Quarterly Progress Report on St. Cloud State University Research Group on Immigrant Workers

Quarterly Progress Report on St. Cloud State University Research Group on Immigrant Workers in Minnesota Research Project on the Social Conditions of Immigrant Workers in Minnesota

Progress Description:

To date, several key components of this research project are underway including research, community collaboration, and student participation. Project 1 progress: Chukwunyere Ugochukwu (CMTY) has sent SCSU students to 6 cities in Minnesota to examine small towns in Minnesota physical, in order to understand recent Latino immigrants’ connections to the rest of the community physically, spiritually, economically, politically, environmentally, socially, and culturally while exploring housing, cultural, and recreational amenities physical layout. The communities examined includes: Gaylord, Glenco, Cold spring, Wilmar, Shakopee, and Melrose. The study required obtaining such archival information as current comprehensive plans, land use and zoning plans, and demographic data. In addition, observation surveys as well as drive-bys were conducted, including photographing to document those things in the built environment that were not currently captured in any of the archival data. Some preliminary findings indicated that communities of color in four out of the six communities examined were clustered in designated parts of the communities. In one case for example, the community of color were observed to be just outside the delineated city boundary, therefore was not captured in the planning documents. In another, the community of color is nonexistent in plain sight. There is no recognition of their existence by the community’s planning officials. Students presented their findings to the public at the recent Global Goes Local: Social Conditions of Immigrant Workers in Minnesota Conference held at St. Cloud State University April 12-13th.

Project 2 Progress Report: Paul Greider (SOC) and Ajay Panicker (SOC) conducted preliminary interviews with Somali elders and social service providers in St. Cloud on patterns of incorporation into St. Cloud’s labor markets and trends in migration to St. Cloud, especially networks that aid in their arrival to the St. Cloud region. They have also developed a core of students whom they are sending into the ‘field’ to conduct semi-structured interviews that trace where these immigrants worked in their home countries and their work experiences since they arrived in the US to present. These interviews are being conducted at the moment and will be conducted throughout the summer and into the fall semester.

1 2 Somali elders and activists and a staff member of a local Somali employment service, administered by Lutheran Social services, participated on a panel with Greider and Panicker on the work related issues facing Somali immigrants in St. Cloud at the moment. They also discussed the importance of this kind of research for expanding understanding of Somali immigrant communities’ incoporation into labor markets in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and throughout the US.

Project 3: Edward Greaves (POLSCI) and Stephen Philion (SOC) also conducted preliminary interviews in the spring semester with Latino immigrant workers in Stearns County and decided to broaden their focus from agricultural workers to Latino workers in general. The focus, however, remains on networks immigrant workers draw on and develop in the process of finding work and also dealing with police surveillance/harassment, which has become especially pertinent in the aftermath of the recently signed Arizona Law giving police officers the right to arrest someone for not having proof of citizenship. In the process of conducting interviews with social service workers, government workers, and police, it appears that the threat of and number of deportations is increasing. We are interested in finding out what kind of networks immigrants have available for support, at the local and state level in the face of such threats. A team of 5 undergraduate and graduate students have been assigned the task of helping with conducting the interviews throughout the summer and the fall. All of the students are fluent in Spanish and are conducting transcription when taping is not possible. Interviews are being arranged with the help of a social service organization that aids Latino workers in Cold Spring and in the Stearns County region. This gatekeeper has also helped with formulating questions being asked during interviews.

Greatest Success: The biggest success thus far was our ability to incorporate these three research projects into the recent conference on immigrant workers in Minnesota, held at St. Cloud State University, April 12-13. These panels were packed and attracted audiences that included local community activists, social service providers, and students from Central Minnesota and the Twin Cities. The panels consisted of people in the community who have helped with the projects and who, in some instances, also contributed to questions that projects have asked. The conference was an ideal chance to showcase how this kind of research on immigrant workers’ communities can be done, even under time constraints that MnSCU professors face due to heavy teaching and committee work. The SCSU Faculty Research Group on Immigrant Workers plans on holding another similar conference next year. At that conference the three research projects will be featured again, and this time they will be featuring data findings from the interviews and also plans for dissemination in academic journals and conferences nationally or internationally.

2 Another noteworthy success has been the involvement of students in this project. For the students this has been not simply ‘eye opening’, but given them a sense of how they can learn from recent immigrants about something that they have in common with themselves, namely identities as people who need to work for a living. This approach to research has lessened the perceived and sometimes exaggerated ‘cultural differences’ between recent immigrant communities and students at SCSU. Finally, one other success in terms of our goals with this grant is the involvement in the project of students from underrepresented communities. Although it did not exclusively determine who was asked to help conduct interviews, it is something that we tried to build into part of the project as it has proceeded.

Challenges: Overall the key challenge has been time (!). Because the research groups consisted of professors who teach 4-4 class loads and also were busy putting together and participating in the recent , the possibility of conducting as many interviews as we hoped during spring semester was not as great as initially expected. However, the plan to involve students in the projects has been a very wise use of resources given that challenge. And we expect that by the end of 2010 we will have met our goals in terms of quantity and quality of interviews conducted. Another challenge that exists is that the SCSU Faculty Research Group on Immigrant Workers in Minnesota is still relatively new (only really in existence for less than a year)). Thus, while we were very successful in putting on a two day conference that met our goals of involving community and students in the broader academic discussion on the conditions of immigrant workers in the US, our contacts in the community remain comparatively limited yet. This will remain a challenge, but one that we expect will become smaller with time and experience. Finally, as with any project, ‘things come up’, one of which included the recent earthquake in Chile. Since one of the members of the research project on Latino workers (Greaves) has family in Chile and also coordinates our SCSU Study Abroad program in Concepcion, he was ‘distracted’ for about two months with that very pressing crisis. However, this is now something that thankfully has not pulled him away from the research and it continues apace. These kind of problems inevitably arise with this kind of project, which fortunately the timeline extension to January 2011 has helped greatly to minimize.