From age 8 through his years as a Stanford University student, Dr. Charles Ogletree, the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law at Harvard University, labored in the fields with his migrant-worker parents.

“We worked in everything from walnuts and almonds to peaches and grapes and cotton and lettuce,” Ogletree says. “When I started college, I still came back summers ... working at ‘swamping’ watermelons — taking them from the field, tossing them from person to person.”

He worked with Hispanic immigrant farm laborers. “My father’s generation was jealous because they saw these people who wanted to do the work they were doing — for much less pay and less security,” he says. “There was this sense of cultural tension.

Those of us who were youger saw it as a way to create a more inclusive society.” Those memories partly inspired Ogletree to join a fledgling inter-faculty effort to debate Harvard’s future approach to immigration studies.

Early in the tenure of former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, there was a faculty push to create a Latino studies or immigration studies center. His administration nixed it.

Ogletree hopes there will be renewed interest. On Dec. 1, 2008, he hosted the first meeting of the Immigration Policy Steering Committee, coordinated by Edward Schumacher-Matos, a visiting professor of Latin American studies at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Fifteen faculty members came from seven schools.

Harvard psychology professor Margarita Alegría, director of the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research, was thrilled to join the group’s monthly meetings.

She says the group is a “dream team” with potential as “an important Harvard think tank that could come up with new ideas and even action plans for an immigration reform agenda. Independently of what it’s called, I’m more interested in seeing what it could do.”

Schumacher-Matos says it’s premature to say whether the group will seek to establish an immigration studies center.