Profiles of 2004 Graduating Students

ILR senior Betsy Cooper wants to help shape U.S. immigration policy

By Linda Myers

Betsy Cooper took up the string bass in sixth grade and hasn't stopped. It's an outlet for the senior in Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. "No matter what other craziness is going on in my life, I can saw away at the bass."

Senior Betsy Cooper, a major in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, has won numerous honors during her Cornell career. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

For Cooper, who has played with the Cornell Chamber Orchestra all of her four years on campus, "craziness" takes the form of getting involved -- and getting classmates involved.

"We're more active than before Sept. 11, but many steps are needed before we'll be influential voters invested in the public sphere," she said. To speed things along, she is associate host of a public interest talk show on local WVBR-FM radio. She co-founded SaveAid, a liaison organization between activist student groups and Cornell's Government and Community Relations division, where she has worked for the past four years. And she is founder and president of the Cornell University Political Coalition. That group offers a forum for debate. It brought to campus former New York Republican Congressman Rick Lazio as well as New York Congressman Maurice Hinchey, a Democrat.

Cooper chose Cornell because of the opportunity it offered "to enter a leadership environment at an Ivy League institution," she said. A Meinig Family Cornell National Scholar and winner of the National Scholar's program Excellence in Leadership award, she liked the fact that the Meinig program, part of The Cornell Commitment, has a built-in obligation to perform service while studying.

Service, for Cooper, always involves the public sphere. In summer 2001, she worked for New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, researching appropriations and writing letters on behalf of grant-seeking constituents. "It was exhilarating because you constantly felt you were helping someone," Cooper said. And in the summer 2002, she worked for Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, writing letters in support of constituents' immigration claims.

The experience lit a fire under her, as did helping Somali and Cuban immigrants learn English and gain U.S. citizenship through Journey's End, a refugee service in her native Amherst, N.Y. "They were so unbelievably motivated to learn," Cooper said. "When one of them called to say he'd passed his exam, the entire office cheered." She later arranged for Dump and Run, a reusable-waste recovery initiative on campus, to donate items to Journey's End.

While she and ILR labor historian Professor Vernon Briggs didn't always agree, his course Immigration and the American Work Force clarified for her that U.S. refugee policy makes no sense. "It's not in line with our humanitarian goals and is implicitly biased toward relatives of people already living here," she said. Her Cornell National Scholar senior thesis, not surprisingly, is about immigration policy -- in this case the relationship of British refugee policy to international law.

A national Truman Scholar her junior year and a Marshall Scholar alternate this year, Cooper was still job searching at press time. The ideal job? "Working on immigration policy, but with a chance to work directly with people. I believe you can't change policy unless you know who you are working for."