The Immigration History Research Center (IHRC) is an interdisciplinary research center in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. Founded in 1965, the IHRC promotes research on migration with a special emphasis on immigration to the U.S. It sponsors seminars, lectures and workshops that bring highly specialized researchers from the academic world into dialogue with each other and with university and high school students and their teachers, with journalists, photographers and filmmakers, and with communities of immigrants and ethnic Americans. The IHRC especially seeks to enrich contemporary debates about international migration—so often heated, emotional, and unrelated to facts—from historical and scholarly perspectives.
The IHRC is proud to have built one of the largest and most important collections of materials documenting U.S. immigration and refugee life to be found anywhere in the world. It yearly welcomes not only student and faculty researchers from the University and from Minnesota communities but researchers from a wide variety of disciplines from North America and the wider world.
Famous quotes containing the words immigration, history, research and/or center:
“The admission of Oriental immigrants who cannot be amalgamated with our people has been made the subject either of prohibitory clauses in our treaties and statutes or of strict administrative regulations secured by diplomatic negotiations. I sincerely hope that we may continue to minimize the evils likely to arise from such immigration without unnecessary friction and by mutual concessions between self-respecting governments.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“The working woman may be quick to see any problems with children as her fault because she isn’t as available to them. However, the fact that she is employed is rarely central to the conflict. And overall, studies show, being employed doesn’t have negative effects on children; carefully done research consistently makes this clear.”
—Grace Baruch (20th century)
“Whenever there’s a big war coming on, you should rope off a big field. And on the big day, you should take all the kings and their cabinets and their generals, put ‘em in the center dressed in their underpants and let them fight it out with clubs. The best country wins.”
—Maxwell Anderson (1888–1959)