GOV 2317 Migration

Oscar Handlin famously wrote, “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.” That is not entirely true, of course, as Native Americans, Mexicans in the Southwest, and (depending on how you define immigration) African Americans could point out. Nonetheless, the majority of residents of the United States are, or are descendants of, people who migrated to this land over the past several hundred years. That was not historically the case for residents of countries in Europe, Asia, or Africa; Germany’s official policy as late as the 1970s was “Germany is not a country of immigration.” Nonetheless, about 260 million people live in a country in which they were not born, and the numbers are rising.

Migration, in short, is central to the construction and character of governance, although it is not a sharply defined subfield of political science. The seminar’s goal is to give students a map of the issues and engagement with some of the best writing on migration in Europe and the United States, preparatory to teaching and doing research that is likely in one way or another to involve attention to migration, migrants, or the impact of the movement of peoples. Our purposes are 1) empirical, examining who moves, why, with what effect on them and the host country; 2) analytic, developing frameworks, concepts, methods, and comparative judgments about migration, and 3) normative, understanding why people hold strong views on the virtues and evils of migration, and clarifying our own perspectives.