[lg policy] Misguided Energies: An Analysis of the Immigration-Related Theses

[Harold Schiffman]

Misguided Energies: An Analysis of the Immigration-Related Theses

By David North, November 22, 2009

CIS does all of us a service by its annual listing of
Immigration-Related Theses and Dissertations, such as Matt Graham's
most recent edition published earlier this month.
Each of the approximately 360 papers listed for 2008 represents from
one to two year's full-time work, sometimes more, and its completion
is usually the last step on the way to the writer's securing a Ph.D.
In these studies could contain a treasure-chest of highly useful
information and insights that could help the nation as it struggles to
define its immigration policy.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. The overwhelming majority of the
2008 papers were not immigration-related, at all, they were
immigrant-related, discussing the challenges to and the accommodations
made by specific subsets of recent migrant populations. The title of
the first thesis listed by Graham, by alphabetical happenstance, is
pretty typical of the lot:

"Brown Picket Fences: Patterns of giving back, ethnic identity and
ethnic associations among the Mexican-origin middle class", by Jody
Agius Vallejo, a Ph.D. candidate at University of California, Irvine.

It is typical for several reasons: 1) it deals with a relatively small
subset of the nation's migrant population, people from the Mexican
middle class (the overwhelming majority of migrants from Mexico are
not from the middle class); 2) it is written by a graduate student
with a name that sounds as if it belongs to the studied population; 3)
it is written for an educational institution located in an area
heavily impacted by the studied migrants; and 4) it sounds like, from
its title, that it focuses entirely on the experiences of, and the
internal workings of, this subpopulation.

I have not read the thesis and it may be remarkably perceptive and a
highly useful addition to the literature, but all too many of the
listed papers have this or a similarly limited focus; few, if any of
these scholarly efforts have paid attention to the impacts of
immigration on the nation's population size, on its environment, on
its labor markets, or its law enforcement issues.

That's the problem.

Some of the papers focus on really tiny subpopulations, some with
cheerful overtones and others with troubled ones. My favorite
light-hearted one is "A qualitative study of the language learning
experience of Latin-born professional baseball players." This is
hardly a study of public policy problem, as the Latin athletes who get
through the immigration and baseball recruitment processes are a lucky
lot, if not linguistically gifted.

Then there is: "English as a second language (ESL) students'
perceptions of the ESL program at Mississippi State University" by
Chun Fu Lin, who is probably struggling with a Mandarin-influenced
southern accent.

Another tiny population, with a grimmer future, is described in
"Factors impacting Korean-American families who are raising a child
with hearing loss."

Sometimes the find mechanism on one's computer can be helpful in
examining a data set. In this case I ran some words against the some
360 titles and found this: Mexico or Mexican, 34; Latin, Latino or
Latina, 30; Hispanic, 14; Chinese 10; Somali, 8; Indian (from India),
7; Vietnam and Vietnamese, 5; Iranian and Armenian, 4 each; and
British, Irish, Italian, Jewish and Swedish, 0 in every case.

In other words there is a heavy emphasis on current migrant
populations, their current challenges and problems, and little in the
way of historical analysis. There were, however, four papers that
included crime in their title, but two dealt with crime in Japan and
Turkey; and two dealt with trafficking, in which the immigrants were
the victims.

I could find none that dealt with immigrant crime rates in the U.S.,
or immigrant birth rates, or with immigrants and the environment, or
with immigrant-impacted labor markets, or similar policy issues.

I know from my volunteer income tax assistance work with University of
Maryland graduate students that most of them belong to the working
poor, often getting deeper in debt as time passes. Maybe a foundation
could help steer some graduate papers in the directions of
immigration-impact studies, or examinations of immigration policies or
immigration-management issues. There could be up-front stipends of
$2,000 or $3,000 for thesis outlines in these subject areas, and
annual prizes of $5,000 or $10,000 for the best completed papers.

This might broaden the range of topics covered in the, say, 2012
edition of CIS' annual listing.

http://cis.org/north/dissertations

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