Topic: immigration and education

I’m beginning to think that I need to figure out how to integrate these two parallel tracks about rhetoric: on the one hand, public education is about what sort of citizens we want other people’s children to be. On the other, the current anti-immigrant rhetoric has defined citizenship to the level of taxpayer (“I work hard and pay my taxes, and these immigrants come and use all the services”). But when you point out that immigrants actually pay more in taxes than they use in services (through Social Security taxes they won’t collect, sales taxes, etc. they pay, and through their reluctance to use services for fear of deportation), the argument doesn’t go away. The rhetoric is more powerful than the data. In the same way, the Global Economic Competitiveness narrative (promulgated by Nation at Risk) defines education as the task of creating good employees who become good taxpayers. (See the connection to the immigration narrative?) And, as in the immigration narrative, when you point out that there’s no evidence of a connection between education and economic development, the rhetoric still doesn’t go away.

So my challenge is how to create a “research question” that shows that no matter what data you have, if you don’t have a driving metanarrative it can fit into, it doesn’t change the argument. I think of it as a problem of making a humanities argument to a social scientist. Since social science tries to make predictions about the empirical world, it’s inherently quantitative (though it is becoming receptive to the need for qualitative analysis). In one way, I think that the humanities are like the “reality based media” of the Bush administration source in Ron Suskind’s article; they’re about making sense of world, while the social sciences are “an empire” attempting to “make reality” (bow to their will). So I’m trying to reconcile myself to the idea of a dissertation that doesn’t “solve a problem” but one that creates a compelling narrative (which I think is actually solving a problem, since really a dissertation is the act of creating a narrative that compels people to believe that you’ve actually defined the problem appropriately and that your solution solves the problem).

One solution a member of my committee suggested was to view it as a “translation equation” (those formulae that help people understand ideas that come from other disciplines). The act of putting various thinkers together is a creative act that can help others understand ideas they haven’t encountered in their discipline previously. That sounds convincing to me, but of course it would, wouldn’t it?