The Global Migration Center will be the premier institution studying the impacts of immigration policy and immigration law enforcement on the health, socioeconomic status, self-image and family life of undocumented immigrants and immigrant detainees/deportees, as well as on their communities.
Humanizing Deportation Project
The Center will house the Humanizing Deportation project, a project coordinated by Professor Robert Irwin, which includes the world’s largest archive of community testimonial narratives on contemporary migration and deportation.
In response to general lack of first-hand knowledge regarding the experience of deportation and removal, and the consequent dehumanized narratives on the topic, we are producing an online open access archive of personal stories about deportation. Policy debate on deportation tends to be driven by statistics, with little attention to human experience. This project will make visible a range of humanitarian issues that mass human displacement has generated as the result of its management on both sides of the US-Mexico border.
It employs digital storytelling, a digital genre that puts control of content and production in the hands of community storytellers (deportees and others affected by deportation and deportability), to produce a public archive that will give a human face to the deportation crisis.
Comparative Border Studies
Another effort joining the Global Migration Center is the Mellon Initiative in Comparative Border Studies: Rights, Containment, Protest co-directed by Professor Robert Irwin.
This initiative has two major goals: first, to respond to the urgent need for comparative conversations about the question of borders and to interrogate the production, deployment and evasion of regional and geographic categories; and second, to bridge scholarship in area studies and ethnic studies, fields that should be in closer conversation with one another given the realities of transnationalism and the transnationalizing of these fields.
This initiative will help promote new approaches to the study of borders, violence, containment, rights, and protest as scholarship attempts to grapple with new political movements and networks that have emerged spanning Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, and North America. These rapid shifts on the ground demand more complex theorization and cross-disciplinary, comparative research as older paradigms of transnationalism and diaspora appear increasingly obsolete or inadequate. Programs as such as the Social Science Research Council have focused on Inter-Asian Contexts and Connections in order to support new research that is needed to study region-making and regional shifts across Asia.