MIGRATION STUDIES
International migration is a political hot potato but a basic fact of life, with multi-dimensional causes and effects. While policy makers focus on border patrols and raids on sweatshops, agricultural economist J. Edward Taylor at UC Davis tracks the changes in the costs and benefits of migration for individual households as the value of the peso and of Mexican corn fluctuate. He finds a direct correlation between the rise and fall of earning and buying power in Mexico and the decision to send household members northward to earn dollars. Irvine anthropologist Michael Burton worked with colleagues in New Zealand and the South Pacific to trace the family ties and consequences of emigration from the Pacific Islands to the United States and Australia-New Zealand, finding that immigration policies influence but do not determine migration patterns and that extended families hold together across vast distances. Philip Martin, another Davis economist, has developed a network of researchers to zero in on the role of labor contractors in intra-Asian migration for jobs, developing a detailed description of the structure and functioning of this element in a growing movement of workers around the Pacific.
PIONEERING RESEARCH IN VIETNAM
Relationships spanning personal and professional dimensions help researchers identify breaking areas of interest. While it was still conventional wisdom among American social scientists that "nothing interesting" was happening in socialist Vietnam, geographers and resource economists at Berkeley, with colleagues at the East-West Center in Hawaii, were quietly building relationships with counterparts in Hanoi. Robert Reed and Jeff Romm received their first Pacific Rim grant in 1992 for workshops on environmental science and agricultural strategies that included Vietnamese researchers and a session in Hanoi. A second grant in 1994 supported Berkeley faculty and graduate students who joined East-West Center and Hanoi University researchers as well as Vietnamese scientific and technical professionals in an intensive two-week environmental survey of rural and urban areas of Vinh Phu province, north of Hanoi. They intended to create a baseline from which to monitor the effects of economic growth and marketization and to find out whether previous agricultural innovations had improved productivity and reduced soil depletion (they had). By 1994, Berkeley was a destination for graduate students making career commitments to Vietnam and was hosting frequent visiting Vietnamese scholars, and in 1995 a Berkeley student obtained a Pacific Rim grant to conduct a study of migrant workers in Vietnam and China.
ARTISTIC VISION
Culture wars are not the only product of the millennial mixing of populations now underway. Performance art is incorporating elements from unrelated traditions into new forms that were not possible until air travel, cross-cultural training, and frequent movement gave artists access to unfamiliar wellsprings feeding expression. Pacific Rim grants have fostered specially commissioned gamelan compositions by Balinese master musicians working with American musicians in Los Angeles and Santa Cruz, during which researchers Linda Burman-Hall of Santa Cruz and Elaine Barkin of UCLA documented both the process of interaction among the musicians and the nature of the composition. San Diego and Santa Barbara theater scholars Steven Adler and Barbara Bosch have used a Pacific Rim grant to study closely nonrepresentational theater elements in Japanese and Indonesian theater. They are now directing their students in performances of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus using Asian theater techniques. Santa Cruz dance professor Ruth Solomon used a Pacific Rim grant to complete a study of how Western training has influenced the way Asian dance masters instruct their students.
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