Select members of the Roundtable discussed the proposed immigration policy changes.

This panel event was hosted by The Institute for the Liberal Arts, the Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics, and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Moderator:
David Quigley, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

Featured speakers:
Noah Pickus, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Peter Skerry, BC Political Science Department

Respondents:
Daniel Kanstroom, BC Law School
Jessica Vaughan, Center for Immigration Studies at BC

Friday, November 6th
2pm

Navy Pier, Room 328
600 E. Grand Ave
Chicago, IL

Kenan Institute for Ethics Director Noah Pickus will participate in a panel discussion on immigrant integration sponsored by Zócalo Public Affairs. Over one million people became legal immigrants last year, and another million — a record number — took the oath of citizenship. But becoming American is not merely a matter of arriving, or even of naturalizing, no matter the oaths taken, history studied, or democratic fundamentals understood. Immigrants and immigrant communities are in constant flux: as some immigrants become citizens, others return home; some maintain their native customs, languages, and rituals, others do not. New migrants arrive, renewing and refreshing memories and ways of home. With them, immigrant enclaves expand or collapse, interacting with their American surroundings. Illegal immigrants live in shadow, unable to fully participate in American society and unwilling or unable to leave it. And Americans always demand — vaguely but resoundingly — that immigrants integrate, never quite specifying what that process means for immigrants or for Americans. As pressure mounts for Barack Obama and Congress to enact immigration reform, writers, advocates, and political experts visit Zócalo to ask what — beyond mere legal status, paperwork and oaths — is required to make immigrants feel like a part of American society.

For more information, visit the event website.

Select members of the Roundtable discussed the proposed immigration policy changes. This event featured Roundtable participants Peter Skerry, Noah Pickus, and Michele Wucker, along with commentator Edward Schumacher-Matos, director of the Harvard Inter-Faculty Initiative on Immigration and Integration Policy and Studies at the Kennedy School of Government and the ombudsman for the Miami Herald.

Institute Senior Fellow Dorren McMahon discussed the educational incorporation of immigrant children in Ireland. Ireland has recently experienced a rapid growth in its rate of immigration, which has left policymakers struggling to provide for the educational, social, and economic needs of this expanding immigrant population. McMahon, who is also the Youth Inequalities Project Team Leader of the Geary Institute, at the University College of Dublin,  discussed the problems currently faced by this new immigrant populationand described how they are rooted in official Irish responses to immigrant arrival in the 1990s. This event was held by the Institute in partnership with the Social Sciences Research Institute at Duke University.

iThink is an exciting new program sponsored by the students of the Kenan Institute for Ethics. This for students-by students event is an opportunity to talk about ethics in the everyday in a fun and relaxed atmosphere. Each week brings a new topic (and delicious food).

For the inaugural event we discussed invisible ethics–how our everyday actions affect our world. Our focus was on consumerism and production. Could you be harming the environment when you buy a soda? How do your new shoes affect someone’s life? Consumerism is rife with ethical issues that we wanted to explore, and we asked participants to bring an open mind and an empty stomach for friendly conversation and fondue.

Ian Buruma discussed the dire warnings coming from a variety of writers and politicians, in Europe and the U.S., about Europe being “Islamized” by an increasing population of intolerant Muslims.

This event was cosponsored by the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, the Duke University Center for International Studies, the Duke Islamic Studies Center, the Franklin Humanities Institute and the Office of the University President.

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.  He is the author of Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance and Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. He writes about a broad range of political and cultural subjects for major publications, including The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Corriere della Sera, The Financial Times, and The Guardian.

Immigration expert and Institute Director Noah Pickus discussed the deadlocked immigration debate, how the Obama administration can advance reform, and what that reform should look like during a live webcast.

Pickus is director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics and associate research professor of public policy studies at Duke. He is the author of “True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism, Becoming American/America Becoming” and “Immigration and Citizenship in the 21st Century.”

He is also a convener of the Brookings-Duke Immigration Policy Roundtable, a joint project of The Brookings Institution and the Kenan Institute for Ethics. The Roundtable was created to address the implicit trade-offs and assumptions underlying the current immigration debate and to generate policy recommendations that better reflect the wide range of views that Americans hold toward immigration.

The roundtable’s report, “Breaking the Immigration Stalemate: From Deep Disagreements to Constructive Proposals,” was released on Oct. 6.