Pardee Center Hosts Conference on How Migrants Impact Their Homelands

Experts from a variety of disciplines and from around the world met at Pardee House on Friday, September 25, 2009, to present at a conference on How Migrants Impact their Homelands. The authors’ conference was part of a research project of the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, being led by Pardee Center Faculty Fellow Prof. Susan Eckstein and Pardee Center Director Prof. Adil Najam.

This conference brought together project participants who presented their papers and discussed each other’s papers. The final output of the project is expected to be an edited book containing these papers.

The meeting began with an overview paper from Alejandro Portes of Princeton University. This was followed by presentations on the Philippines by Rhacel Parrenas (Brown University), on Mozambique by Victor Agadjanian (Arizona State University), on Mexico by David Fitzgerald (University of California, San Diego), on Cuba by Susan Eckstein (Boston University), on El Salvador by Jose Cruz (Vanderbilt University), on Ukraine by Cinzia Solari (University of California, Berkeley), on Vietnam by Hung Cam Thai (Pomona College), on Turkey by Riva Kastoryano (Sciences–Po, France), on China by Min Ye (Boston University), on India by Kyle Eischen (University of California, Santa Cruz) and on Pakistan by Adil Najam and Nabeela Ahmed (Boston University).

Participants discussed the social, economic, cultural, and political effects diasporas in different regions of the world have on the country they originally came from.

The conference program and list of participants are available here.