An alternative title is: When can I homotope a continuous map to a smooth immersion?
I have a simple topology problem but it's outside my area of expertise and I worry may be rather subtle. Any help would be appreciated.
The set-up is the following: Let $M$ be some (closed say) $n$ dimensional manifold and suppose that $\Sigma_1$ and $\Sigma_2$ are two closed submanifolds of $M$ of dimension $k$. Note that $\Sigma_1$ and $\Sigma_2$ are allowed to intersect (in my situation they are also embedded but I don't believe this is effects anything). Suppose in addition that $\Sigma_1$ and $\Sigma_2$ are homologous. If $k\leq n-2$ I would like a compact manifold with boundary $\Gamma$ with $\partial \Gamma=\gamma_1\cup \gamma_2$ and a smooth immersion $F:\Gamma\to M$ so that $F(\gamma_i)=\Sigma_i$. In other, words the homology between $\Sigma_1$ and $\Sigma_2$ can be realized by a smooth immersion.
I believe by approximation arguments one can always get a smooth such $F$ without restriction on $k$ but it need not be an immersion (especially if $k=n-1$). My gut is that when you have $k\leq n-2$ since the dimension of the image of $F$ is codimension one you have enough room to perturb it to be an immersion. That is that $F$ is homotopic rel boundary to our desired immersion.
Unfortunately, I don't know enough to formalize this and all my intuition comes from considering curves and domains in $\mathbb{R}^3$ so I'm afraid there may be obstructions in general.
References would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Edit:
As suspected, the question is somewhat subtle . To make it tractable lets assume that $M$ is a $C^\infty$ domain in $\mathbb{R}^3$ (so is a fairly simple three-manifold with boundary) and that the $\Sigma_i$ are curves. This is where my intuition says that there should be such a smooth immersion.