Teaching The Politics of Immigration: Empirical Tools and Evidence-Based Dialogue

By Angelica Remache Lopez, Political Science 

Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2026

Few topics arrive in the classroom carrying as much weight as immigration. When I became a GSI for “The Politics of Immigration,” I knew the subject would resonate with students, but I did not fully anticipate how much the world outside the classroom would shape what happened inside it. Students came to section with an unusual level of personal investment in the subject matter—some anxious, some activated, many processing news events that felt immediate and consequential. The emotional charge in the room was real, and I had to reckon with it honestly: how could I create a space that honors students’ engagement, while equipping them with the analytical tools necessary to study the subject as scholars?

My answer was to treat the intensity of the moment as a reason to give students better tools. If students were going to engage with immigration, and they clearly were, whether I invited it or not, then my job was to make sure they did so as scholars. That conviction shaped three things I did in section throughout the semester:

First, I was explicit from the beginning that section was a space for informed, evidence-based conversation, and I modeled what that looked like. When students raised current events, I did not shut the conversation down; it was important to engage in meaningful dialogue, and so I directed them toward empirical questions: What does the data show? What does the literature say? What are we claiming, and what is our evidence? Over time, students began doing this for each other.

Second, I taught students to work directly with immigration data using RStudio. Many had never used statistical software before, which meant they often encountered empirical claims in readings, in the news, and in policy debates without the tools to evaluate them. Teaching students to clean, analyze, and interpret real datasets on migration flows, enforcement patterns, and public opinion changed their relationship to evidence. 

Third, I designed activities that required students to apply course frameworks analytically rather than impressionistically. An activity I implemented during section asked students to trace a fictional migrant’s journey through immigration systems in different countries, using theories of legal violence and legal passing to explain what happened at each stage. This exercise helped students move beyond summarizing individual theories and instead use them as genuine analytical lenses to comprehend migration patterns around the world. 

I assessed the effectiveness of these strategies through student work. For the R component, the course required students to complete a data analysis project, which gave direct evidence of whether they could handle empirical reasoning independently. For the discussion and activity components, I tracked how student participation evolved: early in the semester, contributions tended to be reactive and opinion-driven; by the end, students were consistently grounding their arguments in course readings and their own data work. Ultimately, teaching immigration during a moment of unusual intensity helped me learn that students needed more than a space to express how they felt; they also needed tools to understand what was happening, and the confidence to analyze it rigorously. That, more than anything, was what I tried to give them.