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miren.uriarte@umb.edu   Ph: 617-287-5790

TA:  Mandira Kala  mandira.kala@umb.edu

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\Partners:

Themes:

Tasks and Products. 

Practicum in Applied Research 2007-08

Course Description

The goal of the applied research practicum is to offer students an opportunity to engage in applied research in an area related to public policy.  Students and faculty engage as a group in a class research project conducted in partnership with a state, city, university or community-based institution.  Students are involved in the process of research design, of data collection and analysis and produce a report at the end of the practicum.

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  Our partners for this practicum will be the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy (MIRA) Coalition and, hopefully, the Massachusetts Office of Refugees and Immigrants (ORI).   

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This year’s practicum will focus on policy analysis with a special attention to the type of research necessary to make policy choices and/or implement new policy: for example, defining the policy issue, assessments of “best practices”, presenting alternatives, specific fact finding and developing avenues for stakeholder input.    We will not address all these, but this is the arena in which we will be working. 

The substantive theme of the practicum will be what we will tentatively call policies of “immigrant integration”, that is policies directed to the insertion of immigrants into social, economic and political life.  We sought this focus for the practicum for several reasons.  First of all, there is interest on the part of the Patrick Administration to move forward on an integration initiative.   This interest has become even more important as Congress failed to enact federal legislation that would provide some relief to the pressure states and localities are experiencing in the absence of a workable immigration policy. 

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I said tentative above because part of our task will be to understand clearly what “integration” means to policy makers and stakeholders.  “Immigrant” is also a term we will seek to clarify and to focus in our interactions with policy makers and our partners.  We will need to get up to speed quickly on major theoretical and empirical understanding of the immigrant adaptation process so that we can frame both the questions our partners will pose to us as well as the way in which we will approach the study. 

At this point, we are still open about the specific research questions that our practicum will address.  We will be defining those as we gain more knowledge of the issues and in discussion with our partners.  I have presented to them the following possibilities for products, which were expanded in discussion with MIRA in the ways I indicate:

• A review of policies focused on the integration of immigrants in Canada and Europe and their outcomes [documentary (library) research and interviews]
• A review policies being considered, proposed and/or implemented in the US focused on the integration of immigrants [documentary (library) research and interviews]
• An analysis of the policy context in Massachusetts, examining state and local initiatives [documentary (newspaper) research, interviews]
• An analysis of the immigrants’ perspectives on policies directed to their integration into the state’s social and economic life [Census (American Community Survey) data, interviews with leadership of key immigrant groups].

MIRA has added additional issues in which they are interested.  They include: 

• the economic impact of immigrants in MA (fits under 3 above),
• barriers to naturalization and citizenship (under 4),
• estimates of students who would be affected by in-state tuition,
• documentation, categorization and analysis of local immigrant policy initiatives in Mass (under 3 above), etc.