Social Science Research Council

 
Along with international flows of capital, information, and technology, international migration is one of the major forces of change in the world. Approximately 125 million people live outside their country of birth. The United Nations estimates that in the late 1990s, 2.6 million people migrated annually from less-developed to developed countries, seeking employment, reuniting with family, or fleeing conflict and persecution as refugees and internally displaced persons. This enormous movement of people is changing the demographic composition of both host and sending societies, and building new connections between them, with profound implications for economic, cultural and political life. The Council believes these transformations and their implications are best understood through research that focuses both on the experiences of individual nations and localities and on comparative perspectives across nations and regions.

Since its initiation in 1994, the Migration Program has had as its primary goal the strengthening of international migration studies. Our field-building strategy has been to recruit young, promising scholars to the field, to connect scholars with shared thematic interests across disciplines, and to link social scientists with other researchers in the humanities, the professions, and the not-for-profit sector. While the center of gravity of our intellectual focus has been the immigrant experience in the United States, the subject matter and the increasingly internationalized approaches of the SSRC have led us increasingly to develop transnational networks of scholars and to pursue more diverse international and comparative perspectives. The three major organizational vehicles for our work have been thematically-focused working groups, outreach initiatives, and research fellowships.

Working Groups: To promote the development of interdisciplinary perspectives, the program has convened senior scholars in a variety of workshops that have met regularly over periods of a year or more to consider a variety of issues central to migration studies: the relations between religion and immigration; the role of gender in migration processes; immigrant access to education; forced migration and human rights; transnational migration; the impact of immigration on race and ethnicity; and national membership and political participation. Each working group has been expected to publish books or special journal issues representing its members' debates and thinking. Recent publications include a special issue of International Migration Review (IMR) on transnational migration, Not Just Black and White, edited by Nancy Foner and George Fredrickson, and Immigrant Faiths: Transforming Religious Life in America, edited by Karen I. Leonard, Alex Stepick, Manuel A. Vasquez, and Jennifer Holdaway.

Outreach Initiatives: In line with the Council's mission of bringing necessary knowledge to public issues, the Migration Program has developed several initiatives to help bring migration research to a public audience. Through collaboration with the Religion Newswriters Association and the New York Times Company Foundation, the program has organized a variety of fora where social science researchers can address issues confronting journalists and editors and where the two groups can learn from one another's questions and perspectives. By providing journalists with new knowledge, information sources, and historical and social context we hope to inspire and shape future reporting on migration issues.

Research Fellowships: With funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (1996-2002) and the Pew Charitable Trusts (2001-2002), the International Migration Program offered fellowships for dissertation and postdoctoral research and for participation in a minority summer dissertation workshop to support research on immigration to the United States. From 1996 to 2002, the International Migration Program sponsored seven predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowship competitions and minority summer dissertation workshops in order to train scholars and advance their research on immigration to the United States.