SANDRA BERMANN: Good morning.

STEPHEN MACEDO: Hi.

How are you?

SANDRA BERMANN: How are you?

SUBJECT: Coffee all?

SANDRA BERMANN: Yes.

Coffee would be great, thank you.

STEPHEN MACEDO: Me too, please.

Thank you.

SANDRA BERMANN: You know, the whole question

of migration through the ages --

since biblical times, we've had it.

But now, in our lived history, we have a refugee crisis.

We have more migration than we've had since World War II.

And I started thinking about this community

and the possibility of having one

in doing my own work on translation studies but also

literary history and started to realize

how much I needed to know to talk about some

of these things in the current period.

So I went to a couple of colleagues

and talked with them, learned a lot,

and started to think about how much

it would mean to have a group of faculty

from roundabout campus who could talk about these things

and, in innovative ways, share knowledge,

share ways of thinking about this issue,

and how, eventually, this could have a huge ripple effect

on campus through our teaching, through having

student affiliates, graduate and undergraduates.

And, perhaps, over time, we will see

opportunities for changing the public discourse

and developing it into something that

can create better solutions or at least

better debates about them.

STEPHEN MACEDO: Yeah.

We probably need to understand why people see this issue,

you know, so differently, disagree so widely --

where they're coming from, what their perceptions

are, what their misperceptions are,

and how this can be clarified.

One of the things I find most interesting

is that this is an issue that doesn't

cut across the usual left-right divide cleanly.

There are liberals that worry about high levels

of immigration because of the impact on the working class.

There are conservatives that worry

about high levels of immigration both for that reason

but also because of effects on the culture

and because of concerns about cultural stability.

On the other hand, there are progressives

that are in favor, of course, of high levels of immigration,

generous policy towards refugees and poorer

migrants from abroad.

And, likewise, there are conservatives

who believe in open markets and open borders, a little

more libertarian.

So these issues are difficult ones

for both of the major political parties, in a way.

And it makes them interesting.

Then the question of who is a refugee

is a central one that hasn't been all together settled.

It's a disputed category in international law.

And are people that move out of great poverty refugees

or merely economic migrants?

A lot of these issues need a lot more attention

as a matter of policy and law.

SANDRA BERMANN: Absolutely.

And one of the fascinating things

is the whole use of language and translation, because what

if you are migrant and you do not

understand the language of the country

into which you've migrated?

To have good translation that's consistent --

these questions have always fascinated me.

And I think those were some of the issues that attracted me,

at the beginning, trying to think about this much more

broadly.

So there are all these questions in the humanities

that fit into this larger issue of migration.

STEPHEN MACEDO: I guess another question

is, you know, what does it mean to be an American?

And what does it mean to be French in periods of rising

and large-scale immigration?

How do narratives change?

And I know that scholars of literature are studying that.

SANDRA BERMANN: Absolutely.

I mean, the question of narratives and narratives

of migration is absolutely huge and crosses the disciplines.

And we each look at it very differently.

But if you think of, as you were saying,

the narratives that tell us our nationhood

or why governments choose certain programs --

migration programs -- then there are also

the journalists’ stories that try

to get very close to the migrant lives and can be short

or in book form.

And then there are, of course, all the literary narratives --

literary and filmic, visual arts, music --

that explore other aspects of it.

So it's a huge question -- a huge cultural question.

STEPHEN MACEDO: Yeah.

And one of the exciting things about the research community

is that scholars bring all of these different perspectives

to bear.

I mean, some people are unnerved by these changes in what it

means to be an American.

SANDRA BERMANN: Of course.

STEPHEN MACEDO: But the American story

is one of constant change.

SANDRA BERMANN: Absolutely.

STEPHEN MACEDO: And it's great strength

that we have an immigrant history.

SANDRA BERMANN: It's so interesting

to hear what other national perspectives are on this, which

can be very different, and to have people in our research

community who are working on, you know, the Pacific Asian

world, who are working on Europe and also

Latin America and the U.S. and many other parts of the world,

the Middle East.

So it's really very interesting comparatively, as well,

in terms of region.

STEPHEN MACEDO: Yeah.

And we've got here some of the best scholars in the Woodrow

Wilson School, sociology, political science,

in my neck of the woods, also -- philosophy, economics --

working on both the empirical and the moral dimensions

of these questions.

And I look forward to, you know, doing more.

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