Immigration in Europe - HumanitarianNet - Universidad de Deusto

INTRODUCTION 25making. Gallagher, based on US experience, emphasises the impactacademics and advocates can have on policy, if they work closelytogether and are sufficiently well organised. She clearly believes, nodoubt rightly, that European academics and advocates have a long wayto go in this direction by comparison with their American counterparts.Pace sees local level activity by “the movements of civil society”,working at the level of schools and work-places, as virtually the onlyhope of stemming the outlandish fears of the Italian public aboutforeigners taking away their jobs, schools and identity.Ruiz, on the other hand, is less sanguine about the contribution ofNGOs to improving immigration policy in Spain. The number of theseorganisations working in the area of migration has “grown spectacularly”in recent years but, at the same time, their independence, and thereforetheir capacity to have a “transformative” effect on society, has beencompromised by their economic dependence on public funds. They havebecome, in effect, subcontractors to “the powers that be”, supplyingservices that are legitimised by government policy.These remarks hold a warning also for academics working in theimmigration and refugee field, for they also are often dependent ongovernment funding and they certainly strive to make their research“relevant” to problems as perceived and defined by policy makers. Weshould like to end this Introduction by suggesting that, paradoxically,academic research is likely to have a more beneficial impact on policy,the more distanced it is from the immediate concerns and preoccupationsof policy makers and from the concepts and categories by which thoseconcerns and preoccupations are structured. 7How to bridge the so-called “research-practice divide” is a familiartopic of debate in any problem-oriented field of enquiry. At first sight,the answer seems obvious. If we want our research to influence policy,then we had better define its aims and objectives in terms of categoriesand concepts which are employed by policy makers. This was theapproach adopted by refugee studies, when it emerged as a field ofacademic enquiry in the 1980s. Its concern to be “relevant” and, itmust be admitted, its need for funding, led it to adopt policy relatedcategories and concerns in defining its subject matter and setting itsresearch agenda. The trouble with this approach is that the categoriesand concepts employed by policy makers may not be helpful —indeed,they are likely to be downright unhelpful— when it comes to thepursuit of scientific understanding. This, after all, is not their main7 The following paragraphs are based upon an argument also presented in TURTON(in press, 2003).