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Home > News & Events > CLA Today Archive > Fall/Winter 2003-04 : Creating World Citizens

Creating world citizens

by Karin Winegar

The whole world and its increasingly mobile people are Helga Leitner's turf: In her teaching and research, Leitner, professor of geography, draws from a broad theoretical base in the social sciences to focus on the challenges of migration and immigration, cultural and residential integration, and the collision of values and cultures.

Understanding how newcomers adapt and how Minnesotans and other indigenous Americans react to them is central to Leitner's research and teaching. So is negotiating that interaction.

“Acknowledging differences is crucial, but what's most important is showing respect for difference,” she says. “It is not sufficient to be tolerant.”

Leitner understands something of the immigrant experience firsthand: After several years on the geography faculty of the University of Vienna—where she received her Ph.D. in 1978—she came to Minnesota in 1985 as an Austrian citizen. This wasn't her first trip—she had been a visiting professor here—but her “period of adjustment" lasted roughly ten years.

That didn't stop her from being productive. Over the years, she has received more than a dozen research grants for her prolific and pathbreaking work on the timely trio of urban development and sustainability, transnational migration and immigration, and environmental justice.

That work is at the core of her teaching. “All the courses I teach have an international component,” says Leitner, whose undergraduate courses “Population in an Interacting World" and “Transnational Migration and the Politics of Citizenship" take students through the challenges of migration and diaspora.

Countering negative messages

Public discourse both locally and nationally focuses on immigration as a problem to be solved, says Leitner. The negative messages “are not lost on people,” she notes.

“Putting greater emphasis on the contributions immigrants have made and are making to the economy, the culture, and the public purse is really important,” Leitner says. “I try to teach students the value of knowing and appreciating different cultures." Leitner adds that recent immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America into the mostly European Midwest has sorely challenged Minnesotans' capacity for embracing change and respecting difference.

“Small towns in outstate Minnesota, places that have been almost exclusively white, are changed suddenly and dramatically, culturally and racially,” says Leitner. “If you combine this new diversity with other dramatic transformations that these towns are undergoing, such as loss of local business, the indigenous people feel sold out, a loss of control. It is unsettling.”

Despite perceptions of disruption, Leitner says her research confirms that little real competition exists between long-term residents and new immigrants. In other words, if businesses disappear, it's not because of immigration. Indeed, immigration can boost small-town economies, bringing in new businesses, new producers and consumers of goods and services, and, of course, workers.

Race-based thinking is deeply embedded in the American psyche, says Leitner, and assumptions about race inevitably shape how Americans think about and react to immigrants. Indeed, she notes, such thinking may be the single most serious obstacle to cross-cultural understanding, communication, and cooperation.

Leitner's research on adaptation and incorporation of immigrants into host societies has broad implications for public policy on issues such as race and environmental equity. It's no accident, Leitner observes, that exposure to environmental hazards is generally greater in poor and immigrant communities and communities of color. In Minneapolis's Phillips neighborhood, for example one of the poorest and most racially diverse neighborhoods in the Twin Cities—geographic surveys show comparatively high concentrations of chemical pollutants.

Leitner routinely presents her research findings at national and international conferences, most recently at the Color Lines Conference at Harvard University, which brought together academics, public policy makers, and civil rights activists from across the country to discuss the present and future of racial inequalities and racial integration in the U.S.

Negotiating diversity

For communities, immigration issues are complicated by divergent views of how power and authority should be exercised and what constitutes justice for immigrants. With Kathy Fennelly of the Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs, Leitner is addressing some of these issues in an ongoing study of immigrant-host society relations in Faribault, Minn., where they are interviewing new immigrants from Somalia, Sudan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Central America, and Mexico as well as local residents of European descent.

Among other things, Leitner has examined attitudes toward citizenship—specifically, the question of dual citizenship. What nation do immigrants call home? Where are their loyalties? With vast transnational migration, Leitner wonders, “Will dual citizenship become the norm or will it be resisted by nation states who fear it will undermine their sovereignty?”

As the U.S. becomes increasingly tied to the rest of the world economically, politically, and culturally, “The American position that the American way is the 'right' way is increasingly challenged,” says Leitner. “There are a wealth of ideas and ways of life in the rest of the world.

“I am concerned about how can we help people realize and rethink their preconceptions. Globalization means we have to try to figure out what needs to be done to create and foster sustainable multiracial and multicultural societies.

“What makes me optimistic is I see students who want to learn about other parts of the world, other languages, to develop greater understanding and awareness of an increasingly interconnected world.”