• Well over 244 million migrants live outside their birth country as of the last UN count in 2015. Some 43 million migrants live in the US—where are the other 201 million migrants?
• Why has global migration accelerated in the last 40 years?
• Why can’t the proverbial “search for a better life” happen any longer in migrants’ home countries?
• How has migrants’ ethnic diversity provoked a re-imagining of national identities worldwide?
• What is the impact of migration on gender relations in countries of origin and settlement, now that half the world’s migrants are female?

Migrant Interview Project

An interview is like taking a fieldtrip into someone else’s story. For the final assignment each student interviewed an immigrant or refugee and created a web-based project to tell their story. Our project draws inspiration from Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America by Warren Lehrer & Judith Sloan (2003). The book presents fascinating interviews with immigrants and refugees in Queens, a borough of New York City.

We take metropolitan Phoenix as our study site, an urban and transnational social landscape increasingly rich with “strangers, neighbors, aliens,” whose migration stories are every bit as intriguing as migrants in Queens. Building from the interdisciplinary social science approaches and perspectives on im/migration patterns and processes of our course, we look for migration stories “in the shadows between the superstores,” where we find the global has moved right in to our local communities. In conducting close-to-home expeditions, each student’s interview contributes to a collaborative, synergistic, whole picture of local migration that is more rich and complex than its separate parts. In Crossing the Valley, we cross the globe.