Asian Immigrants and Refugees in the United States: Rethinking the Immigration and Integration Paradigm

Opportunities and Challenges of Immigrant Integration Lecture Series

Professor Yen Le Espiritu
University of California, San Diego - Department of Ethnic Studies

When: Tuesday, April 1, 2008 : 3:00pm to 4:30pm

Location: University Park Campus, Doheny Memorial Library, 233

Conceptualizing immigration primarily as a problem to be solved, the dominant theories in the field of U.S. immigration studies have focused on immigrant cultural and economic adaptation and integration and on responses by U.S.-born Americans to this "problem." In this talk, I will argue that we need to study immigration not only for what it tells us about the assimilability of the immigrants but more so for what it says about the racialized and gendered economic, political, and cultural foundations of the United States. Drawing on the experiences of Asian immigrants and refugees in the United States, I will propose a move away from conceptualizing immigration and immigrants as objects of study, but more as sites of social critique-in order to illuminate and make intelligible a wider set of problems and processes such as colonization, war, globalization, and racism and their intimate connections to the movement of people worldwide.

About the Speaker
Yen Le Espiritu received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1990.  She is currently Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego.  Her latest book, Home Bound: Filipino American Lives Across Cultures, Communities, and Countries (UC Press, 2003), received two national book awards.  Her current research projects explore public commemorations of the Vietnam War and Vietnamese and Vietnamese American transnational lives.

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