Engaging With the Immigrant Human Rights Movement in a Besieged Border Region: What Do Applied Social Scientists Bring to the Policy Process?

Abstract

Engagement with immigration goes beyond work directly with immigrants to include involvement in the immigration policy process. The chapter describes work on immigration and human rights policy grounded in issues facing the U.S.-Mexico border region. A policy coalition with regional and national presence, the Border and Immigration Task Force, combines an organized social movement with bases in immigrant communities with a diverse policy coalition whose members have varied skills, constituencies, and political connections. As applied social scientists in this coalition, we bring a number of skills, including effective writing, synthesis of secondary sources, teaching skills applied to public interaction and communication, and application of the sociological and anthropological imagination to understand the implications, on the ground, of detailed policy recommendations. Our work has not involved community-based primary research, but this form of practice is also mentioned for its relevance to policy formation and advocacy. The literature on public anthropology and public sociology needs to include discussions of engagement in practical policy processes.

An Academic in an Activist Coalition: Recognizing and Bridging Role Conflicts

“…I have allied myself since 2006 with the Border Network for Human Rights (BNHR), a community‐based immigrant rights organization in El Paso, Texas and southern New Mexico. Through the BNHR, I have participated in a shifting set of coalitions, first the Border and Immigration Task Force (BITF; Heyman et al 2009, and examples of task force products are U.S.–Mexico Border and Immigration Task Force 2008, 2009) and then the Southwest Border Communities Coalition (SBCC) 2 . The focus of all these groups is on human rights, including U.S. constitutional rights, of border community residents and migrants through the region, in the face of massive U.S. border enforcement.…”

“…7. Elsewhere, Morales, Núñez, and I have pointed out that some of these communicative tasks draw on teaching skills hopefully cultivated by academics (Heyman et al 2009). 8. Many paid staff also have multiple duties that create role conflicts with their specific coalition activities, which merits attention, but the distance is not usually as great as with volunteers who hold mainly unrelated jobs.…”

“… 7. Elsewhere, Morales, Núñez, and I have pointed out that some of these communicative tasks draw on teaching skills hopefully cultivated by academics (Heyman et al 2009). …”

Introduction to Special Issue: Everyday Enforcement: Heightened Immigration Enforcement and Community Responses in the United States

“…Heyman currently serves as President of the Board of Directors of BNHR but also contributes writing, teaching, and researching skills to the group (Heyman et al. ). Perhaps most importantly, all of these articles reveal some of the human faces behind a “post‐9/11” enforcement‐oriented landscape and contribute analyses and models for action that can be engaged at the community level across the United States.…”

Giving Back: Activist Research with Undocumented Migrants in Berlin

“…The latter term, in contrast, relates to practical, hands-on involvement and direct reciprocity, to "pragmatic engagement with the contemporary problems of our social and physical worlds" (Rylko-Bauer, Singer, and Van Willigen 2006:178). It refers to the multiple social functions anthropologists may assume, for example, by conducting research while actively taking part in health care provision (e.g., Knipper 2004;Pollock 2007;McCurdy 1976), or engaging with public policy by writing policy recommendations and collaborating with advocacy groups (e.g., Heyman, Morales, and Núñez 2009). These two forms of engagement are, of course, interrelated (cf.…”