Jupiter, FL (September 2011) — At Florida Atlantic University’s Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College, members of the faculty and administration conduct the type of research that they hope their students will emulate.  The result has been a massive outpouring of valuable scholarship ever since the college was founded.  One of the school’s most productive scholars, Dr. Timothy Steigenga, who also serves as Chair of Social Sciences and Humanities, has published a number of books and articles, including several co-authored by other scholars in his field.  Dr. Steigenga’s newest book, co-authored with Marie Friedmann Marquardt, Phillip J. Williams, and Manuel A. Vásquez, was not only released this year, but it was also immediately incorporated into the Honors College curriculum. The book, titled Living Illegal: The Human Face of Unauthorized Immigration, provides a fresh perspective on the highly controversial topic of immigration.
            Dr. Steigenga has made a specialty of studying Latin America and its relationship to the United States.  He is well known for his expertise in the field of Guatemalan immigration to the USA in general and to Jupiter in particular.  From 2002-2008 he worked as part of a team of researchers funded by the Ford Foundation to study Guatemalan, Brazilian, and Mexican immigrants in South Florida and Georgia.  During the summer of 2010, Dr. Steigenga accepted a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where he began work on Living Illegal with the assistance of Sandra Lazo de la Vega, an Honors College alumna who interned at Wilson and did extensive background research for the book. The goal of the authors was to produce a book that would be accessible to American non-academics as well as university students and professors.
      The book focuses on the individual lives of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S., paying close attention to the difficult circumstances they face while travelling to and living in the United States, including economic hardships, social issues, and deportation.  The work offers insights into immigrant life that the authors hope will provide the basis for a more rational discussion about immigration policy in the United States.  Dr. Steigenga and his colleagues wanted to reframe the debate about illegal immigration in the U.S.  “We realized by speaking to different groups that people’s minds are already mostly made up about immigration before we meet them,” explains Dr. Steigenga. “They need a human connection to change their perspective.  It’s easy to see immigrants as an ‘other,’ but we hope that this book will allow readers to see them as people.”
            Each of the co-authors wrote chapters of the book based on their individual research emphases, then circulated their contributions among the group for editing.  This fall, students enrolled in Dr. Steigenga’s immigration course, co-taught with Dr. Christopher Strain (who gained some national acclaim last year as the author of Reload, a study of violence in America), have already been using the book to help guide their class discussions. Living Illegal has also been introduced at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where Dr. Steigenga recently spoke at a book release event attended by an audience composed of college students, faculty, and Gainesville residents. He hopes that Living Illegal will be able to give readers an insider’s view of the complexities of unauthorized immigration.  “This book offers a look under the hood of the immigration debate, so to speak,” explains Dr. Steigenga. “We’re hoping that this book will make the light bulb turn on in the minds of people who have had an incomplete understanding of the issue.”

byline: WHC Student Intern Megan Geiger