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

Tue Nov 24 21:28:30 UTC 2009

Francis, I hope you are not talking about Sweden :-) Christina

On Nov 23, 2009, at 9:27 PM, Francis Hult wrote:

> There is also no guarantee that even research with the best possible  
> implications for policymaking will ever be acted upon by  
> legislators.  (It almost seems like some of them take pride in  
> making decisions without being informed by research.)
>
>
> --
> Francis M. Hult, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor
> Department of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies
> University of Texas at San Antonio
>
> Web: http://faculty.coehd.utsa.edu/fhult/
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: lgpolicy-list-bounces at groups.sas.upenn.edu on behalf of Eve  
> Haque
> Sent: Mon 11/23/2009 6:56 PM
> To: Language Policy List
> Subject: Re: [lg policy] Misguided Energies: An Analysis ofthe  
> Immigration-Related Theses
>
>
>
>
> 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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