Stanford University Press Blog

What should we do about immigration?

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

What do these words mean today? Yesterday, the latest immigration bill died in the senate, signaling that the government, and the country, will continue to look for a direction for our immigration policy.

In this context, it is useful to examine how other countries have dealt with the pressures and benefits of immigration. In The Boundaries of the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits of Universalism in France, 1918-1940, Mary Dewhurst Lewis turns to interbellum France to examine Europe's first guest worker program and the transformations it underwent as France experienced difficult economic and political circumstances. There is much, she argues, that could be used in our current dilemma from the lessons that France learned in the years before the Second World War.

One of the lessons Lewis presents is that there is not a straightforward connection between the integrity of a country's sovereignty and the extent of migrant rights. The reality is a complex negotiation between various interests and levels of power in which there is always a combination of benefit and loss. There can be no straightforward answer our current dilemma, making the nuances of France's journey – first admitting nearly two million immigrants, and then expelling 93,000 of them – relevant and engaging.

Do Pre-K programs work?

As Washington lawmakers debate the revision of the federal No Child Left Behind policy, they should take notes from a new book, Standardized Childhood by Bruce Fuller. Citing his research on the NCLB, in a recent op-ed Fuller makes the point that, “Since No Child was approved, just one of these six trend lines has inched upward: fourth-grade math. The other five plots have gone flat or simply fallen. Progress in narrowing achievement gaps also has stalled, after closing markedly in the 1990s.”

Fuller is critical of NCLB and, by extension, universal pre-K initiatives because, in his view, they overemphasize testing and lead to centralized, micromanaged programs that can only provide “a rather illiberal education” and are not responsive to the needs of children from diverse families.

 

Standardized Childhood calls for a strong public investment in preschools, but in programs that remain rooted in community organization and are focused on children who empirically benefit the most—those from low-income families. He points out that no study has detected lasting benefits for children from middle-class homes.

This is in contrast to both what Republicans and Democrats have proposed. Senator Hilary Clinton recently proposed a $5 billion pre-K federal government program that would cover "every child not just children whose parents cannot afford it," see article.

According to Fuller Congress should look at Austin’s school system as a model.  The city has defied partisan politics and embraced early-childhood programs focused on children from working class families, with an emphasis on bilingual education. These reforms are nurturing a mixed market of preschools, including a colorful blend run by churches, community groups, and the public schools. See article.