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

Tue Nov 24 00:56:35 UTC 2009

I'm not convinced that research on immigrants and crime, etc is 'more 
useful' than some of the thesis research topics listed below - clearly 
our notion of 'useful' research depends on how we are positioned 
(politically, socially, academically, etc.) in relation to immigration 
issues and David North (http://www.cis.org/taxonomy/term/62)  is no 
exception. Furthermore, a good dissertation/thesis makes a theoretical 
contribution and not necessarily a policy driven one (ie. how to solve 
the 'problems' of immigration).  Speaking as someone who is doing 
research in Canada, it pains me to have to contort my research interests 
to fit into the increasingly policy driven SSHRC funding mandate (our 
main source of research funding in the social sciences and humanities).
Eve

Eve Haque, PhD	
Assistant Professor
York University, Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics
4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3
email: ehaque at yorku.ca
tel: 416-736-2100 ext. 20764
fax: 416-736-5483

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Harold Schiffman wrote:
> 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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