Of immigration and archives

I sing in the Chapel Choir with Gunther Peck, an associate professor of history at Duke.  He recently wrote an op-ed about Trump’s immigration policies.  I think he raises an interesting point about the importance of stories to address assumptions and prejudices — and especially to counteract falsehoods.  Perhaps this is a role that archives can help fill.

The government provides a number of resources for researching immigrants:

• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has both arrival and nationality records
• National Archives has some indices available online, and some of their records have been digitized by partners for online access.  David Ferriero recently wrote about research that has been done in NARA collections about Irish emigrants.

Additional archival collections related to the immigrant experience include:

• Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota
• Center for the History of the New America at the University of Maryland established the Archive of Immigrant Voices to collect stories of the experience of migration
• New York University has an Archives of Irish America
• Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota

For more insight about the creation of ethnic and immigrant archives, see this 2010 article in the American Archivist.