of investment bankers and consultants for a seat at the bar. My nomination for the best Irish bar in the Twin Cities is the Dubliner [http://www.dublinerpubmn.com/index.html], located in St. Paul on University Avenue, right near the Minneapolis border. They have free popcorn, which is always a plus, and pour a good pint of Guinness. Take a bus there on a quiet Sunday afternoon, bring a book, and spend an afternoon relaxing.

On New Year’s Day, if you are too hungover to venture out, or if the weather is less than enticing, why not stay at home and cook? As migrants to the North, African Americans brought with them Southern cooking and Southern traditions. In many parts of the South, New Year’s Day is welcomed with the traditional meal of “Hoppin’ John,�? a mixture of black eyed peas, rice, and vegetables. Dash a little hot sauce on top and you are good to go.

Things to Read

Ole Rølvaag’s Boat of Longing [http://www.amazon.com/Boat-Longing-Borealis-Books/dp/0873511840] offers a stark portrait of Norwegian immigrants trying to make it in Minnesota. Whereas his more famous Giants of the Earth looks at immigrant life on the prairie, Boat of Longing is set primarily in Minneapolis. The settings of “Snooze Boulevard�? (Cedar Avenue) and the neighborhood of Bohemian Flats, which is now the empty area adjacent to Mississippi River below the University of Minnesota’s West Bank campus, makes for an interesting literary and historical tour.

For the dedicated history person, the Minnesota Historical Society’s They Choose Minnesota: A Survey of the State’s Ethnic Groups [http://shop.mnhs.org/moreinfo.cfm?Product_ID=245&bhcp=1] offers an interesting overview of the different immigrant groups that have come to the state.

Gifts to Give

The website www.ancestry.com is an easy way to do genealogical research from the comforts of one’s home. For a moderate fee, subscribers have access to census information, ship manifests, and birth and death certificates, just to name a few of the available resources.
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Andy Urban is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Minnesota, and a member of the IHRC Advisory Council. His research focuses on Irish and Chinese domestic servants in the late-nineteenth century United States.
Contact Information: urba0090@umn.edu

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The word “raids�? packs plenty of emotion. So did much of the commentary these “raids�? inspired.

Raids are surprise attacks or forcible entry by a small armed force or the police, in this case by the I.C.E. (agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Swift & Company officials and undocumented workers undoubtedly were surprised by this federal show of force. But did federal immigration agents really have to force their way into factories where the arrests were made? Of course not. There was no armed resistance in the meat-packing plants. No blood was shed.

Still, commentators agreed on the military metaphor. For a federal administration that has been under criticism for months for its failures to “defend�? U.S. borders, public acceptance of the recent action as decisive and forceful, must have been satisfying. The administration that introduced Americans to “shock and awe�? in the Middle East has now done the same in the Middle West.

“Raids�? are undertaken either to destroy property or to steal it. Think of air raids. Or of a popular bug killer. The vicious commentary on last week’s raids suggests that some Americans would welcome the death of those characterized as “illegal aliens.�? Fortunately, no one died in the I.C.E. raids.

In a corporate setting, raids have special, but equally emotional, meaning. They are attempts to seize control of a company by acquiring a majority of its stock. Or they are predatory operations aimed to lure competitors’ workers or drive down their stock prices. No corporation wants to the object of a raid.

Swift & Company certainly felt under attack last week. Company representatives complained of difficulties in complying with federal law. They suggested their rights as producers—which include the right to purchase the labor of workers on a free market—were under attack. And they hinted at consequences for American consumers in the form of higher prices for meat.

Privately they also wondered, I suspect, why their company had been singled out for raids. Why had I.C.E. agents not raided construction sites, where foreigners without documents also work by the thousands? Why not hotels? Why not restaurant kitchens? Why not the hundreds of thousands of American homes where immigrant women, also without proper documentation, work as cleaners and nannies? Buying “illegal�? labor and the goods that “illegal�? labor produces has become as ubiquitously American as apple pie. Why should the meat-packing industry alone suffer the loss of its workers?

Raids by government agents have historically also targeted illicit substances—alcohol raids during prohibition or on college campuses; drug raids in American cites or along the border. Between 1918 and 1921 the so-called “Palmer Raids�? (named after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer) also targeted immigrants--by breaking up the offices of the radical organizations they supported—and then deporting them.

Such raids have also targeted the producers or retailers of the illicit substances or ideas, rather than their consumers (or readers). It’s useful to ponder the illicit substance sought during last week’s raids and to identify those producing, selling, and buying it.

I.C.E. agents claimed the illicit substance was fake documents, representing the identities of hundreds of Americans, on whose behalf the I.C.E. acted. Unfortunately, few newspapers reported the numbers of foreign workers actually found in possession of such documents. I searched in vain for reports about Swift & Company workers who had stolen American identities or produced false documents.

What I learned was that most had purchased the documents. Here in Minnesota, reporters noted, and even visited and photographed, the places where false IDs, or “micas�? were on sale: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2006/12/13/fakedocs
I.C.E. had not raided those markets. It had not targeted the producers or the thieves themselves. Apparently, it had not deported them.

Instead, coverage of the raids focused on the fat that that hundreds of Swift & Company workers were in the country illegally and soon would be deported. Apparently, the workers and their labor-- not the documents or the stolen identities themselves-- were the illicit substances that most mattered to I.C.E. agents. They were the substance being “raided�? in meat-packing plants last week.

If the purchase of illicit substances justifies raids such as those last week and if those illicit substances include human labor, then I.C.E. agents might not stop with raids at Swift & Company. Perhaps American consumers—and not just purchasers of Swift meat products--should expect a visit from the I.C.E. in the near future.
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The article seems a bit bare in its analysis on a couple of accounts. It would be interesting if the author put this into context with the larger debate surrounding immigration; it is simply implied that these nurses are essential workers (perhaps because they ensure the health of the American population) and therefore they should be allowed to enter the country without impediment. While this is certainly true, why are the agricultural workers who harvest American crops not afforded a similar privilege? In addition, as the former University of Minnesota professor Cathy Choy illustrates in her book Empire of Care, the reason Filipina nurses have been such an integral part of the American healthcare system is because of the unique colonial relationship that existed between the United States and the Philippines. After the American government occupied the Philippines, one of its first measures was to send a cadre of doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals there to teach the “uncivilized�? Filipinos how to engage in proper health practices. This influx of American nursing schools in the Philippines eventually led to a surplus in nurses, who went to the United States to find work; a trend that has continued into the present.
On the theme of health, an article in the Los Angeles Times [“Immigrants' health assessed in Rand study�?] addresses a recent report published by the Rand Corporation, which finds that the children of Asian immigrants are on the whole more healthy then the children of Latino immigrants. Although income disparities between the two groups in part accounts for this – affluent children, regardless of their race, exercise more, have better access to health care, and eat more healthy – he article notes that even when in comparable economic groups Asian Americans tended to have healthier habits then Latinos. What does this mean? To start, it means that racial categorizations play an important role in the way individuals’ health are measured by the government and by experts who produce knowledge in this field. The article (and perhaps the report as well), not surprisingly, does not mention children who come from mixed backgrounds and lumps Latinos and Asians all together, without making any distinction to nationality. Nonetheless, the report does show how race is a real social force in the sense that it impacts facets of social life like human health. If Latinos for example, have fewer opportunities than whites to find work that offers benefits, their race can indirectly inform life expectancy and other elements of their well-being.
Finally, addressing health in a less abstract sense, an article from CNN.com [“Driver guilty in deadly human smuggling case�?] covers the recent guilty verdict against Tyrone Williams, the driver of the truck in which 19 undocumented immigrants suffocated to death in the truck’s trailer while being smuggled into the United States in May 2003. Although Williams deserves to be punished for his role in this – and he certainly will as an individual scapegoat – doesn’t this tragedy speak to a larger collective guilt over the way the border is currently policed? Human smuggling is an extremely dangerous business for the same reason that many people die each year selling drugs. Its illegality makes it profitable.

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Andy Urban is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Minnesota, and a member of the IHRC Advisory Council. His research focuses on Irish and Chinese domestic servants in the late-nineteenth century United States.
Contact Information: urba0090@umn.edu

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For the past decade, scholars have noted what they call “bi-modal�? patterns among the foreign-born of the United States. Foreigners cluster disproportionately at both the bottom and at the top of the U.S. job hierarchy. Large proportions have far less educations than natives but the proportions with post-graduate degrees also surpass that of Americans. Precisely because recent debates have focused so much attention on the poor of Mexico and Central America--who often enter the United States without proper visas in order to work low-wage, low-skill jobs--it’s important to pause occasionally and to acknowledge those immigrants who are decidedly not today’s “huddled masses.�?

There are many of them, as even a quick survey of a holiday week’s news suggests. For the reader who looks, information about the large and growing numbers of well-educated, high-income immigrants is everywhere to be found. Could attention to these immigrants change the terms of the current debates?

A recent Washington Post article focuses on one group of prosperous migrants from India and their quick move into the American mainstream. Eighty percent have college degrees and 70 percent work in professional and managerial positions; their incomes are higher than the American median, making it possible for them to purchase homes quickly, even in the high-price Washington area. Although we don’t usually debate about the desirability of immigrants like these, some of these immigrants, too, have overstayed their visas and have become “illegal�? immigrants. Most, however, have entered the country as students or workers or have received visas as relatives of earlier immigrants who have become resident aliens and U.S. citizens.
Out of India, En Masse and on the Way Up

Many newspapers and services picked up AP business reporter Michael Liedtke’s article on foreigners as entrepreneurs. Although they make up only 12 percent of the American population, immigrants start up 20 percent of all new businesses in the country. It’s particularly appropriate that yahoo.com carried this story: Yahoo’s Jerry Yang arrived in the U.S. from Taiwan thirty years ago. In fact, Silicon Valley is to a considerable degree a product of immigrant business success stories.
Venture capitalists betting on immigrant

Even those conservatives who generally argue for immigration restriction do sometimes acknowledge the reality of middle-class migration—a phenomenon that is increasingly obvious even in Mexico (see, for example, Middle Class Mexicans Also Emigrating). The author of this article points to the complexity of wealthier migrants’ motives: many middle-class Mexican migrants are fully employed at home. He even sympathizes with their desire to earn more money in the U.S. But ultimately he insists that the only solution to the current immigration “problem�? is stricter controls at the border.

In short: don’t expect attention to wealthier, better educated immigrants to end the hot debates about how many immigrants the U.S. should welcome. It’s not just the huddled masses that many debaters seek to exclude.

_________________________________________________________

Donna R. Gabaccia Rudolph J. Vecoli Professor of Immigration History
Research and Director Immigration History Research Center
311 Elmer L. Andersen Library
222-21st Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
612-625-5573
612 625-4800
FAX: 612-626-0018
Email: drg@umn.edu

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The Institute of Medicine Report “Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century�? has called upon the United States to ensure that quality care is available to all, without differentiating by race or ethnicity, yet lack of health insurance is the single largest determinant of the differences between Latinos and Whites in access to regular health providers (Mayberry et al, 2006). The growing ‘chasm’ is particularly ironic given that first-generation immigrants—including low income Latinos—are generally healthier than US-born residents when they first come to the country. It is only by the second and third generations that alarming health disparities begin to emerge in the form of higher risk behaviors and chronic illnesses. Scientists speculate that lack of access to health care is one of the culprits in what is known as the loss of the ‘healthy migrant effect’, as are changes in diet and exercise. Given the size and the rapid growth of the Latino population in the US today, decisions regarding access to health and social services will not only determine the future of Latino youth, but that of the nation as a whole.

Additional reference:
Improving quality and reducing inequities: a challenge in achieving best care
R. M. Mayberry, D. A. Nicewander, H. Qin, and D. J. Ballard Proc (Baylor University Medical Center) 19:103-118, 2006
___________________________________________________
Contributer: Katherine Fennelly
Office: 144 Humphrey Center
Phone: (612) 625-6685
E-mail: fenne007@umn.edu

Katherine Fennelly is Professor of Public Affairs at the Hubert H.
Humphrey Institute, University of Minnesota, and the 2006-2007
Fesler-Lampfer Chair in Urban and Regional Affairs. Her research,
teaching and outreach interests include immigration and public policy,
leadership in the public sector, the human rights of immigrants and
refugees in the United States, and the preparedness of communities and
public institutions to adapt to demographic changes. Recent projects and
publications focus on the determinants of attitudes toward immigrants
and their successful integration into US communities.

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Worldwide, 191 million people currently live outside the countries of their birth. They are a modest 3 percent of the world’s population (of 6.5 billion). They are not evenly distributed of course. The estimated 32 million living in U.S., while certainly an impressive number, constitutes only 12 percent of the American population. And in today’s world, 12 percent foreign-born puts the United States near the middle of a very long list: the wealthy country at the top of the list has roughly 75 percent foreign-born.

To identify that country, American readers must tear themselves away from the headlines about U.S. immigration that dominate page one and explore the “inside pages,�? where newspapers bury international stories. (They can also read to the end of this column.)

A reader of international news this week would have learned, for example, that Mexicans are far more concerned about their southern border with Guatemala than with the border that dominates U.S. headlines: "Illegal Immigration and Mexico's Maras". As many as 100,000 migrants enter Mexico illegally from the south each year; as a result, the population of Tapachula, a southern Mexican border town of about 300,000, has doubled in only ten years.

In Europe, we learn that a million “Brits�? emigrate every year (to Spain, Australia, and America), thus outnumbering the 474,000 foreigners who arrive annually: http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article1951273.ece . In Russia, “illegal immigration�? is debated in much the same terms as in the United States, right down to estimates of how much these foreigners harm the national economy by not paying taxes. "'Love Bridge' Fuels Anti-Immigrant Backlash on Swedish Border"

But the really huge stories of international migration—like the relative proportions of foreigners—are in Asia. Readers of a recent New York Times article learn indirectly just how ubiquitous foreigners are in the oil-enriched economies of the Middle East. ("Dubai Swats Pests Ogling Beach Beauties")
The article focuses unsympathetically on male foreign workers who go to public Dubai beaches to look at and attempt to meet western women in bathing suits (“Dubai Swats Swarms of Pests Ogling Beach Beauties�?). It fails to note these workers constitute 60 percent of Dubai’s population. Or to mention that foreign men outnumber women three to one.

What country in the world has the highest proportion of foreigners living on its national territories? Few Americans, or Arabs for that matter, think of the United Arab Emirates as a “nation of immigrants.�? Yet it, and not the U.S., provides the correct answer to our question.
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Perhaps the most curious omission has been the immigrants themselves. Of all the actors involved in the political drama of immigration—including President Bush, members of Congress, fences, and Minutemen—surprisingly little has been said about the immigrants who are supposedly the main actors in this story. For example, in a curious development, the recent emergence of African American groups protesting illegal immigration finds African American community leaders meeting with white supremacists and arguing with the Southern Poverty Law Center about the nature of their campaign. Are immigrants from Latin America a “threat�? to black communities? Should Mexican-Americans and African-Americans work together because of their shared minority status? Is this simply an issue where some African-American community leaders agree with the KKK? Who knows? The point is that immigration is once again framed as a political drama that both revolves around immigrants and simultaneously ignores them. Like so many other flashpoints in our current political world, immigration has largely been turned into a symbol.

The role of corporations and their demand for cheap labor has also been largely pushed outside the storyline of immigration. The recent move by anti-immigration groups in North Carolina to protest companies suspected of hiring illegal aliens ("Immigration activists target employers" The News and Observer) highlights how various groups, both on the left and the right, have tried to add an economic angle to the political story of immigration. Yet the failure of this sub-plot to make it into the national debate suggests that certain aspects of the story are simply less palatable to media corporations and their audiences than others. Additionally, the way that this story pops up when it is supposedly outside the mainstream story of immigration reminds us that maintaining the coherency of a story—and this is true for political stories as well as stories about national identity—requires constantly policing its boundaries. Because people, things, and ideas simply refuse to act in the ways we want. They rarely follow the channels we’ve laid out in our narratives. For immigration, this means that laws or no laws, people will continue to move around the globe and across national boundaries. The fence that is supposed to neatly divide the Mexican desert from the U.S. desert will require maintenance. And ideas, which have never respected borders, will continue to move around our world.

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Jeff Manuel is a PhD Student in History at the University of Minnesota and a member of the IHRC Advisory Council. His research focuses on media, politics, and culture in the modern United States.
Contact Information: manu0014@umn.edu

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While these economic arguments surrounding immigration are appealing in part because they provide the empirical evidence for countering claims that “immigrants steal American jobs,�? they can also make the historian of migration a bit queasy. Historically, the free market has consistently been invoked as the natural rationale for bringing in foreign labor. While immigrants from across the world benefited from the opportunity to work in American factories and in other jobs, business leaders’ notion of the “free market�? also meant that at times immigrant workers were used to weaken unions or lower the wage standard. Today, when a free market scholar such as Jacob invokes efficiency one has to wonder to what extent she is using shorthand for “finding the cheapest labor possible.�? Similarly, guest worker programs have the potential to function as a means of regulating immigration in a manner that benefits both undocumented immigrants and their employers – but only if these guest worker programs allow workers the right to negotiate the conditions of their employment, to redress poor treatment, and to join unions and other organizations (by way of snide comment, it would be nice if American citizens had these rights as well).

Switching gears…an interesting article from the Anchorage Daily News [link] looks at the relationship between Mormon missionaries and Anchorage, Alaska’s growing Hmong population. As the article notes, “For the young and converted, taking on Mormon beliefs is often bound up with a desire to fit into American society, and to succeed.�? This echoes the argument of the anthropologist, Aihwa Ong, who documented in her book Buddha is Hiding, the manner in which Christian agencies intervened in the lives of Asian refugees seeking to resettle in the United States. Ong points out that refugees first encounter Christian missionaries and social workers when they are still in refugee camps, and this connection continues to the United States, informing the manner in which refugees are socially assimilated to American life. To some refugees, Christianity offers a strategy for social incorporation, albeit a strategy that forces them to make cultural choices that can be at odds with their traditions.

Finally, an article in the Houston Chronicle [link] calls attention to a creative means of overcoming language difficulties, in a manner that benefits both tourists and immigrants. San Francisco is piloting a program where non-English speakers will have instant access to a translator via a toll free number. These translators will be available to help non-English speakers communicate with municipal agencies, as well as to connect with businesses that agreed to help fund the program. Maybe the market is not so bad after all…

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Andy Urban is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Minnesota, and a member of the IHRC Advisory Council. His research focuses on Irish and Chinese domestic servants in the late-nineteenth century United States.
Contact Information: urba0090@umn.edu

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An article in the Wall Street Journal (“Uphill Climb: Registering Hispanics to Vote�?) examines efforts to register Hispanic voters for the 2006 election and the presidential election in 2008. As the article notes, many immigrants from Mexico and Central America are primarily concerned with navigating the hurdles of naturalization, with voting coming as an after-thought. A remarkable 9.4 million Hispanics living in the United States are eligible to become citizens and vote, a number that could dramatically alter the political landscape and the manner in which the two main parties tailor their messages. In 2004, while President Bush failed to capture the majority of the Hispanic vote, the Democrats received a smaller proportion of the total vote then they had in the two previous elections. Younger Hispanic voters, in part politicized by rallies and anti-immigrant rhetoric, are expected to vote more solidly Democrat. As has been the case throughout the United States’ history, unions and community network groups – ostensibly non-partisan due to their non-profit status – will take the main responsibility for organizing Hispanic citizens to vote.

Providing context to the previous article, a recent piece in the Dallas Morning News ("Mexican, American - or both?") attempts to explain why Mexicans living in the United States have not aggressively pursued United States citizenship. One reason is that Mexican law allows Mexicans living abroad to vote in national elections. Perhaps a deeper reason why Mexicans who have lived in the United States for multiple decades, yet do not seek to become citizens, has its roots in the cultural sense of belonging. Although legal citizenship may not require sole allegiance to the English language and a withdrawal from the politics of an immigrant’s homeland, cultural forces typically attempt to frame citizenship in such a manner. Legal citizenship in the United States is often viewed as a practical measure for Mexicans, but one that has little meaning in terms of becoming assimilated. As a Mexican American businessman in Dallas commented, “I don't think it is so easy to change to a citizenship one doesn't really feel. Very few do it with conviction; they do it for migratory reasons.�?

______________________________________

Andy Urban is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Minnesota, and a member of the IHRC Advisory Council. His research focuses on Irish and Chinese domestic servants in the late-nineteenth century United States.
Contact Information: urba0090@umn.edu

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In statements made upon signing the bill, the president continues a rhetorical strategy that walks a tightrope between liberal and conservative views on immigration reform by claiming a middle ground that links border security and terrorism and ignores the underlying social and economic issues that undergird the ongoing national debates on immigration reform: "It's what the people in this country want," Bush said. "They want to know that we are modernizing the border so we can better secure the border." (Bush signs homeland security bill). What he also fails to acknowledge is the international disdain for the U.S. precipitated by this extreme measure that threatens to strain not only U.S.-Mexico relations (U.S. Border Fence Plan Upsets Mexicans), but the U.S.’s reputation throughout Latin America and the rest of the world. Though the total number of deaths of immigrants crossing the border extra-legally was down from 446 to 426 this past year, numerous news reports noted the potential of the law’s passage to have deathly consequences for immigrants who, as a result of the new wall, are likely to be forced to try evermore dangerous routes through the desert to cross into the U.S. (Migrant deaths down along border).

Perhaps due to the inability of national leaders to provide leadership by finding a middle ground in the debate and passing legislation representing the broad range of perspectives, new strategies have emerged at the local level to try and address the controversial issue. Like the debates in Congress, local enforcement initiatives in Carpentersville, Illinois and Escondido, California, expose a seemingly irreconcilable social divide that raises more questions than they answer—questions that are not easily addressed if looked at only through the lens of enforcement. This is especially true, when legislation like those in these initiatives seem to be driven by a desire to return to an era preceding this last great wave of immigration. Both communities passed legislation this past week making it a crime for landlords to rent to undocumented immigrants. The Carpentersville initiative takes enforcement to a new level by including provisions that punish businesses and landlords who employ, do business with or rent to undocumented immigrants. Needless to say, local commercial interests are not supportive of the ordinance, and believe that it will hurt the village’s financial standing in a variety of ways (Concerns Grow Over Village's Immigration Ordinance). In both cities, the ordinances sparked great controversy about the “inhumanity�? of such restrictions. In Escondido, a city of 142,000 where 42% of the population is Latino, “residents, businesses and city officials can file written complaints with the city if they suspect a landlord is renting to illegal immigrants. Complaints based ‘solely or primarily on the basis of national origin, ethnicity, or race shall be deemed invalid,’ the ordinance says.�? In contrast, the mayor of nearby National City declared the city an immigrant sanctuary last week. (Escondido council OKs immigration ordinance).

Rapid demographic change has obliged many regions of the country that were once primarily bi-racial or racially homogenous to reflect on the social and cultural changes occurring around them. In some parts of Georgia, where the racial divide has traditionally been black and white, the enormous influx of Latino immigrants, has resulted in tension between these two communities as they compete for jobs and confront media stereotypes and ignorance about each other despite a shared history of racial discrimination from mainstream society (A Racial Rift That Isn’t Black and White). Whether it is in Baptist churches in Georgia or in the Church of Latter Day Saints in Utah, in religious leaders across the country are discovering that they have an important role to play in facilitating respectful and cohesive relationships within congregations that are becoming increasingly diverse. For congregations like the LDS, the changing population is to be embraced, not shunned. "Latinos will represent more than 50 percent in the LDS Church by the year 2020" (After a 'culture of continuity). Unlike many places in the country where intense xenophobia has emerged due to rapid change, an otherwise conservative Utah has, until now, mostly welcomed new arrivals with open arms. However, some of the socially progressive policies they have adopted like driving privilege cards and in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants are under attack by the local Minutemen chapter (Immigrants turn Utah into mini-melting pot).

It’s fairly clear that we can’t create the world we want to live in by legislative decree alone. Though policy is the purview of politicians, we must be mindful that they should be taking the lead from those they represent and not get mired down by myopic media sound bites and the next election on the horizon. Bridges connect, walls divide. The legal and material questions at stake in the immigration debate are worth our most serious consideration; so, too, are the kind of culture and society we create as we redefine ourselves in relation to others through this process.
____________________________________________________

Louis Mendoza
Associate Professor
Department of Chicano Studies Chair
University of Minnesota
19 Scott Hall
72 Pleasant Street, Minneapolis 55455
Office: 612-624-8031
Email: lmendoza@umn.edu

Visit us on the Web: http://www.ihrc.umn.edu
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The New York Times describes Congress’s recent bill to allow for $1.2 billion to be allocated to the Department of Homeland Security, which will use the money to build a 700-mile fence and a “so-called virtual fence made up of cameras and sensors�? along the United States-Mexico border (Lawmakers Agree to Spend $1.2 Billion on Tightening Border). Absent from this article, and perhaps from Congressional discussions on the border, is whether the fence will be more effective in preventing immigrants from entering the country, or will it simply make crossings more dangerous. Robert Frost’s poetic statement that “good fences make good neighbors,�? has often been misinterpreted. A deeper reading of the poem reveals that “good fences�? allow neighbors to avoid confronting the issues that they mutually must address.

Locally, Governor Tim Pawlenty and other Republicans in Minnesota have alleged that undocumented immigrants are illegally voting in elections, and have proposed measures to require voters to show picture identification when voting (State Republicans turn spotlight on immigrants). According to Pawlenty, 32 non-citizen immigrants have registered to vote in elections since 2004 and 11 have actually voted. The DFL has accused Pawlenty of using this as an election-year “gimmick,�? and point out that 32 voters represent 0.00103 percent of registered voters in the state. One might add that the Republican Party’s recent involvement in various incidents of disenfranchisement in national elections hardly makes it the moral stalwart when it comes to fair democratic processes.

Also of local interest, the Homeland Securtiy Department recently declared Liberia to be stabilized, meaning that Liberians living in the United States will lose their temporary protected status as refugees. The Twin Cities have one of the largest Liberian populations in the country, and many seem to think that the designation of Liberia as being “stable�? is a bit premature (Many Liberians to lose their status to stay in the U.S.). The capital, Monrovia, is still without electricity or running water and displays many of the lasting effects of the Civil War that killed more then 250,000 people in that country. An interesting article in the Liberian Times takes a more historical look at the significance of the return of Liberians living abroad. The article notes how the intial colonizers of Liberia, freed African slaves from the United States, were at odds culturally and otherwise with the native inhabitants. The article speculates whether Liberian emigres returning with greater capital, education, and experience might be greeted with similar hostility (Liberia: Back to Africa).

From the “sick to the stomach�? department, an Indiana University editorial rightly denounces conservative student groups at Michigan State and the University of Michigan that have created a “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day,�? where students hold a contest to see who can capture a student pretending to be an “illegal�? immigrant quickest ('Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day' ). Yuck. To end on a positive note, there are people out there doing more creative and positive things in regards to immigration. A recent exhibit that opened in Arizona displays photos taken along the border. Artists with the “Border Film Project�? distributed 600 disposable cameras to would-be immigrants in Northern Mexico, as well as to Minutemen border “volunteers�? in Arizona (Arizona photo show snaps immigration in the raw). The resulting photos literally show two sides of the issue, and the stark desert terrain that separates them. The exhibit will be on display in Phoenix until late-January at which point it will be travelling nationally. Let’s hope it makes it to Minnesota.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Andy Urban is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Minnesota, and a member of the IHRC Advisory Council. His research focuses on Irish and Chinese domestic servants in the late-nineteenth century United States.
Contact Information: urba0090@umn.edu

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In the New York Times, a story about the genealogical search for the
descendants of fifteen-year old Annie Moore, the first immigrant to arrive
at Ellis Island, graced the front page. Born in County Cork, Ireland, Moore
landed in New York on January 1, 1892. It was opening day for the
immigration station, and Moore's arrival was met with pomp and circumstance.
The superintendent of immigration for the port of New York himself presented
Moore with a $10 gold piece, and Moore was featured in the local news.
Although Ellis Island fell into disrepair after it closed in 1954, renewed
interest in European immigration and its role in "making" America
contributed to the station's massive renovation and celebrated reopening as
a National Monument in 1990.

Consequently, Moore has been celebrated in "story and song" as the first of
12 million immigrants to arrive at Ellis Island. A bronze statue of Moore,
with suitcase in hand and holding her hat in the harbor breeze, graces the
grounds of the island and is passed by 2 million visitors to the site each
year. See "First Through Gates of Ellis I., She Was Lost. Now She's Found"
and the tribute to Moore on the Ellis Island website

Although another Annie Moore had long been considered to be the iconic
immigrant, recent genealogical research uncovered the true identity of the
famous woman. And the details of her life have only increased the mythology
surrounding her. She lived the "typical hardscrabble immigrant life," a
genealogist explained. "She sacrificed herself for future generations." The
professions of her descendants, who include an investment banker and a
Ph.D., are cited as proof that Annie's family was able to achieve the
American dream.

Across the continent, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about Hisayo
Yoshino, another immigrant woman pioneer, who arrived at Angel Island as a
picture bride from Japan in 1912. Yoshino was not the first person to arrive
at Angel Island. That person remains a mystery. Historians are just
beginning to research the rich and diverse history of immigration through
Angel Island, where over one million immigrants from around the world
arrived in the United States. Indeed, the story in the Chronicle reported on
efforts by historians (including myself) and the Angel Island Immigration
Station Foundation to recover the stories of immigrants who spent time on
the island. Angel Island is just now undergoing a massive renovation and
preservation effort, twenty years after Ellis Island was similarly
preserved. See "An effort to keep memories alive; Angel Island: Future museum puts out the call for information about the West's second-largest immigrant group -- 60,000 Japanese"

Reading these two different newspaper stories about Ellis Island and Angel
Island raises a number of questions for me. Why is there so little known
about Angel Island in comparison to its counterpart in New York? Why are
immigrants like Annie Moore memorialized in song, guidebooks, and statues
while we are just beginning to learn about the experiences of someone like
Hisayo Yoshino?

Much of the answer lies in the fact that Ellis Island has largely come to
represent America's history of welcoming and integrating European
immigrants. The museum itself ­ reborn during a period of ethnic revival in
the 1970s and 1980s ­ is a celebration of white ethnic identity. Visitors
can research their immigrant ancestry and contribute to the immigrant "wall
of honor."

On the other hand, the two largest groups of immigrants arriving on Angel
Island during its operation from 1910-1940 were Chinese (175,000) and
Japanese (60,000). Like other Asian immigrants, both groups were targets of
race-based immigration laws that prohibited or largely restricted their
admission into the United States. While the vast majority of immigrants
arriving at Ellis Island spent only a few hours in the processing center,
Asians were subjected to much greater scrutiny, often leading to detentions
that numbered in the days and weeks. Hisayo Yoshino was detained in the
medical hospital on Angel Island for three weeks. She left the island to
enter a life of hardship on the farms of California. During World War Two,
she and her family were forcibly evacuated and interned with other Japanese
Americans. These hardships, combined with the knowledge that they were not
welcomed in the United States, discouraged many Asian immigrants from
sharing their stories of Angel Island, even with their children and
grandchildren.

In short, Angel Island's history, is a hard pill for Americans to swallow.
Instead of reminding us of America's promise, like Ellis Island often does,
it forces us to confront American racism. Yet its story is just as important
for us to remember.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Erika Lee
Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of History
University of Minnesota
614 Social Sciences Building
267 19th Ave South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
work: 612/624-9569
fax: 612/624-7096

Visit us on the Web: http://www.ihrc.umn.edu
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It is now clear that U.S. immigration policy is dramatically different than it was before the attacks. President Bush had identified immigration reform as one of his top priorities upon his inauguration in January, 2001. He even traveled to Mexico to discuss immigration with President Vicente Fox in February, 2001. Just seven months later, however, the terrorist attacks "exposed major holes" in immigration enforcement, and immigration became IHincreasingly identified as a national security issue. There would be no support for immigration reform until 2006. "Migrant reform: 9/11's role debated" (Arizona Republic)

While Congress has not passed any major new immigration laws in the past five years, several changes have been put into place at the administrative level. The government's surveillance of immigrants already in this country has increased. In December of 2002, the Justice Department implemented SEVIS – the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System – which requires all international students and exchange visitors to register with the federal government with their names, addresses, majors, course load, graduation date, etc. and update that information regularly. The Immigration and Naturalization Service undertook a separate registration of men from 24 (mostly Muslim) countries. They are required to be fingerprinted, photographed, and interviewed by the government annually. At the same time, deportations increased. This year, the Department of Homeland Security sharply increased the number of workplace raids. "Immigration Movement Struggles to Regain Momentum Built in Spring Marches" (New York Times)
Equally dramatic was the transfer of all immigration services and border enforcement procedures to the newly-created Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on March 1, 2003, a move that critics argued would result in the conflation of all immigration as a security threat.

Within this context, the debate over immigration policy flared up again in 2005. The concern over the lax enforcement that allowed terrorists into the country was transferred to Mexican immigration. In December, 2005, the House passed an immigration bill that increased border security and also made illegal residence in the country a federal crime rather than a civil infraction. The bill inspired hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their supporters to call for comprehensive immigration reform, including the legalization of illegal immigrants. See
"Democracy at Work" from the IHRC blog, March 30, 2006.
The Senate negotiated a bi-partisan comprehensive immigration reform bill that included a guest-worker program and a path to citizenship in addition to tighter border security.

But as we enter mid-term elections, comprehensive immigration reform is all but dead, and analysts are questioning whether the "fledgling immigrant rights movement" can transform itself into a political force. While labor day rallies failed to garner an expected high turnout, House Republicans announced that they would "move swiftly to pass legislation…to build 700 miles of fencing along the Mexican border" to stop illegal immigrants. See "House Republicans Will Push for 700 Miles of Fencing on Mexico Border" New York Times. and "Immigration Overhaul Takes a Back Seat as Campaign Season Begins" New York Times.

On the five-year anniversary of 9/11, America has been split into two camps on immigration once again. And it seems as if the camp that views immigration as a threat is currently winning.

______________________________________

Erika Lee
Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of History
University of Minnesota
614 Social Sciences Building
267 19th Ave South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
work: 612/624-9569
fax: 612/624-7096

Visit us on the Web: http://www.ihrc.umn.edu/
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The U.N. Report is available online and it’s well worth reading. So are the follow-up reports that link local stories around the world to the report’s main themes: http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2006/english/introduction.html

Specialists have long known about the “feminization�? of migration worldwide. Once less than a third of the mobile, women today make up almost half the total of the 180 million people who live outside their countries of birth. While many women work for low wages in service jobs or in factories, about a third are instead highly educated participants in a global market for professional and technical workers.

What is surprising about the U.N. report is the upbeat view it takes of this change. While acknowledging problems such as women’s invisibility to policy makers and the problems of trafficking and low wages, the U.N. report portrays women migrants as major economic players in the global economy.

The report suggests that the savings that women send home collectively constitute important international investments. These remittances far surpass the amounts rich nations offer poor nations as development aid. And remittances—some economic historians now tell us--explain how over the course of a century some of the most important countries of emigration (such as Ireland and Italy) now number among the global rich.

That’s not the portrait of immigrant women or remittances we’ve typically seen recently in either U.S. or European debates about migration.

In the U.S. both restrictionists and advocates consistently view immigrant women and their children as poor. For restrictionists, they are drains on welfare, health and education services not threats to American women’s jobs. For more sympathetic observers, immigrant women need greater protection to prevent their abuse, whether by criminal traffickers or exploitative employers.

In Europe, reports about immigrant women also focus on abuse but more often focus on their vulnerability to male tyrants, especially in Moslem families, and especially in the form of “honor killings�? of daughters who reject arranged marriages. See for example: Deaths of South Asian women highlights tensions with immigrant communities in Italy


This week, California newspapers generally responded to the U.N. report by locating and speaking with immigrant women who work hard for low wages and who send remittances home to support their children.
Immigrant women make up 95 million of total migrant population
Report: Female immigrants earn less, but send more home

Predictably, the women interviewed were all poor Mexican women--not female engineers from Iraq or Bulgaria. Still, their individual voices were confident and clear. These are among the most detailed and upbeat portraits of articulate and savvy female immigrants to appear in the American media in quite some time.

Is the future economic development of the world increasingly in female hands? The immigrant women interviewed, unsurprisingly, are mainly concerned with their own children and their own families. Still, it’s a possibility worth pondering.
________________________________________________________________

Donna R. Gabaccia Director, Immigration History Research Center 311
Elmer L. Andersen Library 222-21st Avenue South Minneapolis, MN 55455
612-625-5573 612 625-4800 FAX: 612-626-0018 Email: drg@umn.edu Visit us on
the Web: http://www.ihrc.umn.edu/ To receive email notices about events at
the IHRC: http://www.ihrc.umn.edu/about/e-notice.htm

The controversies that swirl around Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, remind us that (for better or worse) the web puts specialists and amateurs on equal footing. Here, I’ll distinguish three kinds of webpages—blogs, advocacy pages, and scholarly sites. The blogs deliver passionate opinions, often in “just-folks�? style, replete with typos and amusing screen names. The advocacy pages offer a more reasoned voice while trying to provide answers: they’ll provide you with the information supporting whatever answer they advocate. The scholarly sites rarely offer answers; typically, too, they offer more information than the average student, journalist, or potential voter wants to digest.

Since I’m an academic and a specialist, I obviously encourage people seeking information to take the time to think about this complicated issue and to recognize that more information typically means no easy answers. This week, at least, I’d recommend going first to the Migration Policy Institute’s Immigration Information Resource http://www.migrationinformation.org/
and then to the Social Science Research Council’s forum on “Border Battles�?: http://borderbattles.ssrc.org/ Both try to situate the American debates in a broader context.

By all means, explore the fascinating world of the bloggers if you want to see the passion that immigration generates. (But prepared to invest some time in this exercise, too: Googling “Immigration blog�? will give you 360,000 options.) By all means, too, visit websites that advocate. Most readers will recognize advocacy as the main purpose of pages like liberals.com or Peter Brimelow’s VDare webpage (where the current lead story blames Mexican immigrants for rising cruelty to animals). A more complicated case is the Center for Immigration Studies which advocates a “low-immigration vision which seeks fewer immigrants.�? Advocacy sites provide much information; almost all their interpretations of that information can be, and are, disputed.

Here’s the important point: rant, raves and easy answers are unlikely to resolve the current debates about immigration. If there were easy answers, wouldn’t they have been found and implemented long ago? What I advocate is this: keep on looking and keep on thinking!

Nebraskans who think immigration is new to their state have forgotten that in 1870 a quarter of Nebraska’s population was foreign-born (in 2000, it was under 2%) Now low unemployment rates in Nebraska (3.81%) are again attracting foreigners. Many are from Mexico, and most entered the U.S. without authorization. Yes, many Nebraska conservatives—like their counterparts elsewhere--want more stringent enforcement of the borders. But their own, conservative president, George W. Bush, was there to tell them about the positive impact of foreign workers on the economy.

Immigrants work in large numbers in Nebraska’s meat-packing and food-processing plants. Much of the food they process is headed south, as part of Nebraska’s growing export trade with Mexico. In a state concerned about the loss of its farming population—and long worried about losing a Congressional seat—immigration has meant a net population gain and economic revitalization. (Richard Dooling, “Immigration Beefs up Nebraska,�? New York Times, June 11, 2006).

Only a day after Bush traveled to Nebraska, UC Berkeley and Tulane University professors released their own report, claiming that a quarter of construction workers, and as high as 45 percent of all reconstruction workers in hurricane-devastated New Orleans are Hispanics. Again many are foreigners without proper documents. Their wages are lower and their working conditions more dangerous than American workers’. Yet the mayor of New Orleans suggested already last fall that Mexicans were “over-running the city.�? Perhaps President Bush needs to visit conservatives in Louisiana, too. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/us/nationalspecial/08workers.html

What states like Nebraska and cities like New Orleans need is a national immigration policy that acknowledges a simple fact: in many parts of the country economic growth does not mean high-tech employment. It means a strong demand for manual laborers. They need a national immigration policy that respects manual work and workers.

As long as U.S. immigration policy criminalizes the manual laborers that economic revitalization demands, the country will face the “problem�? of “illegal�? workers who endanger themselves and the wages and working conditions of immigrant and American workers alike.

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

This week, newspapers were full of stories about love, marriage, and childrearing among migrants. Suddenly, “mixed status families,�? “birthright citizenship�? and “family reunification�? have all joined the already long list of problems supposedly associated with immigration.

"'Mixed status' tears apart families" USA TODAY

"Change in laws could divide families" Houston Chronicle

Politicians have been quick to propose solutions—by denying citizenship to the American-born children of “illegal�? immigrants or by reducing the visas available to family members.

Unfortunately, changes in law that affect immigrants usually also affect citizens—and sometimes in surprising ways. In the nineteenth century, for example, Americans wanted “dependent�? wives and children to share the
citizenship of the man who headed their families. When an immigrant man decided to become a citizen, so did his foreign-born wife (whether or not she spoke English). Worse, when an American woman married a foreigner, even in the U.S., she lost her American citizenship.

Faced with the overwhelmingly male migrations of the late nineteenth century, the U.S. also very much wanted to encourage families to stay together. Every time Congress restricted the numbers of immigrants, it also
created loopholes to encourage family reunification.

The result? Almost half of the 500,000 visas available recently to prospective immigrants are claimed by those with “family-sponsorship.�? Roughly 150,000 remain for persons with desired skills and professions. Almost none of those visas are open to unskilled workers, who then enter the country “illegally�?--without visas. Meanwhile, another 400,000 immigrants enter because they are exempt from visa restrictions. Is this unfair? Perhaps not. That group is made up entirely of the spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens.

Germany has no birthright citizenship and it has historically had very strict requirements for naturalization of foreigners. Is this a possible model for the U.S? Millions of German-speaking grandchildren of the “guest workers�? of the 1960s have never been in the country of which they are citizens and do not even speak its language. Germans have actually eased naturalization requirement in recent years, fearing the consequences of alienation and exclusion of its sizeable “alien�? population of German-born non-citizens.

When law, love, and families entangle—as they inevitably do in immigration policy—we should be skeptical of easy solutions. Whatever the proposal to fix the “problem�? caused by immigrants will have consequences for citizens,
too.
_______________________________________________________________________
Contributor Contact Information:

Donna R. Gabaccia Rudolph J. Vecoli Professor of Immigration History
Research and Director Immigration History Research Center
311 Elmer L. Andersen Library
222-21st Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
612-625-5573
612 625-4800
FAX: 612-626-0018
Email: drg@umn.edu

On Monday, April, 17 Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue signed a sweeping immigration bill that may be among the toughest in the nation. The Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act requires all adults to demonstrate their legal status before seeking many state-administered benefits. It sanctions employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants and mandates that companies with state contracts check the immigration status of their employees. The law will also require police to check the immigration status of people they arrest to see if they face deportation orders. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, the law “to go into effect on July 1, 2007�? is believed to be the first comprehensive immigration package to make it through a statehouse this session. (Miami Herald “Georgia Governor signs immigration
bill" by Shannon McCaffrey AP)

The Georgia act is significant on several levels. First, it makes clear that in this current immigration debate, what happens in our state governments is just as important as what happens in our national capitol. In fact, local and state governments have historically used their own legislatures to spur the federal government into action. In the nineteenth century, California attempted to ban Chinese immigrants within its borders several times before the U.S. government reminded Sacramento that immigration was a federal, not a state, issue. Since the 1980s, states have taken an increasingly active role in monitoring immigrants within their jurisdictions, often with the assistance of the federal government. A little-known provision of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act established a system to train local law enforcement and correctional agencies to enforce federal immigration law in respect to aliens changed with an aggravated felony. And states, including Minnesota, want local law enforcement officers to play even greater roles in enforcing federal immigration laws. Secondly, the fact that a state like Georgia “which has historically attracted only small numbers of immigrants“ is now at the forefront of the immigration debate demonstrates how far reaching the issue has become. Lastly, the Georgia law also reflects a growing trend in the larger debate over immigration. Politicians are increasingly careful to avoid charges that they are "anti-immigrant," a label that can be a huge liability for law-makers trying to capture more of the Hispanic vote. Instead, they insist
that they only want the laws of the nation enforced. In signing the Georgia bill on Monday, Governor Perdue, a Republican, said: "I want to make this clear we are not, Georgia's government is not, and this bill is not, anti-immigrant. We simply believe that everyone who lives in our state needs to abide by our laws." Distinguishing between "good" legal immigrants and "bad" illegal immigrants is politically effective. But in this highly charged and nativist environment, I doubt that federal law enforcement officers or Georgia state administrators will be able to distinguish the "good" from the "bad." At the same signing ceremony, State Representative Melvin Everson seemed to conflate the illegal immigration problem (denounced by him as a "cancer") with all Spanish-speaking immigrants. "The last time I checked," Mr. Everson said, "America was the land of English, not Spanish." (New York Times “Georgia Enacts a Tough Law on Immigrants�? by The Associated Press April 18th 2006)

We can expect more states to pass similar laws. The Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act is a sign of times to come, especially if politicians in DC fail to pass comprehensive immigration reform. And even if they do, it is likely that laws like the Georgia one will have a more direct effect on immigrants in their everyday lives than any federal legislation.

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

_____________________
Erika Lee
Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of History
University of Minnesota
614 Social Sciences Building
267 19th Ave South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
work: 612/624-9569
fax: 612/624-7096

I have my doubts.

Street demonstrations are highly orchestrated and carefully planned events,
and they have a long history in the United States. Assessments of their
political impact have been decidedly mixed, however. Few commentators doubt
that the 1963 March on Washington (of half a million African Americans and
their supporters) contributed to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of
1965. By contrast, barrels of ink have been unable to resolve ongoing
debates about the impact on U.S. policy in Vietnam of the giant anti-war
protests of the 1960s and early 1970s. And, of course, more recently,
impressive demonstrations in the U.S. and around the world failed to
prevent the American invasion of Iraq.

This week’s large pro-immigration demonstrations began as Congress recessed
for two weeks, without having reached a compromise among many competing
proposals. Divisions within the Republican Party and sharp differences
between Republicans and Democrats in Congress resulted in the impasse.
(http://search.csmonitor.com/search_content/0410/p04s01-uspo.html )
Representatives with their eyes on the upcoming elections may not have the
incentive to compromise and reach agreement even when they return. American
politicians keep their eyes on the polls more than on the streets.

Nor can we be sure that protestors favored one legal reform or another.
Yes, Catholic prelates said they would go to jail rather than deny
assistance to the so-called “illegals,�? a reference to a House bill that
had still been under debate last week. And yes, immigrant advocacy groups
pointed to the political significance of the large marches.

Still, one looked in vain for the placards demanding “amnesty,�? a
“temporary worker program�? or even “Green cards for all.�?

The signs and flags that most demonstrators carried suggested they wanted
more than a change in immigration law. Marchers demanded dignity. They
demanded recognition for who they are. As one marcher in St. Paul said,
"We're peaceful people. We're honest people. And we're helping the economy
grow." (http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/14305785.htm)

Whatever the fall-out in Washington, demonstrators accomplished something
very significant. They pushed aside the ever-present and shadowy figure of
the threatening, criminal “illegal.�? When Congress renews its debates in
two weeks, it will be harder for Americans to believe that 11 million
criminals threaten their security.

Millions of flag-waving, pro-American, hardworking, and very ordinary
people on the streets of American cities reminded the country what
“illegals�? look like.

And what they look are immigrants. Mothers. Fathers. Workers. Neighbors.
Voters. Dreamers. Us.
_______________________________________________________________________
Contributor Contact Information:

Donna R. Gabaccia Rudolph J. Vecoli Professor of Immigration History
Research and Director Immigration History Research Center
311 Elmer L. Andersen Library
222-21st Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
612-625-5573
612 625-4800
FAX: 612-626-0018
Email: drg@umn.edu

In a country, and a political party, that celebrates hard work, many
Republicans nevertheless reject Bush’s proposal.
"Senate Deal on Immigration Falters" (New York Times)
"Bush pushes to make illegals temporary workers" (Pioneer Press)

As an historian, I’m intrigued by this debate, and especially by debaters’
labels for the Bush proposal. Most critics refer to it as a “guest worker�?
program. That, of course, is the name Germany gave workers (Gastarbeiter)
recruited from southern and southeastern Europe and Turkey in the 1960s and
early 1970s.

These guestworkers made Germany’s economy the strongest in Europe.

Still, when the program stopped in 1973, many Germans were shocked to
discover guest workers had become permanent residents. They lived in
families, they had children, and they wanted to stay. It’s been a source of
controversy for three decades.

But it also provided one of the strongest arguments for current European
Union policy on labor migration. These now allow for completely free
movement across national boundaries for all citizens of EU member states.
Neither supporters nor critics in the contemporary debate turn to the
American past for a name for Bush’s program. Yet the U.S. once had a large
program that actively recruited Mexican workers to come to work temporarily
in the U.S.

It was called the bracero program, and it functioned between 1942 and 1963.

It’s interesting to remember how hard the U.S. once had to work to recruit
temporary Mexican workers. Before 1965, there were no numerical limits on
Mexican immigration. Perhaps potential workers still worried about what had
happened during the Great Depression when California, for example, put
Mexican workers onto railroad cars, along with their citizen children, to
ship them back to Mexico.
See: U.S. urged to apologize for 1930s deportations (Pioneer Press)

It’s even more interesting to recall why the bracero program ended. Almost
no one liked it. Employers preferred to do the hiring themselves, and not
depend on Mexican and U.S. government to deliver their labor supply.
Workers faced deportation if they objected to contract violations. The
A.F.L.-C.I.O believed the bracero program undermined working conditions for
all workers and made unionization almost impossible.

In short, programs for temporary workers are not foreign to the U.S.—as use
of the term guest worker implies. Nor are they new.

Neither supporters nor critics of Bush’s proposal want to call it a new
“bracero program�? because memory of the failures of that program are still
fresh.

Temporary worker programs are not the only way to guarantee that jobs in
the U.S. find workers willing to cross borders to take them. Ironically,
when the European Union abandoned temporary labor programs it sought to
create a freer, less regulated Euroepan-wide labor market. By contrast,
here in North America, under NAFTA, goods and capital move freely across
national boundaries; human beings do not.
_______________________________________________________________________
Contributor Contact Information:

Donna R. Gabaccia Rudolph J. Vecoli Professor of Immigration History
Research and Director Immigration History Research Center
311 Elmer L. Andersen Library
222-21st Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
612-625-5573
612 625-4800
FAX: 612-626-0018
Email: drg@umn.edu

Instead, the Catholic Church joined with unions, non-profit organizations, students and Latino organizations to mobilize protestors who were angered by proposals to make unauthorized presence in the US a felony, and to expand definitions of smuggling to include anyone who assists an undocumented individual. Police estimated that 500,000 individuals turned out in Los Angeles, and 200-300,000 in Chicago.

The day after the Los Angeles march four Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee joined Democrats in approving a bill that removed the most punitive provisions and maintained many of the components of the bipartisan McCain-Kennedy bill that had the support of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The bill would allow undocumented immigrants to apply for a six-year guest worker visa if they meet several criteria: employment, payment of a $1,000 fine and back taxes, passing a criminal background screen and demonstration of English proficiency.

Despite the euphoria of the protesters, their victory may be short-lived. The Senate is sharply divided over immigration reform, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has introduced an enforcement-only bill that should lead to contentious debate between and among Republicans and Democrats in the weeks ahead.

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1] The "Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005," sponsored by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), would also build a high-tech fence along sections of the southern border, facilitate the enforcement of federal immigration law by local officials, and require detention of all non-Mexican unauthorized immigrants apprehended at or between official ports of entry.

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Contributer: Katherine Fennelly
E-mail: kfennelly@hhh.umn.edu

Katherine Fennelly is Professor of Public Affairs at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute, University of Minnesota. During the fall of 2003 she was the Willy Brandt Visiting Professor of International Migration and Ethnic Relations at Malmö University in Sweden. Her research, teaching and outreach interests include immigration and public policy, leadership in the public sector, the human rights of immigrants and refugees in the United States, and the preparedness of communities and public institutions to adapt to demographic changes. Recent projects and publications focus on the integration of immigrants in rural, Midwestern communities in the United States.

It contains evidence of both the growing prevalence of transnational migratory patterns and the resilience of the nation in today’s world, and it reminds us of the often fracturing nature, on a personal level, of the decision to exit one’s homeland.

Professional sports, perhaps more visibly than any other area, constitute an environment where international boundaries are often blurred beyond distinction. Examine the roster of any North American major league baseball team and you will find a polyglot of talent from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Korea, Japan, and Canada, along with a shrinking number of U.S.-born (including an even more dramatically shrinking contingent of African Americans, but that is another essay). In decades past, the relatively small number of such non-U.S. players would tend to become permanent American residents or citizens, but today that decision is much less the norm. And as the self-directed redistribution of players to represent native countries during the WBC showed, national attachments and the desire to bring pride to the homeland are core sentiments.

The transnational existence of professional athletes also carries implications for the international movement of money and puts the long-persistent phenomenon of immigrant remittances in a dramatic new light. With some superstars earning the equivalent of a sizable portion of their nation’s gross national product, they have the power to affect matters beyond the improvement of their own families’ living conditions. But history includes some tragic cases of these individuals and their resources falling prey to corruption and violence at home, perhaps none as sad as that of basketball star Manute Bol whose attempts to use his millions to thwart civil war in Sudan in the 1990s resulted in his imprisonment and eventual return to the U.S. as a penniless refugee (http://chud.com/forums/showthread.php?t=89941).

Of course, not all foreign born professional athletes in the U.S. live a transnational life, a point this news feature underscores with the example of Cuba’s Eddie Oroposa. His story calls attention to the often forgotten category of migrants known legally as asylees. Like refugees, people who seek asylum status are unable to live where they have been owing to a “well founded fear of persecution. The difference, however, is that refugees establish their status before resettling in the U.S. (or elsewhere); asylees do so after arriving here by whatever means and expressing their claim to asylum. (See Migration Policy Institute site for further definitions and demographics.)

In typical years, many more people are admitted to the U.S. as refugees than are granted asylum status, but the number for the latter still often reaches between 15,000-20,000. The establishment of policy on asylum seekers, like that of refugees, is a quite recent development. And similar to refugee policy, it owes its emergence and initial character to foreign policy objectives as much as, or more so than, humanitarian ideals. The decision of the U.S. government to provide legal residency – sanctuary, if you will – to those fleeing persecution was shaped substantially by Cold War wrangling with the Soviet Union and its satellite nations, including to a very significant degree Castro’s Cuba. Accepting people from these lands was tool of “warfare,�? a way to embarrass the enemy in the arena of world affairs.

While refugees and asylees of the latter half of the 20th Century were predominantly from Communist-controlled regions, this is far less true since the demise of the Soviet Union. Regardless of their origins, as Oroposa’s case illustrates, the athletes, musicians, writers, academics, and many others who have come here and chose to defect have faced an excruciating time of dislocation and uncertainty regarding those they left behind. And finally, this case also reminds us that migration in its many forms, be it through frequent transcontinental relocation in the free pursuit o f one’s profession or through the severing of ties to home, is first and foremost an individual experience, always with individual consequences.

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Contributer: Joel Wurl
E-mail: wurlx001@umn.edu

Joel Wurl is the head of research collections and Associate Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. where he has worked since 1985. He is an advisor to public programs, exhibits, and historical preservation projects and has presented and published research on several topics related to immigration and the preservation of documentary resources. He has led seminars and workshops on both archival and immigration-related topics and has spoken to a diverse array of community audiences on the immigrant experience in America and, particularly, in the state of Minnesota. Wurl was elected in 2002 to the Society of American Archivists council and has served the Midwest Archives Conference as a council member and as editor of its journal Archival Issues. He has also served as series editor for “North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories,�? an Internet-based publication effort produced by Alexander St. Press.

A century ago, Teddy Roosevelt worried about “race suicide.�? New immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were having more babies than “old stock,�? white American women with the result that the newcomers—viewed as too racially different from Americans to become good citizens--would soon outnumber them.

In our own times, demographers have been reporting that “minority�? would soon become “majority�? as a result of immigration. In New York City, as in several west coast and southwest cities, whites have been a minority since the 1980s.

Most Americans are very well aware that immigration is re-arranging the U.S. demographically. So why was the headline “Whites to be a Minority in N.Y. Soon�? newsworthy this week? (New York Times, March 7, 2006)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/nyregion/07census.html

The answer is that a recent Brookings Institution report focused on metropolitan regions, not just central cities. The suburbs, of New York, like many western and southwestern regions, also now attract large numbers of immigrants. If, as is often asserted, white Americans had fled to the suburbs to escape newcomers with darker skins, then their strategy is clearly not working. Minorities are following them. Like most reports on urban population dynamics, the New York Times made this a story about whites and immigrant minorities. But a careful reader would have learned a more complex story.

In recent years the black population of New York City, too, has been declining--for the first time in over a century.

It is too often forgotten that both black and white Americans claim deep roots in the U.S. and that both react to the arrival of newcomers. Over a decade ago, responding to a Times Magazine portrait of the “new face of America�? (in the form of an attractive coffee-colored young woman), Toni Morrison declared that immigrants made it in America “on the backs of blacks.�? (Dec. 2, 1993) http://www.time.com/time/community/morrisonessay.html

Immigrant minorities will not become majorities if they become white. But if, as Morrison suggests, becoming white means becoming “not-black,�? then cities, and indeed the country, will remain as troubled by race as it was under the old majority.
___________________________________________________________________

Contributor Contact Information:

Donna R. Gabaccia Rudolph J. Vecoli Professor of Immigration History
Research and Director Immigration History Research Center
311 Elmer L. Andersen Library
222-21st Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
612-625-5573
612 625-4800
FAX: 612-626-0018
Email: drg@umn.edu

The Twin Cities this week continues its discussions of Governor Pawlenty’s
proposals to encourage “legal�? immigration (especially of highly skilled,
educated, and entrepreneurial foreigners) while cracking down on “illegal�?
immigrants, who are disproportionately poor laborers whose labor is eagerly
sought in the construction, meat packing, agriculture and the
hotel/restaurant/ and cleaning industries. Specifically, the Minnesota
legislature will soon consider whether or not local police should begin to
enforce federal immigration law (see Pioneer Press “Today at the Capitol,�?
March 1, 2006).

Georgia--where estimates put the number of immigrants without proper visas
at 250,000—is taking a somewhat different approach. There, a State Senate
bill proposes to deny state benefits to undocumented adults and to use the
tax code to penalize employers who employ any workers without
documentation. (http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/13983851.htm)

Along the U.S./ Mexico border participants in “Minuteman Projects�? claim
they are “Americans doing the job that Congress won’t do.�?

Meanwhile, in California, where state voters in 1994 tried to prevent
immigrants without proper visas from using state welfare services, Cardinal
Roger M. Mahony, as quoted by a L.A. Times reporter, said that “he would
instruct his priests to defy legislation — if approved by Congress — that
would require churches and other social organizations to ask immigrants for
legal documentation before providing assistance.
(http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-me-mahony1mar01,1,3463213.story?co
ll=la-headlines-politics)

Whether fearful or supportive of immigrants, many American recognize that
federal immigration policy is “broken,�? “not working,�? or not being
enforced. But does that mean that the only solutions to this problem are to
found at the local level?

As an historian, I doubt it.

In the middle years of the nineteenth century it was the states, and not
the federal government, that determined most immigration policies. There
were few restrictions on human movement but when states imposed them it was
usually to drive off poor people or to prevent racial minorities from
moving into their areas.

Local control of immigration did mean that Americans welcomed the “legal�?
immigrants from Europe as unproblematic in the 1850s. On the contrary, that
decade saw the rise of a powerful movement and a new political party,
usually called the “Know-Nothings.�? These “Know-Nothings�? tried to convince
voters that immigrants were too influential and their power should be
limited by denying them basic rights, like land ownership and religious
freedom.

Rather than repeat the mistakes of the Know Nothings of the 1850s,
Americans today might want to devote careful thought to the kind of federal
immigration policy they would like to have—and then demand change from the
federal government.

____________________________________________________________

Contributor Contact Information:

Donna R. Gabaccia Rudolph J. Vecoli Professor of Immigration History
Research and Director Immigration History Research Center
311 Elmer L. Andersen Library
222-21st Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
612-625-5573
612 625-4800
FAX: 612-626-0018
Email: drg@umn.edu

If as scholars such as Liz Cohen have argued in recent years, citizenship and rights in the US are increasingly articulated through individuals and groups’ roles as consumers, immigrant protesters have keenly heeded this trend. By demonstrating that their positions as workers and consumers are integral to the US’s material well-being, immigrants used their absence from economic activities to show how they are part of the nation. This article ("Rallies held nationwide to show economic clout" The Star Tribune) also illustrates how many people around the world see the US’s response to undocumented immigration as being hypocritical in light of the US’s involvement in other aspects of globalization. In short, why is Wal-Mart privileged in being allowed to cross the Mexico-US border without hindrance, while human travelers are subject to myriad barriers and stigmatized as dangerous?

Critics of this week’s rallies have seemed to focus mainly on the symbolism of the events, and not the substance of the issues themselves. What garnered the most attention from critics was the fact that some of the demonstrators sang a version of the “Star-Spangled Banner�? in Spanish. Colorado Republican Tom Tancredo seemed to believe that the protests would backfire because of their sacrilegious symbolism, commenting that, “My guess is that Americans are going to say ‘What are those people doing waving all those other flags and what's this about changing the national anthem into Spanish?’�? ("Republican leader predicts immigration backlash" Reuters.com) For a more humorous and ironically accurate look at the significance of the “Star-Spangled Banner,�? Jacob Weisberg ("The Irrational Anthem" Slate.com) points out that barely anyone, native-born Americans included, really knows this bizarre and convoluted anthem.

On a more serious note, lest we forget what happens when patriotism, English-only politics, and public vigilance intersect, an article in the New York Times ("Mont. Governor Pardons 78 in Sedition Case" New York Times) looks at the recent posthumous pardon of German Americans in Montana who the state imprisoned during World War I because their loyalty had been called into suspicion. One can only hope that we take a more nuanced approach to what it means to be an “American�? in the present day.
_____________________________________________

Andy is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Minnesota, and a member of the IHRC Advisory Council. His research focuses on Irish and Chinese domestic servants in the late-nineteenth century United States.
Contact Information: urba0090@umn.edu