Immigration is a topic students learn about throughout their education. The emphasis, however, tends to be placed upon immigration history instead of the future. I was pleasantly surprised to see that a great deal of this course focused on immigration in New York City right now, and its future prospects.
Personally, I learn best through discussion, which is something our class did not seem to have a problem with. I value the role of numbers, so to speak, in these discussions but doubtlessly got a lot more out of my interview with an established immigrant and my own immigration essay than I did out of research for my statistical profile. Although I understand why categories were assigned here, perhaps if we had been given the discretion to select a group to study, the process would have been more eye-opening. I do better when studying something I am truly interested in.
This has been a reading-intensive course, and the assignments were few but always extremely time-consuming. We learned about theories of migration and histories of immigrant groups, but the most memorable classes for me involved discussions of recent newspaper articles. I am fortunate to know a fair amount about the history of immigration in New York City, so the highlights of this class were the times I was introduced to new concepts, such as flaws in our current immigration system.
At the end of the day, this class made me think, which is something I value. The course load was heavy, but there were certainly a number of highly memorable discussions and concepts.
