The Department of Sociology welcomed Dr. Irene Bloemraad to UBC this summer as a Professor. Dr. Bloemraad joined us from the University of California, Berkeley.
In addition to her position in our Department, Dr. Bloemraad is cross-appointed as a Professor in the Department of Political Science and is now the Co-Director of the Centre of Migration Studies in the Faculty of Arts.
We spoke to Dr. Bloemraad about her research, interdisciplinary work, and role at the Centre for Migration Studies.
Dr. Irene Bloemraad
Could you tell us a bit about your research agenda?
My research examines migration and politics in all of its diversity. So I study immigrants as political actors, immigration as the subject of politics, and the consequences of migration for political communities.
This also means that my work spans common sub-fields in political science. Some of it fits in Canadian or US politics, political behavior, and public opinion. For example, I have a recent article in the Canadian Journal of Political Science that looks at whether Canadians are less willing to support immigrants who have fallen out of legal status as compared to citizens, looking specifically at situations where a person is subject to arbitrary police stops or is going hungry. We find that Canadians do treat people differently based on legal status – and this largely replicates similar research I did in California.
But I’m also a comparative researcher. My first book compared immigrants’ acquisition of citizenship and their success in running for office in Canada and the United States. A later article extended the analysis of immigrant electoral success to Western Europe.
And, touching on another sub-field, last year I published an article with the political theorist Sarah Song that bridges normative and empirical social science. It considers the normative and on-the-ground implications of mass legalization programs for the rule of law. I have also written with the political philosopher Will Kymlicka and I am a long-time participant in debates about multiculturalism.
What motivates the kind of research you do?
I want my research to speak to audiences across academic disciplines and to speak to public debates on immigration. The politics of migration are so fraught. I want to bring thoughtful, evidence-based insights to that conversation. I’ll be co-directing UBC’s Centre for Migration Studies with Professor Antje Ellermann. I hope to build up a policy and research brief series at CMS to make our academic work relevant to policymakers, the public, and community organizations.
My personal experience also plays an important part in my research interests. I’ve been a migrant multiple times in my life. I’ve held a range of temporary visas status and I’ve gone through the permanent immigration and citizenship systems of two countries.
My mother, who was born in the Netherlands, ran for city council unsuccessfully when we lived in Saskatoon. I really admire the fortitude and civic-mindedness that she and other immigrants show when they get involved. They work, raise families, pay taxes, and care about their neighborhoods like those born in Canada. But they can face push-back when they speak out because of their accent, where they were born, what they look like, or their religious traditions. Who counts as a member of our political community? When do ‘they’ become a part of ‘us’? These two questions are core to the research program I co-direct at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
What projects are you currently working on?
I plan to continue my work on how the general public views immigrants, with a particular focus on inequities at the intersection of legal status and ethno-racial background.
But beyond what people think, I am even more interested in how we change opinions. How does framing immigration, whether as a matter of economic growth, or human rights, or national values, affect what people think? My collaborators and I have been using survey experiments to test the resonance and effectiveness of various political frames.
I also want to expand how we think about migrants and politics. Political science, especially in North America, tends focus on voting, political parties and elections. But immigrants cannot vote until they become citizens, and those without a pathway to citizenship are always on the sidelines of electoral politics. This doesn’t mean that they are silent or quiescent within the political community, however. I have a book project with a former UC-Berkeley colleague, Kim Voss, where we are taking stock of immigrant protest and collective action since the founding of the United States. I want to bring insights from research on social movements, a rich field in sociology, into political science.
You’re cross-appointed in both the Department of Political Science and the Department of Sociology. What kind of role does interdisciplinary research serve in your work?
It is absolutely critical. Studying migration and citizenship demands an interdisciplinary approach. International migration is about crossing political borders, so understanding laws and politics is critical. Furthermore, your visa or legal status affects your rights and what you can do, such as voting, but also your freedom to work, study, receive public benefits, and more.
Additionally, being an immigrant is a dance between seeking acceptance and belonging in the place you live but often also retaining who you are and where you’ve been. I think that sociologists have been leading the way in tackling these questions of integration, legal status, and identity. In Term 2, I’ll be teaching a graduate class on migration in Political Science, but it is also cross-listed with Sociology. My syllabus will be deeply interdisciplinary.
It sounds like your research uses different methods. Do you have a preferred methodology or data that you use?
Just like how my research is cross-disciplinary, my work also crosses methods. I’ve done quantitative analyses of census and survey data, and used survey experiments. That is often with co-authors who have deep expertise in particular datasets, so I learn from them.
I’ve used indepth interviewing extensively. These tend to be long interviews, often one to two hours, where you ask open-ended questions to learn how people interpret and think about the world, as well as understand their lived experiences over long stretches of time. I have previously taught classes on interviewing as a methodology and would be eager to do that here at UBC.
Recently, I’ve started to learn more about new techniques in computational social sciences, especially machine learning and natural language processing. Working with a co-author, we tested whether you could use these methods to identify immigrant-serving organizations out of a large corpus of thousands of names of community organizations. I was pretty skeptical, but the best model was astonishingly good. That was a few years ago, so it is already an ‘old’ model.
Looking forward, I would love to use computation techniques to study the way that those who advocate for immigrants and those who oppose migration make claims on government and the public, as well as the degree to which some claims resonate more than others. I’d like to do this across countries and across time. I’d be excited to work with students who want to apply new computational methods to migration studies.
As you begin your position at UBC, what are you most excited about?
I’m really excited about joining the Centre for Migration Studies. It is remarkable how CMS has grown in such a short time. My understanding is that CMS is the first interdisciplinary research centre in the Faculty of Arts here at UBC. Within a few short years, it has dozens of affiliates across campus as well as a huge $12 million grant as part of the pan-Canada Bridging Divides research program.
I want CMS to be known as the pre-eminent centre for migration in Western Canada and to be on the map globally. That means getting the word out on the amazing research already being conducted on the UBC campus, as well as nurturing new research.
But it also means becoming a centre for training students and early career researchers. This year, Professor Ellermann and I will launch the inaugural cohort for UBC’s new Certificate in Migration Studies. We also hope to leverage the fact that the American Political Science Association meetings will take place in Vancouver in 2025 to bring a global group of researchers to CMS for a series of workshops ahead of the meetings.
I have so many ideas! The challenge will be finding enough hours in the day and also learning to prioritize.
Outside of work, what do you like to do for fun?
That is part of my “enough hours in the day” challenge! I believe strongly in the importance of work/life balance, but I find that it can be hard to achieve. I’m really looking forward to getting outside and exploring British Columbia and I want to make that part of my weekly routine.
I love hiking and biking and I hope to bike to campus most days, as long as it is not raining too hard. I spent my formative years in Saskatoon, so I’m not a big alpine skier, but I like cross-country skiing and want to try to snowshoeing. I’d love suggestions of people’s favorite hiking, biking and cross-country ski trails!
I also want to get out on the water more. My husband and I have already tried stand-up paddle board and kayaking at Jericho Beach and loved it. I used to swim competitively, and so I’m attracted to the idea of trying open water swimming. But I’m not entirely sure I’m ready for the cold Pacific waters.
