4:02 p.m., Nov. 14, 2007--Mark J. Miller, Emma Smith Morris Professor of Political Science and International Relations at UD, delivered the inaugural Francis Alison Lecture Monday evening, Nov. 12, in Memorial Hall, before receiving a medal and a $10,000 check, along with public congratulations and official induction into the Francis Alison Society by UD President Patrick Harker.

The award, which was established by the Board of Trustees in 1978, the same year Miller joined UD's faculty, is given annually to a professor who exemplifies scholarship, professional achievement and dedication to UD.

“I will attest to the fact that Delaware is a good place,” said Harker in his congratulatory remarks, “and not just Delaware the state, but the University of Delaware. This is because of highly accomplished, passionate faculty and scholars who are passionate about their field and want to bring that passion to their students, and these are the faculty who are part of the Alison Society.”

UD Provost Dan Rich gave a brief history of the award and quipped, in light of the fact that Miller received the nomination last May, that “it is now the University's tradition that the faculty doesn't get the award until he or she gives the lecture.”

Miller thanked his family and colleagues and touched on his passion for his work before delivering his lecture “Sketching the Age of Migration,” which broadly summarized the 30-plus years of research he has invested in the topic of international migration patterns since the Mercantilist Age of the 17th and 18th centuries.

“International migration is not something that began in the 18th or 19th century,” Miller said, laying the framework. “There's a long history, and I would love to go through that with you, but I'm going to resist the temptation and begin with the 17th and 18th centuries. And I'm going to limit myself to the Trans-Atlantic zone, which is really my zone of expertise, though migration is a global phenomenon and always has been from time immemorial.”

Miller summarized how immigration and emigration were oppressed in the Mercantilist Age and then talked about how the settlement of American colonies impacted the Revolutionary War. He summarized immigration patterns from the early years of the American republic through the 1830s and on, when North America assimilated a large number of immigrants, due, initially, to the French Revolution.

“Something big was going on,” Miller said, “and that big thing was the French Revolution, which gave us a new norm, and the new norm was that immigration was a human right.”

It was the beginning of a new epoch, Miller said, adding that the new trend in international migration drove globalization between 1820 and the inter-war period, when about 60 million Europeans came to the United States and Canada. It was a migration, he said, that eventually involved nearly all of Europe, and it was a trend that gave way to a growing concern about immigration and its impact on American society at the end of the 19th century.

Miller made the point that “most people emigrate for economic purposes” and that “immigration is generally a good thing, because immigrants are moving from a place that is low-wage to a place that is high-wage,” which in general increases productivity. “That's the basic economic basis for migration,” he said. “But by the end of the 19th century, it was becoming apparent that immigration had different distributional effects.”

Miller said that because the people who benefited from migration were primarily employers and people with capital, the growing concern over the laboring masses became a rationale for the first federal sanctions limiting immigration to the United States.

Miller touched on some of the federal laws that limited immigration in the first half of the 20th century and said that this set the pace globally for sanctions on immigration “because the United States was at the center of the world already.”

Immigration slowed between World War I and World War II, Miller said, until a law in 1952 and further legislation in 1965 “opened the door to immigration a little more.” But, he added, “the Age of Migration really started circa 1970.”

Miller examined the various factors that gave rise to the Age of Migration, as well as tendencies that defined it, including the United States' relationship with Mexico. He touched on the Interagency Task Force formed in 1972, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and the ongoing failure to establish a credible employer sanctions system before directing his attention to the North American Free Trade Agreement, which went into effect in 1994.

Before being inducted by Harker into the Alison Society, Miller fielded questions from audience members. The evening was capped by a reception in his honor.

Miller earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Wisconsin and has taught at UD for nearly 30 years. He has been sought out by government and other organizations for his expertise on international migration, and in 2006 he served as a consultant to the United Nations and as codirector of the Fulbright Institute on U.S. national security and foreign policy from 2003-2005. He was a member of the Center for Strategic and International Studies Steering Group on population and U.S. foreign policy in 1993, has been a lecturer for the U.S. Department of State and has presented a series of lectures in Mexico, from 1991 to the present.

Additionally, he has written more than 100 articles, chapters and monographs on immigration and has served as the longtime editor of the International Migration Review, the leading and influential 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, which has been translated into Japanese and Spanish and will be published in its fourth edition in 2008.

Article by Becca Hutchinson
Photos by Kathy Atkinson