Throughout my doctoral studies in history at Emory University, I have become increasingly committed to educating current and future policy makers about immigration concerns.  Given recent events surrounding global refugee crises, immigration restrictions, and the resulting frustrations among historians who recognize these patterns in other historical contexts, I began to develop a hypothetical required reading list about immigration issues in history to circulate among policy makers in Washington, D.C. Shortly after posting my request for suggested ‘mandatory’ readings on social media, I was flooded with recommendations from my contacts. Their breadth of knowledge about scholarly and educational materials related to migration concerns undoubtedly helped to broaden mine.

One of my undergraduate colleagues at Rutgers, now Dr. Evan Taparata, revealed that he and numerous other scholars had collaborated at the University of Minnesota to develop the #ImmigrationSyllabus website about immigration concerns in history. As I read through the online resource, I realized that these scholars had already achieved many of my own objectives. Evan generously offered his time to speak with me about some of the goals and processes that underlined this initiative. My objective for this blog post is to highlight the development of the #ImmigrationSyllabus. A follow-up blog post will explore the numerous ways in which scholars, educators, and policy makers have applied the syllabus in their own work.