Center for Advanced Study CAS/MillerComm Lecture Series "Understanding America's Immigration "Crisis""

• Event Date: Thursday, October 11, 2007
• Time: 4:00 pm (CDT)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Free Admission

• Talk

Douglas Massey
Professor of Sociology, Princeton University

Since 1986 the United States has employed a politics of contradiction in its relations with Mexico. With US encouragement, Mexico joined GATT in that year and embarked on a neoliberal economic project that opened its economy to trade, investments, and exchange, a project that was institutionalized by NAFTA, ratified by the United States, and fully enacted in 1994. Over the same period, however, the US has poured increasing resources into maintaining the illusion of a controlled border that is impervious to the flow of Mexican workers, even as it becomes more permeable with respect to capital, information, goods, commodities, and services. Douglas Massey will document the contradictory policy of growing integration and increasing separation and then trace out the costs of this self-deception for the inhabitants of both countries and the people who move between them.

This lecture is held in anticipation of the 2008-2009 CAS Initiative Immigration: History and Policy which will bring together scholars in the social sciences, law, computer science, engineering and humanities to explore new approaches to immigration and its controversies.

For more information about Spurlock Museum facilities or for other inquiries, contact Brian Cudiamat at (217) 333-0889.

Museum visitors are reminded that food and drinks are not allowed in the Museum. Backpacks and other large items brought to the Museum will have to be stored; there is limited locker storage space available for these items.