Rows of huts went back for miles, and the smell of cooked food blended with the odor of camp latrines. For the refugees -- overwhelmingly women and children -- life was hard and dangerous as they took flight from Cambodia during the 1980s.

Georgetown professor Susan Martin vividly remembers her first visit to the refugee camp in Thailand during her early days as a researcher and policy analyst. The camp was filled with victims of war and repression, she says. Some had been displaced for a decade; watching as their children, born far from their homes, grew up amid barbed wire.

Martin recounted what she saw during her first refugee camp visit and wrote  "Refugee Women" (Lexington Books, 2004).

Since that 1984 trip, Martin, now the Donald G. Herzberg Associate Professor of International Migration, has spent much of her career conducting field work at refugee camps around the world, including sites in Southeast Asia, Central America, Africa and Eastern Europe. She also serves as executive director of Georgetown's Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM).

Her research has focused on Mexico-U.S. migration, the human rights and management of forced migration, refugee women, migration and security and a number of other subjects. Two new books are scheduled for release this year -- "Women, Migration and Conflict" (Springer Books, 2009) and "The Migration-Displacement Nexus" (Berghahn Books, 2009).

"Globally, about 13 million people are refugees, having been displaced from their homes and forced to seek safety in other countries," says Martin.

"We are a country of immigrants -- it has been a major cause of population and cultural growth throughout U.S. history," she says.

Martin received her undergraduate degree in history from Rutgers University and her master's and doctoral degrees in the history of American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania.

She continued her pursuits within academia through teaching as a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and serving as assistant professor at Brandeis University throughout the 1970s.

The Movement From Historical Migration
Deciding to take a break from academia, Martin wrote a series of historical papers for the U.S. Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy from 1980 to 1981, and then became its research director. Her career focus began to shift from history to contemporary public policy.

The 1980s brought much to think about in the way of immigration policy, she says.

"The U.S. had been resettling very large numbers of refugees from Indochina," Martin recalls. "There was also the Mariel (Harbor) boat lift incident in 1980 when 125,000 undocumented Cuban migrants entered the United States through Southern Florida."

After observing these events and others, she began to notice that major refugee crises caused the United States government to continually reinvent the wheel with regard to international refugee policy. "A lot of very well meaning volunteers got into the refugee field, but none of them were trained," Martin says.

Hoping to change this, Martin and her colleagues approached the Ford Foundation and suggested they develop a grant program to help professionalize the refugee and migration fields. As a result, the charitable trust decided to fund a small think tank, the Refugee Policy Group, and Martin joined their staff in 1981 as a senior associate. For 11 years, she worked on issues with refugees and displaced persons.

"Some of my most important work during that period was related to refugee women -- understanding their needs and the types of programs that needed to be put in place," says Martin. "I wanted to allow refugee women the opportunity to advance toward greater participation in decision-making about the policies and programs affecting their lives," she says.

Through her fieldwork in the refugee camp, Martin discovered a great need for reproductive health services, programs to reduce gender-based violence against women and greater employment opportunities for female refugees.

Determined to increase services for refugee women, Martin brought these issues to the attention of the United Nations, governments and nongovernmental organizations. She developed guidelines for the protection of refugee women that were adopted by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in the early 1990s.

Conditions have been improving ever since, she says, but a lot more needs to be done.

"It is incredible what Susan has done … she has worked to improve national and global policymaking and brings international leadership to the complex issues of immigration," says Lindsay Lowell, director of policy studies and co-founder of ISIM.

Professionalizing the Field
After Martin served five years as the executive director of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform in the mid-1990s, Georgetown invited her to continue her migration research on the Hilltop in 1998.

"I remember speaking with School of Foreign Service Dean (Robert) Gallucci back then --  he told me that the university was excited about my research, but also wanted to start offering academic courses in international migration," recalls Martin. "Even though I had left academia 20 years before, it felt like the right time to come back and teach."

Taking advantage of Georgetown's offer, Martin co-founded the ISIM, as well as the nation's first and only certificate program in refugee and humanitarian emergencies.

"Coming to Georgetown was a turning point for me -- my colleagues and I had gotten into researching and studying international migration by accident, so I was very interested in professionalizing the field and mentoring the next generation of students by creating an international migration academic program that hadn't existed yet," says Martin.

Martin established the institute in 1998 with Lowell and Andrew Schoenholtz.

"Susan is an educator with a very particular purpose -- to improve professionalism in the field of international migration," says Schoenholtz, deputy director of ISIM and visiting professor at Georgetown's Law Center. "She sees the importance of training and knows that Georgetown students are going to be among the leaders in this field."

The institute graduated 11 students in its first certificate class in May 2001; in 2008 alone more than 70 students graduated from the program -- representing masters programs in the School of Foreign Service, the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, the government department and the Law Center.

Putting Theory Into Practice
For Martin, mentoring the students that come through her classroom and the certificate program is filled with rewards, and that feeling has a reciprocal effect on her students. Office hours often involves a line of students waiting outside her door for academic and career advice.

Katelin Maher (G'09) recently sought advice from Martin about accepting a two-year Department of Homeland Security honors fellowship.

"Professor Martin is always accessible and somehow always finds time to help students -- even when they aren't even in her class but need her advice.  I think this says a lot about her character," says Maher, who has taken Martin's graduate courses on refugee and humanitarian crisis and on migration and development.

Recognizing a great interest in refugee, humanitarian and disaster relief at the undergraduate level, Martin also teaches a course on refugees and international relations and helped organize and launch the first-ever Jesuit University Humanitarian Action Network conference last year.

"The undergraduates are very fun to teach -- they are so hungry for information, and I find that a lot of what I am teaching them -- immigration events that I have lived through -- is now part of their history," says Martin. "Re-seeing these events through their eyes has opened up so many new things for me in terms of my own understanding of these historical moments."

Source: Blue & Gray