| Manmeet Kaur Bindra, Intern for the Brennan Center for Justice
 While all of her New York experiences have influenced her to some degree, Senior Manmeet Kaur Bindra considers her internship with the Brennan Center for Justice this past summer and fall to be the most influential in her decision to continue working on low-wage and forced labor networks. While at the Brennan Center, Bindra worked on their "Informal Economy" project, an effort to document the unregulated economies of New York and Chicago by investigating 14 industries like domestic work, construction, day labor, and restaurant work. To this end, she helped conduct interviews with undocumented workers, employers, government agencies, community-based groups, and unions. Speaking with such a wide range of individuals and actors was, to her, an amazing opportunity and learning experience.
" It was exciting to be somewhere where I was doing concrete research that involved direct contact with a wide range of individuals," Bindra, an Anthropology-History major, says. "It was also greatly satisfying to work such an inspiring, intelligent group of social scientists, lawyers, professors, and research assistants."
Initially, Bindra took notes or just observed the interviews, but she says that she was quickly given responsibility on par with others on the team. She was also sent to Chicago for a weekend to conduct interviews and engage in theoretical discussions about the project with the Chicago research team at the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
A native of Baldwin, New York, 22-year-old Bindra first learned of the internship at the Brennan Center, a public policy organization that mixes public interest law and social science interest, from the Barnard Career Development web site in the summer of 2004. Her full-time internship was funded that summer by the Jewish Foundation for the Education of Women Internship Fund, and she was mentored by Annette Bernhardt, a Barnard alum and a senior policy analyst at the Brennan Center's Poverty program. By the fall, they had asked her to remain as a part-time paid employee. In addition to her interviews, she also conducted background research on immigrant enclaves; compiled information on the garment industry for an industry grid; and attended coalition meetings with ally groups.
All of this work at the Center ultimately inspired both Bindra's thesis topic and also her future goals after graduation in May.
"An interview I led with a group of 8 undocumented West African workers inspired me to write my senior thesis on the perceived stigma against African immigrant domestic workers who are thought to have AIDS based on nationality," she explains. "The project also influenced my decision to work in India and hopefully next year on unregulated labor networks and vulnerability to AIDS among migrant populations in the commercial sex industry."
Prior to working at the Brennan Center, Bindra also did an internship at Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), a grassroots immigrant rights organization in Queens. She interned under the Francene Rogers Fellowship program, for which she conducted a year-long research project on immigrant detentions in conjunction with the internship.
Currently, Bindra is doing a paid internship at Family Justice, an organization that assists government and communities involved in the criminal justice system that relies on the strength of the family as an agent of change. At Family Justice, she is using her interview skills from her previous internship to conduct a survey in the Lower East Side public housing sites about social services.
Bindra was recently awarded an Arthur Liman Public Interest Law Fellowship, one of three Barnard students to receive the prestigious award open only to Yale, Harvard, Brown and Barnard students. This is the first year Barnard students were eligible.
She also just received a Third Millenium Fellowship through the Columbia Human Rights department. The fellowship was awarded to three students at Columbia and three students at Harvard. The majority of applicants were from the various graduate schools at Columbia, and Bindra was the only undergradate selected into the program. The fellowship will allow her to spend six months in India and six months in South Africa, volunteering with two different legal rights organizations that address HIV risk among migrant worker populations.
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f you would like your work as an intern featured on the Barnard web site, please send an email to Suzanne Stein, Internship Program Coordinator, at sstein@barnard.edu. Indicate where you are interning, what you are doing, and why you would like to be considered.
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