Immigrant Oregon panel discussion

175 Knight Law Center
Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics

This panel features authors of a new report, “A State of Immigrants:  A New Look at the Immigrant Experience in Oregon.”  The report documents the actions of immigrants and the adoption of public policies and community level strategies in Oregon that are helping immigrants and refugees achieve social, civic, cultural, and economic integration.    
The report, made available here, was coordinated and edited by Bob Bussel, director of the UO Labor Education and Research Center, and includes contributions by an interdisciplinary group of scholars from the University of Oregon, Oregon State University and Portland State University. The event, which is free and open to the public, is part of the Wayne Morse Center’s Public Affairs Speaker Series and is cosponsored by the UO Labor Education Research Center and made possible by the Philip H. Knight Chair Fund. 

Livestreaming will be available for this event. Please register  to be notified of any event changes. This event is subject to UO COVID guidelines; refer to the UO COVID-19 Resource page for more details. 

Panelists
Daniel López-Cevallos is an associate professor of Latina/o/x studies, ethnic studies, and health equity and the assistant vice provost for undergraduate education at OSU. His research focuses on the intersections of race/ethnicity, gender, class, and other socioeconomic and sociocultural constructs, and their relationship to health and health care issues. He is invested in the development and implementation of community, institutional, and policy-level strategies to better serve Latinx and other marginalized communities.

Lola Loustaunau is a UO sociology graduate student and Wayne Morse Graduate Research Fellow. Her research interests are in the sociology of labor, migration, emotions, and gender, especially looking into the working conditions and collective organizing of precarious workers with an intersectional frame. Her dissertation which focuses on immigrant and refugee women employed in food processing in the Pacific Northwest and their experiences as essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Maggie Mitteis is a third year doctoral student in the Critical and Sociocultural Studies in Education Program at UO. She’s also a part-time faculty member in Lane Community College’s English as a Second Language Department. Her research focuses on English language learners and their identities both in and outside the classroom environment.

Lynn Stephen is Philip H. Knight Chair, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences, and professor of anthropology at UO. Stephen’s scholarly work centers on the impact of globalization, migration, nationalism and the politics of culture on indigenous communities in the Americas. Through her concept of transborder communities and migrations, Stephen has produced ground-breaking analysis on gender, economic development, gendered violence, asylum and migration, globalization and social movements, indigenous autonomy, and the history of Latinx communities spread across multiple borders. 

Moderator
Since 2002, Bob Bussel has been director of the Labor Education and Research Center at UO, where he is also a history professor. As a labor educator, Bob has conducted trainings and workshops in the areas of strategic planning, leadership development, organizational change, political and community engagement, and labor history. Bussel has long been interested in issues affecting immigrant workers. He edited a 2008 University of Oregon report on the immigrant experience in Oregon and later helped organize the Integration Network for Immigrants in Lane County, a group that seeks to create more welcoming communities for immigrants and their families.

Tags: Bob Bussel, Immigrant Experience, Immigrant Experience in Oregon, LERC, Wayne Morse Center

Political Discussion Networks, Political Engagement, and the Latino Electorate

Knight Library, Browsing Room

Marisa Abrajano is professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego. Her research interests are in American politics, particularly in developing ways to increase politics participation and civic engagement amongst racial/ethnic minorities. Her most recent book is White Backlash: Immigration, Race and American Politics (with Zoltan Hajnal, 2015).

Sponsored by the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics. Cosponsored by the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies.

Tags: Latino electorate, UO Dreamers Working Group, Wayne Morse Center

Panel Discussion — Immigrants out, “Guestworkers” in: A Hidden History of the Trump Years

Gerlinger Lounge, 1468 University St.
Passover-friendly refreshments will be served

Organized by Julie Weise, 2018-19 Wayne Morse Resident Scholar

In the United States and across Europe, nation-states are slamming their doors on immigrants and refugees. This nationalist reaction to the diversity that globalization has brought seems to portend depressed immigration levels for the foreseeable future. Yet employers still demand immigrant labor in a growing economy. Even as U.S. President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies drove undocumented workers deeper into the shadows, his administration also approved a record-breaking quarter-million temporary agricultural worker visas, known as H2A or “guestworkers.” Similar patterns are in effect around the globe.

In this panel, historians join key Oregon advocates for both agricultural and workers’ interests to contextualize the “guestworker” phenomenon locally and globally, and ask whether it represents the future of immigrant labor in the United States and beyond.

Panelists

Michael Dale is the founder and executive director of the Northwest Workers’ Justice Project, and non-profit law firm that represents low wage, immigrant and contingent workers with respect to civil employment law problems.  He worked for 25 years as an Oregon legal aid attorney, and helped establish the Oregon Law Center in 1995.  Over the last ten years he has been engaged in extensive litigation over the rules governing the use of H-2B temporary workers, winning cases in the 3rd, 11th and 4th Circuit Courts of Appeals.

Christoph Rass is one of Germany’s leading historians of twentieth-century European labor migration. A professor at Osnabrück University’s Institute for Migration and Intercultural Studies, Rass concentrates on institutions and knowledge production in migration regimes, forced migrations, and GIS-based modeling of migration patterns. Rass is a recent recipient of the Kalliope Prize for Migration Research from the German Emigration Center.

Jeff Stone is the CEO of Oregon Association of Nurseries and formerly Chief of Staff to Metro Council. Stone has a BS from the UO in political science and has deep experience in Oregon and national political affairs. He has served as an executive and board member of numerous business and nonprofit organizations.

Julie M. Weise is a scholar of twentieth-century Mexican migration history in global context. An associate professor of history at the University of Oregon, Weise is the author of the prize-winning Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 (UNC Press, 2015). Her current book project, “Citizenship Displaced: Migrant Political Cultures in the Era of State Control,” places postwar Mexican migration history in conversation with parallel histories in Europe and southern Africa.

Cosponsored by the UO Office of International Affairs, the UO Department of History, and the Global Studies Institute’s Global Oregon Faculty Collaboration Fund. Part of the Wayne Morse Center’s 2017-19 theme, Borders, Migration, and Belonging. The Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics encourages civic engagement and inspires enlightened dialogue by bringing students, scholars, activists, policymakers, and communities together to discuss issues affecting Oregon, our nation, and the world. 

Tags: Christoph Rass, Farmwokers, Julie Weise, Michael Dale, Trump era, UO, Wayne Morse Center

Pulitzer winner Jose Antonio Vargas to be in residence at UO

Pulitzer winner Jose Antonio Vargas to be in residence at UO / Around the O 

October 5, 2017 — At age 16, Jose Antonio Vargas went to the motor vehicles department to get a driver’s license and discovered he was in the U.S. illegally.

Jose Antonio Vargas

The green card he’d been given by family when he moved to America from the Philippines as a child was a fake. For years Vargas kept his status a secret, even as he became a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose writing appeared in publications such as the San Francisco Chronicle, Rolling Stone and the New Yorker.

Vargas will be telling his story to University of Oregon audiences as the 2017-18 Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics. On Oct. 24, he will give a public lecture, “Define American: My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant.” The event begins at 7 p.m. in Room 156, Straub Hall.

In 2011, Vargas wrote a groundbreaking essay for New York Times Magazine revealing himself as undocumented and appeared on the cover of Time magazine in conjunction with a follow-up story he wrote. Some of the ramifications were immediate: He lost the driver’s license he’d finally managed to obtain, and he had to have difficult conversations with close friends to whom he’d never told his secret. His status makes it unsafe to have a fixed address, so he travels most of the time, living in hotel rooms and staying with friends. › Continue reading

Tags: CLLAS, Jose Antonio Vargas, UO, Wayne Morse Center

CLLAS Town Hall with Jose Antonio Vargas

UO campus
Crater Lake South
Erb Memorial Union (EMU)
Room 145
1222 E. 13th Ave.
Eugene, OR  97403

A conversation about undocumented America

 Jose Antonio Vargas is the 2017-2018 Morse Chair and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. In 2011, he published a story in the New York Times Magazine titled “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant.” Since then, he has devoted himself to changing the cultural and policy conversations about immigration through filmmaking and activism.  His organization, Define American is a non-profit media and culture organization that uses the power of story to transcend politics and shift the conversation about immigrants, identity, and citizenship in a changing America. This conversation with Vargas will be moderated by Chris Chávez (School of Journalism and Communication).

Sponsored by CLLAS, UO School of Journalism and Communication, and the School of Journalism and Communication.

Tags: CLLAS, Jose Antonio Vargas, SOJC, undocumented, UO, Wayne Morse Center