EpiCenter
EpiCenterThe Center wishes to express its gratitude to the United States Institute of Peace for its support of this important and timely undertaking. We will be providing readers of "EpiCenter" periodic updates on the progress of the USIP project.
PEW PROJECT ENTERS SECOND PHASE
Legislative proposals currently pending in the U.S. Congress are likely to issue in important changes in U.S. immigration and refugee/asylum policy. For the most part, the debate engendered by these reform proposals has focused on the advisability of establishing more restrictive ceilings on the numbers of immigrants and refugees to be permitted entry to the United States. Considerable controversy has also surrounded provisions of the proposed reform legislation that would, among other things, strengthen existing employer sanction and other measures intended to staunch the flow of undocumented migrants to the U.S., authorize immigration authorities to summarily deny entry to would-be asylum-seekers, and roll back the procedural due process protections currently available to those seeking adjudication of their asylum claims. Conspicuously absent from the animated debate surrounding the proposed federal immigration reform legislation is the question of the linkage between these comparatively more narrow aspects of U.S. immigration and refugee/asylum policy and other dimensions of U.S. policy that impinge upon international migration either directly or indirectly, by affecting conditions in sending countries.
Making clear the connections between these seemingly-disparate dimensions of U.S. migration policy has been a key objective of the Center's "Migration Policy in Global Perspective" project, being funded by The Pew Global Stewardship Initiative. For the first phase of this project (now concluded), the Center commissioned a series of papers addressing various determinants of international migration -- demographic, economic, environmental, and political -- with a view to assessing the likely implications of current and foreseeable developments in these spheres for out-migration to the United States. The findings of our phase I paper-writers, taken as a whole, cast considerable doubt on the (often-implicit) claim or assumption on the part of would-be restrictionists that drastic measures to close gates of entry are necessary to deter massive new waves of migrants -- especially those fleeing poverty, environmental degradation, and political turmoil in developing countries and regions -- from making their way to the U.S.
The fact that the United States is most unlikely to be inundated by an outpouring of migrants from the developing world does not, however, mean that it can or should turn a blind eye to conditions in sending countries that constitute the "root causes" of migration. Nor can the U.S. shirk its responsibility to contribute to efforts to improve the international community's capacity to respond effectively to refugee and refugee-like emergencies in those cases -- which will no doubt remain legion -- when preventive approaches fail to achieve the hoped-for effect. For the second phase of the Pew project, the Center has commissioned a series of papers by leading specialists designed to formulate both normative and practical guidelines to govern these and related aspects of U.S. migration policy more broadly conceived. The paper-writers and topics are as follows:
Richard Bissell (Inspection Panel, The World Bank) and Andrew Nastios (Vice President, World Vision), impact of short- and long-term U.S. development assistance programs on international migration and refugee flows;
Elizabeth Ferris (Director, Immigration and Refugee Program, Church World Service) U.S. policy pertaining to conflict resolution and post-refugee emergency reconstruction/repatriaton;
David Forsythe (Department of Political Science, University of Nebraska) U.S. policy to promote democracy in developing countries and East-Central Europe/former Soviet Union;
Leah Haus (Department of Politics, New York University) impact of U.S. trade and investment policy on "regular" migration
Gil Loescher (Joan Kroc Institute of International Relations, University of Notre Dame and Refugee Studies Program, Oxford University [U.K.]) critique and proposed reforms of the prevailing international refugee protection system
Tom Weiss (Executive Director, Academic Council on the United Nations System [ACUNS], Watson Institute of International Affairs, Brown University) reform of the international emergency relief system.
The Center will be convening a second meeting of the Pew project working group in mid-September 1996 to review drafts of the phase II papers, revised versions of which should be available for distribution by late October. The "Migration Policy in Global Perspective" project is now scheduled to conclude in December 1996, when the Center plans to organize two concluding mini-conferences -- one in Washington, DC, the other in New York -- to share the project's principal findings and recommendations with policy makers, international affairs specialists, journalists and other opinion-leaders. Readers interested in receiving copies of the final papers prepared for Phase I of the Pew project or in learning more about plans for the second phase of this project are invited to contact the Center.
The NYCT project paper-writers are: David Howell (Director, Program in Urban Policy, Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy, New School for Social Research) and Elizabeth Mueller (Senior Researcher, Community Development Research Center, Milano Graduate School, New School for Social Research), who are co-authoring the paper on employment/labor market issues; Suzanne Michael (Director, Community Intrepreter Program, Center for the Study of Family Policy, Hunter College, City University of New York), who is preparing the paper on health care policy issues; and Francisco Rivera-Batiz (Director, Institute of Urban and Minority Education, Columbia University Teachers College), whose paper will address education issues. Draft versions of these papers will be presented at a series of roundtables now scheduled to take place at the New School on April 19 (health care), May 3 (education) and May 10 (employment/labor market).
Please contact the Center by phone, fax or email if you would like to receive a summary of the November 28 organizational meeting or to let us know if you would like to participate in one or more of the NYCT project roundtables scheduled for the spring, which will be free and open to the public.
ROCKEFELLER "IDENTITY AND CITIZENSHIP" PROJECT
In addition to the NYCT project (see above article) the Center also convened an organizational meeting this past November in connection with a two-year research project on "Identity and Citizenship: Incorporation and Diversity in Contemporary Democracies," being supported by The Rockefeller Foundation. As noted in previous issues of this newsletter the focus of the Rockefeller project is on the political and cultural consequences of immigration in the United States and other receiving states, starting (in year one) with a concentration on the U.S. experience. The project is intended to critically assess the adequacy of prevailing approaches to the study of immigration and its consequences in the social sciences and humanities, to contribute to the elaboration of a new "transnational" and "interactive" theoretical framework to guide future research in this field, and to use this framework to (re)assess the changing role of incorporative institutions (including, e.g., political parties, civic associations, and the media).
Twenty-five scholars and academicians, primarily from the New York area, attended the November 3 organizational meeting for this project, whereupon the project co-directors -- Center director Aristide Zolberg and Vicky Hattam, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science in the New School's Graduate School of Political and Social Science -- determined that the initial set of (four) commissioned papers should focus respectively on the intersection between issues of immigration and citizenship, political participation, race and ethnic relations, and language. The Center is now actively recruiting appropriately-qualified scholars to prepare these papers and is also seeking to identify others to prepare written commentaries in response to the papers. Our plan is to convene a meeting of the full project working group in the fall of 1996 to discuss drafts of the year-one papers and to make preparations for the second, comparative phase of the project, which is scheduled to conclude in June 1997. Updates will be provided in future issues of "EpiCenter."
The Center has received a verbal commitment from The Ford Foundation (Education and Culture Program) for a 30-month grant to support the new faculty-graduate student working groups in undertaking a series of discrete curriculum development projects under the direction of faculty co-chairs. The working group co-chairs will be responsible for organizing a series of workshops designed in significant part to determine where curriculum development efforts might best be targeted. The co-chairs will also be responsible for soliciting bids from faculty at consortium-member institutions to develop and subsequently teach the new courses. As explained at an inaugural meeting of the New York Consortium convened at the New School on February 9, the Center hopes to use the Ford Foundation-supported curriculum development project as a stepping-stone towards the establishment of a formal Migration Studies Certificate Program. (This program would enable graduate students studying towards a Ph.D. at their home institution/department to obtain formal certification of their qualifications in the migration subfield.)
We will be providing updates
on the progress of the curriculum development projects, and the New York
Consortium more generally, in future issues of this newsletter. In the
interim, readers of "EpiCenter" should be aware that the Center has created
email listservs to support the new working groups. The listservs are intended
to facilitate information-exchanges (including, e.g., notices about upcoming
events in New York and elsewhere of potential interest to subscribers),
to provide working group members an opportunity to share works-in-progress
with interested counterparts, etc. Participation in these groups is open
to all interested parties, regardless of where located. To sign up for
one or more of the working groups, contact the Center at: ICMEC@newschool.edu.