January 22, 2009
Charles Hirschman to address immigration in Faculty Lecture
Forget the Mayflower, the Daughters of the American Revolution and even the United Daughters of the Confederacy. When it comes to tracking their ancestry most Americans today can’t trace their family roots that far back in history.
That is because their origins as Americans are far more recent, and the percentage of people who have family trees going back to the Pilgrims or those who fought in the Revolutionary or Civil wars continues to decline.
The changing American family tree is just one of the topics that Sociology Professor Charles Hirschman will touch on when he explores the hot-button issue of immigration in the 33rd annual Faculty Lecture at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 28. The free program, titled Immigration and American Identity, will be held in 130 Kane and is open to the campus community and the general public. A reception will follow in Kane’s Walker-Ames Room.
Although Hirschman, who is the Boeing International Professor of Sociology and at the Evan School of Public Affairs, is considered to be one of the leading experts on immigration, there is little in his youth and early academic career hinting at such an interest.
He was the great-grandson of immigrants and grew up in small town Ohio where there was virtually no immigrant presence. After earning his doctorate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Hirschman’s early academic years at Duke and Cornell were devoted to exploring questions about race and ethnicity, as well as understanding inequality in Malaysia, a nation where he served as a Peace Corp Volunteer for two years in the mid-1960s.
He joined the UW faculty as a full professor in 1987. His research continued to look a race and ethnicity in American society and on demographic change in Southeast Asia until his focus shifted to immigration about a decade ago, largely by happenstance.
In the mid to late 1990s Hirschman served on several national committees for the National Research Council, the Russell Sage Foundation and the Social Science Research Council that examined the role of immigrants in American society. He edited the Handbook of International Migration, a landmark volume that helped to shape the interdisciplinary field of immigration research.
“The anti-immigration claims being made today by people like Lou Dobbs and other pundits parallel similar views that were expressed in the early 20th century,” said Hirschman. “The prevailing view was to ‘Americanize’ immigrants, or better yet, to stop them from coming. In addition to economic fears of losing jobs and lowered incomes as a result of immigrants, there were cultural fears that Southern and Eastern European immigrants could not be assimilated. These ideas were part of the ideology of that era that considered southern and eastern Europeans, as well as Asians and Africans, to be inferior racial groups. But Italians, eastern Europeans and Irish immigrants not only assimilated, but created much of what we consider American identity today.”
Anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States goes back even further in time to the foundation of the country, according to Hirschman.
| The lecture is now available on UWTV. Go to http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.aspx?rID=28373&fID=513. |
In his lecture, he will explore how immigrants, past and present, have added to and changed American culture. Two examples are food and Hollywood.
“A lot of what we think of as quintessential American foods as well as many dominant themes from Hollywood movies reflect the contributions of immigrants and immigrant culture,” Hirschman said.
In spite of the campaigns to stop or restrict immigration, Hirschman believes they are unlikely to be successful. He expects that we will continue to have substantial immigration for the foreseeable future. That means new groups will come to America and continue to redefine American society as have earlier waves of immigrants.
