Anthropology and Immigration in the Classroom

Abstract

If there is one major gap in the public debates on immigration, it is surely the limited attention to migration as a profoundly human experience that affects people as individuals and as members of families and communities. In that gap, of course, lies the anthropological advantage. Who else would understand as instinctively and as completely that migration policy is family policy as well as labor, social, cultural and economic policy. This recognition makes visible that migration policy, as human policy, must be anthropologically-informed. Others in this special AN issue have commented on how the anthropological insights on this very human process of migration can enhance current policy debates. But it is also important to remember that one of the most important “publics” with which we deal involves students. How students are learning to think about migration today will set the tone for the public debate about migration through much of the remainder of this century. And the classroom may well be the best, broadest and most intellectually sophisticated forum that students will ever have for considering this subject. So how can we approach immigration in the classroom? One option is certainly to utilize the rich ethnographic accounts we have in our own discipline for demonstrating the complex human dynamics of migration. Another option, however, is to use anthropology not for its ethnographic richness but for its integrative breadth. Anthropology thus provides not simply an explication of the immigration process on the human level but an overall multidisciplinary framework for understanding it. In teaching immigration at the undergraduate level, my own experience is that this integrative role for anthropology is quite easily achieved. My undergraduate immigration course has, in fact, just become the core course for a new interdisciplinary minor in immigration studies. The course moves through a series of texts that present the perspectives of economics, literature, anthropology, sociology and history. These are illuminated by the students’ own experiences in a region (northern Virginia) that includes a wide range of immigrants, foreign students and refugees. Class discussion is lively and undergraduates enjoy debunking stereotypes. Having read the preparatory texts, when the time comes to consider public policy on immigration, students are well prepared. They understand how rigid and narrow the formal public debates on immigration truly are and easily