Immigration scholar earns top faculty award

Mark J. Miller, Emma Smith Morris Professor of Political Science and International Relations, has been named the 2007 recipient of the Francis Alison Award, the University’s highest faculty honor.

Established in 1978 by the Board of Trustees, the Alison Award recognizes the scholarship, professional achievements and dedication of the UD faculty.

Miller’s research has focused on international migration issues, which have received increasing attention in today’s world.

“Mark Miller’s outstanding scholarship, teaching, writing and international reputation as an expert on immigration issues exemplify the qualities represented by the Francis Alison Award,” President David P. Roselle says. “He is well deserving of this recognition for his many contributions here and abroad.”

In announcing the award at the University’s Named Professors Dinner in May, Provost Dan Rich said, “Mark Miller has had a distinguished career as a scholar and teacher. He is recognized internationally for his research on international immigration. He also is a frequent consultant to international organizations on a wide range of immigration issues. His contributions as a UD faculty member for three decades have earned the respect of his colleagues and the appreciation of his many students.”

Miller says he learned about the issues of immigrants and guest workers firsthand because he once was one. He spent three summers in France doing manual work with masons and other laborers in the Maritime Alps.

“My junior year at the University of Wisconsin was a crucible year for me,” he says. “I had a full scholarship to France at Aix-en-Provence, and then I returned every summer to work.” He became what he calls a “francofou,” meaning he was crazy about France. He says he felt he came full circle when he returned to France to teach as a visiting professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Lyon in 2005.

Immigration was an “esoteric topic,” in those early days, Miller says, and did not attract much attention when he was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees. He received a scholarship from the French government for research on immigrant political participation in Western Europe at L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, writing his dissertation on foreign worker participation and representation in France, Switzerland and Germany.

“I did a historical overview of migration and guest workers, and what I discovered was that the system was not working out as planned and anticipated,” he says. “Instead of leaving, many workers formed settlements in their adopted countries and were becoming a political force.”

His research attracted attention, and he was asked to discuss his findings with a U.S. Justice Department task force on illegal Mexican immigration in 1977. That was the first of many such sessions during his career, which has included testifying before Congress and several U.S. commissions and consulting with the U.S. departments of State and Labor, the International Labor Organization and the United Nations.

Thirty years after Miller began studying the subject, the debate has changed, and immigration has become a political issue, he says, with an estimated 12-14 million illegal immigrants in the United States. He says he considers himself a centrist on immigration issues, and much of his current research concerns the use of sanctions against companies that hire illegal immigrants. Among the measures he recommends are instituting counterfeit-resistant documentation to prove eligibility and requiring companies to maintain records.

“Migration, radical minorities and their integration or lack of it into society, and security are major concerns facing developed countries,” Miller says. “Populations are becoming increasingly diverse, and events like immigrant marches in the United States underscore the significance of migration.”

Miller, who joined the UD faculty in 1978, has written more than 100 articles, chapters and monographs on immigration and served as editor of the International Migration Review, the leading scholarly journal in the field. He is the author or coauthor of The War on Terror in Comparative Perspective; Foreign Workers in Western Europe: An Emerging Political Force; The Unavoidable Issue: United States Immigration Policy in the 1980s; Administering Foreign Worker Programs: Lessons from Europe; and The Age of Migration.