Migration, immigration and refugees today
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By:
Linda B. Glaser,
Arts Sciences Communications
May 8, 2016
Migration is one of the major forces shaping the world today, with more than 60 million displaced people.
“Never in history have we seen this many simultaneous displacements
across the globe and these people are not going home any time soon,”
says Mostafa Minawi, assistant professor of history and Himan Brown
Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow. “This is a global population
redistribution and it will hit us whether we like it or not.”
Although migration has always been a factor in world history, war,
civil unrest, economic dislocation, and climate change are combining to
create what some policymakers call “disposable” populations. “It’s in
our interest to study migration, to ask, what are the policies that are
uprooting populations?” says Maria Cristina Garcia, Howard A. Newman
Professor of American Studies. “What are the consequences for those who
are uprooted as well as for the host societies who are then going to
have to accommodate them?”
Syrians refugees are currently attracting a great deal of attention,
as a visible by-product of regional power struggles and a reminder to
Americans of the threat ISIL terrorism poses, but Garcia emphasizes the
importance of remembering that there are also migrant crises in Eritrea,
Burundi, Libya and elsewhere.
Forced migration issues are the most urgent to address, and the most
difficult, given the inconsistencies, inefficiencies, and inadequacies
of global refugee and immigration policies. From 2010-2013, the
Institute for Social Sciences conducted a collaborative project
examining Immigration: Settlement, Integration and Membership.
Participants included political scientists Michael Jones-Correa and
Mary Katzenstein and anthropologist Vilma Santiago-Irizarry, as well as
historians Richard Bensel, Derek Chang, and Garcia. The group examined
labor markets, formation of policy, new gateway cities, and demographic
shifts across the country.
“Students enroll in immigration courses because they are troubled by
what they read in the news. They want to understand who’s migrating to
the US, and what the appropriate response should be to that migration,"
says Garcia. "They think the anti-immigrant discourses are unique to
their day. But when they study history, when they examine migration and
policy over a longer period of time, they see patterns emerge. History,
and the humanities in general, remind us to look for those patterns, to
look for the similarities and the disjunctures, to see what conclusions
we might reach.”
“Quantitative science looks at large numbers of people, what factors
push lots of people to places and what factors pull them to a place," says Leslie Adelson, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German Studies. "For
example, Germany now has big pull factors and Syria has big push
factors. What humanists bring are the heightened attention to blind
spots in categories we use in analysis and a heightened attention to how
perceptions are formed and how they can be changed in productive and
creative ways. Not just creating empathy for migrants, but acknowledging
existing bonds for and among migrants, and forging new bonds.”
