Immigration is a many-faceted subject, at IFE too

Immigration is one of the major issues facing the global community, and the “immigration question” is of course a huge bundle of questions, challenges, answers, policies, programs, activist initiatives and a million personal stories. Opportunities to dig into specific aspects of immigration abound at all IFE sites.

A new intern host partner with IFE Asturias in this field is Asturias Acoge, a regional NGO providing documented and undocumented individuals with a range of necessary services. This year, Acoge agreed to welcome its first IFE student intern, Carlos Hernandez from the University of Illinois. Carlos’ experience includes volunteering with not-for-profit educational organizations in Tijuana, and providing support for immigrants through the New American Welcome Center in Illinois (NAWC). This background plus his academic achievement earned him an Obama-Chesky Voyager Scholarship, one of only a hundred Voyager Scholarships granted nation-wide.

Already complex, immigration issues vary depending on the lens: local, national, or international. For his field research at IFE, Carlos took a comparative approach to immigrant and asylum seeker services, choosing as case studies an NGO in Illinois (NAWC) and Asturias Acoge, a perspective that proved of real value to Acoge in their work. Looking back, Carlos finds that in Asturias “everything felt more humanistic”. He adds, “in Illinois we treated people as clients seeking a service. In Asturias, they were usuarios. I interacted with children, and with people who were willing to cry in front of me, something that never happened in Illinois.” Writ large at the top of Acoge’s homepage is “we protect the rights of immigrant persons” (emphasis added).

Experiencing difference piqued Carlos’ interest in immigration even more. “I definitely want to continue exploring how regularization works in different countries. [My time at] IFE has made me even more curious. I have used my scholarship to attend a seminar in Austria in May on migration, and in August I will be volunteering in migrant shelters in Athens.”

Even within a country, differences occur; Carlos speaks cogently to differences between border states and other states in the US (“in Texas NGOs’s focus on providing shelter and humanitarian aid,... in Connecticut they offer “know your rights” workshops, making people aware of – for example – something called a bill of protection”), and differences before and after a national election. (“During my first year at university, my work involved helping people apply for federal aid or emergency funds. All that is now gone, and the work we do is to refer people to other organizations.”)

Asturias Acoge (“Asturias welcomes”) is – as the name suggests – locally grounded while closely linked to actors and developments in Spain and beyond. The range of services and activities offered reflect the complexity of the field of immigration: information and assistance on a range of administrative procedures and requests, cooking or computer classes, job training programs, anti-racist awareness-raising, alerts about government deportation programs, and others. Interestingly, Acoge operates a project, the Qabileh Project, which works with community organizations in Tetouan, Morocco, to foster mutual understanding and cooperation.

IFE looks forward to future collaboration with Asturias Acoge on behalf of Spanish-speaking students seeking to learn more about the many-faceted field of immigration. Besides Carlos in Asturias, and two students involved in immigration mentioned above in the article on new placements in Marseille (exile trauma, and immigration policy and law), a recent student intern with a political science research institute in Paris examined the unexpected phenomenon of immigrants and their descendants who vote on the far right. Other topics include work with unaccompanied and unpapered minors.

Thanks to broad local networks of organizations – NGOs, small not-for-profits, activist groups, government agencies, and social science research centers – all IFE sites provide a good start for students wanting comparative perspective and hands-on international experience in the increasingly pressing set of issues known as immigration.