hi my name is Irene Blume rad I’m a
professor of sociology at the University
of California Berkeley I’m also the
Thomas garden Barnes chair of Canadian
Studies I have been with the Canadian
Institute for Advanced Research for the
last 10 years as a senior fellow so I’m
interested in when immigrants come into
democratic countries how do they become
part of civil society but then also how
does civil society and the political
system shift and change and how do the
people who are already living there
change their conceptions of membership
citizenship belonging in the face of
immigrant generated diversity in our
research we asked people if someone was
facing a situation of hunger serious
health issue or sexual harassment
whether the government should step in
and do something and we find that people
are much more likely to say the
government should step in when they talk
about a citizen compared to someone
who’s described as undocumented unlike
what we had hoped even when we use the
language of human rights people are more
likely to say the government should help
somebody who is a citizen than someone
who is not it was really surprising was
that the degree of support for helping
and getting the government involved was
higher for an undocumented immigrant
when we use the language of American
values than when we use the language of
human rights or the language of civil
rights and so one of the conclusions
from the research is that rights
language is not very effective in
increasing sort of the boundaries of
membership at least not as effective as
some kind of national values language
with communication technology and
transportation technology the way it is
it’s much quicker to move around the
globe but at the same time the borders
seem to be getting stronger and so this
issue of immigration of people moving
across borders has never been more
timely I’ve been involved in CFR for
about 10 years I think CFR really
influenced the way that I move to using
a survey based methodology that
experimental approach was something that
I saw in my interactions with various
groups of academics who are in different
disciplines than my
and what I really value about CFR is
that ability to get people into a room
from to talk across these boundaries
that we might have say between sociology
political science and economics
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