Migration and Borders Syllabus

Migration and Borders
ICP 329.5
3 credits
International and Comparative Politics
American University of Central Asia
Fall Semester 2009
J. Otto Pohl, Ph.D.


Meeting Time: Tuesday and Thursday 10:50 am

Course Description: This course will cover the topic of cross border migration. It will concentrate primarily upon the movement of people across international borders. However, it will also briefly cover the role of internal state borders with regards to forced migration in the USSR during the 1940s. The class will deal with various types of international migration in the 20th and 21st centuries including labor migration, forced migration and ethnic “return” migration. The course will emphasize the effects of state policies upon migrants in both countries of emigration and immigration. Case studies will be drawn from the US-Mexican border, Europe, the USSR and its successor states and Palestine.

Requirements: The course will consist of assigned readings, lectures, discussion, short writing assignments, an oral report and a research paper. Students will be required to write three 600 to 800 word reflection papers. They will have to write one paper on each of the three types of migration covered in this course: labor migration, forced migration and return migration. Each of these papers should engage with one or more of the readings assigned for the topic. They will also have to write a 2500 to 3000 word essay on one specific case of migration. The paper is due the last week of class. In the five weeks prior to this deadline each student will be required to give a short oral presentation on the subject of their paper followed by a short question and answer session. Late papers will lose ten percent each day they are late. Please see the separate handout on late papers. Students must come to class on time. Being more than fifteen minutes late will count as an absence. Students will lose one letter grade after four unexcused absences and fail the course after seven. Written proof of an emergency from a doctor or other appropriate authority is required for an absence to be excused. No mobile phones are to be visible during class. They are to be out of sight and turned off. I will eject any student from class that has a visible cell phone or whose cell phone rings during class. This will count as an unexcused absence. Finally, I have a significant hearing loss and may have to ask people to repeat their questions or statements from time to time. You can minimize this by speaking loudly and clearly. This syllabus is tentative and subject to change.

Readings: All of the required readings are included in the course packet.

Policy on Plagiarism and Citations: I have a zero tolerance policy regarding plagiarism. If I catch any student plagiarizing once I will fail them from the course and recommend to the chairman of the ICP department that they be expelled from the program. Plagiarism includes any verbatim copying of from a source without using quotation marks or setting the text up as an indented single spaced block quotation. If I find that more than four words in a row in your paper show up in the same order in a Google search and you do not have the words in quotation marks or set up as a block quotation I will fail you. Putting a footnote, end note or other citation after the copied words without the quotation marks or block quotation form is still plagiarism, you are claiming to have paraphrased verbatim text, and you will still receive an F for the course and be recommended for expulsion from ICP. Taking text from a source without citing it and rearranging the words so that it does not show up in a verbatim Google search is also plagiarism. I will also do Google searches to see if you have taken text and merely rearranged the words. You must either paraphrase the sentence by putting it completely in your own words and citing it with the proper footnote, end note or in text citation or quote the actual text verbatim complete with the proper citation. Completely paraphrasing sentences in your own words, but neglecting to cite the source of the information is also plagiarism. All information that would not be known to the average person on the street with no university education must be cited. When in doubt always cite a legitimate source. Wikipedia is not a legitimate source. Books published by university presses and academic journal articles found on JSTOR are legitimate sources. Other sources may or may not be legitimate. If you have questions about whether a particular source is legitimate you can ask me. Using Wikipedia or other illegitimate sources will result in a reduction of one letter grade for each citation in a paper.


Grading:

Three Short Papers – 45% (15% each)

Written research paper – 30% (Due last week of class)

Oral report on research – 15%

Class participation – 10%

Grading Scale:

100-96 = A
95-91 = A-
90-86 = B+
85-81 = B
80-76 = B-
75-71 = C+
70-66 = C
65-61 = C-
60-56 = D+
55-51 = D
50-46 = D-
45 and lower = F

Class Schedule

Week one: Introduction to the course and review of the syllabus

Crossing the Border

Week Two: Read “Border Crossings and the Transformation of Value and Valuers” (chapter six) in Hasting Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Oxford, UK: Berg, 1999), pp. 107-127.

Week Three: Read “Frontiers and Migration” (chapter five) in Malcolm Anderson, Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World (Cambridge, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), pp. 127-150.

Labor Migration

Week Four: Read Thomas J. Espenshade, “Unauthorized Immigration to the United States,” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 21 (1995), pp. 195-216.

Week Five: Read “Europe’s Immigrant Integration Crises,” (chapter one) in Patrick Ireland, Becoming Europe: Immigration, Integration and the Welfare State (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), pp. 1-26. The first paper is due Thursday.

Ethnic Cleansing

Week Six: Read “Forced Migrations: Prehistory and Classification” (chapter two) in Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004), pp. 17-48.

Week Seven: Read Elza-Bair Guchinova, “Deportation of the Kalmyks (1943-1956): Stigmatized Ethnicity,” (chapter seven) in Uyama Tomohiko, ed., Empire, Islam, and Politics in Central Eurasia, Slavic Eurasian Studies, no. 14 (Sapporo, Japan: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2007), pp. 187-221.

Week Eight: Read Introduction and Piotr Pykel, “The Expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia,” (chapter one) in Steffen Prausser and Arfon Rees, eds., The Expulsion of the ‘German’ Communities from Eastern Europe at the End of the Second World War (Florence, Italy: European University Institute, 2004), pp. 1-20.

Week Nine: Read Rosemarie M. Esber, “Rewriting the History of 1948: The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Question Revisited,” Holy Land Studies, vol. 4, no. 1 (2005), pp. 55-72. The second paper is due Thursday.

Ethnic “Return” Migration

Week Ten: Read “Did they jump or were they pushed?” (chapter one) in Hilary Pilkington, Migration, Displacement and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 3-22.

Week Eleven: Read “18 May 1944: The Deportation of Crimean Tatars” (chapter one) in Forced Migration Project of the Open Society Institute, Crimean Tatars: Repatriation and Conflict Prevention, (New York: Open Society Institute, 1996, pp. 11-28.

Week Twelve: Read Rainer Ohliger and Rainer Munz, “Minorities into Migrants: Making and Un-Making Central and Eastern Europe’s Ethnic German Diasporas,” Diaspora, vol. 11, no. 1 (2002), pp. 45-83. Watch the documentary, Through the Red Gate. The third paper is due Thursday.

Student Research

Week Thirteen: Student oral presentations.

Week Fourteen: Student oral presentations.

Week Fifteen: Student oral presentations.

Week Sixteen: Student oral presentations continued.

Week Seventeen: Written version of the research paper due and concluding remarks.