Cawo Abdi, University of Minnesota

Cawo Abdi’s research focuses on refugees and migrants. One of her recent projects investigates the increasing role ethnocentric charter schools are playing in new refugee and migrant groups’ education in Minnesota and how this shapes their long-term settlement and integration in the United States. In recognition of her exemplary scholarship, she was recently a recipient of the President’s Community-Engaged Scholar award, a prestigious honor bestowed onto faculty that are committed to serving the wider community by bridging public and professional engagement. As one of the leading scholars on Somali migration and diaspora in the world, Professor Abdi’s ground-breaking research continues to benefit individuals and communities across nations, where newcomers can find a home and host societies can feel enriched. She received the Public Sociology Award in 2015, in honor of her commitment and outstanding contributions to inform the general public regarding the everyday reality of Somalis in the US, Minnesota, and the world. Through her response to many media inquiries, thoughtful opinion pieces, invited presentations, as well as with her soon-to-be-released ethnographic study, Elusive Jannah: The Somali Diaspora and a Borderless Muslim Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), Professor Abdi brings sociological knowledge to a wider audience and contributes to public debates and social policy. She has become the ‘go-to’ person for journalists wishing to understand anything related to Somalis–in the US and abroad.

Claire E. Altman, University of Missouri

Claire E. Altman is an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri with appointments in the Department of Health Sciences and the Truman School of Public Affairs. As a social demographer her work broadly focuses on population health and immigrant well-being. She has done research on topics such as obesity, fertility, weight perceptions, and self-assessed health. Her current research examines the role of legal status on health and life course transitions for young adult unauthorized immigrants.

Rawan Arar, University of California at San Diego

Rawan Arar is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of California at San Diego and a researcher at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies. Rawan is a political sociologist whose research interests include international migration, refugee studies, race and ethnicity, law and governance, political sociology, cultural sociology, gender, human rights, and conflict and post-conflict societies. Rawan’s dissertation, “Leveraging Sovereignty: Syrian Refugees and the Jordanian State,” investigates the role of Jordan in the unfolding Syrian refugee crisis. Her dissertation operationalizes “the refugee burden” from the top-down through state-centric concerns, and from the bottom-up, privileging the voices of refugees and host populations with a focus on Jordan as a major refugee receiving country. Through in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations, she explores the relationship between hosting large numbers of refugees and state sovereignty. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Nations and Nationalism, and a forthcoming article with Journal for Middle East Law and Governance. She has written for other academic, policy-oriented, and generalist outlets including the Middle East Institute, Project on Middle East Political Science, Scholars Strategy Network, and Washington Post’s Monkey Cage Blog.

Amada Armenta, University of California at Los Angeles

Amada Armenta’s research examines how the law is understood, altered, and transformed by its principals and targets, and how socio-legal processes construct and reify ideas about race and citizenship. She seeks to understand how government bureaucracies respond to the presence of Latino immigrants, and conversely, how Latino immigrants adapt to life in the U.S. Her first project, Protect, Serve and Deport: The Rise of Policing as Immigration Enforcement (University of California Press, 2017) draws on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival materials to examine the close coupling of the nation’s immigration enforcement and criminal justice systems. The project documents how immigration control happens- not just through restrictive laws- but through the mundane work of local law enforcement agents who punish illegality through their daily practices. Articles drawing from this research, which was conducted in Nashville, Tennessee, have been published in Social Problems, Law & Policy, and Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. Amada’s newest research examines how undocumented Latino immigrants in Philadelphia navigate laws and bureaucracies in their everyday lives. She asks how it feels to break laws with which it is impossible to comply (such as the requirement to drive with a state-issued license or have valid work authorization papers) and examines how residents understand their compliance and non-compliance. This project also addresses immigrants’ experiences of victimization, decisions about whether and when to call the police, and residents’ understandings about race and ethnicity.

James Bachmeier, Temple University

James Bachmeier’s expertise is on international migration, immigrant incorporation, racial/ethnic inequality, and social demography. He is interested in the social and economic incorporation of immigrants in the United States and other nations receiving large immigrant populations. His research has primarily concentrated on assessing and interpreting the integration of the U.S. Mexican-origin population using social-demographic methods and data. He is currently engaged in three lines of research. The first is concerned with understanding how various processes operating in immigrant destinations across the United States–including migrant social networks and ethnic communities, labor markets, and immigrant enforcement policies–have shaped patterns of Mexican immigration over the past two decades. A second project focuses on the legal and citizenship status of immigrants in the U.S., and aims both to improve methods used to measure and estimate the various legal statuses of immigrants in large-scale surveys, as well as to understand how legal status is associated with the integration of contemporary immigrants and their children into the social and economic fabric of the nation. Finally, a third avenue of research is concerned with understanding inter-generational patterns of incorporation among members of the U.S. Mexican-origin population. The primary objective of this work is to assess empirically the extent to which the economic mobility of today’s Mexican-American population, especially with respect to educational attainment, is shaped by the distinctive social and historical contexts out of which the Mexican-origin population has grown.

Frank Bean, University of California at Irvine

Frank Bean’s current research focuses on the implications of U.S. immigration policies, Mexican immigrant incorporation, the implications of immigration for changing race/ethnicity in the United States, the determinants and health consequences of immigrant naturalization, and the development of new estimates of unauthorized immigration and emigration. He is the author or editor of more than 150 scholarly articles and chapters and eighteen books. His research focuses on international migration, unauthorized migration, U.S. immigration policy, and the demography of the U.S. Hispanic population. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he has been a Guggenheim Fellow and numerous other Visiting Scholar awards (at the Russell Sage Foundation, the Transatlantic Academy, the American Academy in Berlin, the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, and the Center for U.S./Mexico Studies at the University of California at San Diego). A frequent recipient of foundation and federal grants, Bean is the country’s only social scientist who has been a Principal Investigator of NICHD behavioral science grants in population in every decade since the inception of the program in 1969. In 2011, he received the Distinguished Lifetime Scholarly Career Award in International Migration at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.

Jennifer Bickham Mendez, College of William & Mary

My research explores ways in which the lives of everyday people are caught up in cross-border forces, including economic globalization. My scholarly interests have centered on Latino/a (im)migration, citizenship, border studies, gender and labor. My current work examines Latino/a immigration to Williamsburg, VA, the barriers that immigrants face in gaining full social membership, and the ways in which the native-born community has responded to the arrival of these newcomers. Another theme of my work is the challenges and possibilities of activist research methodologies. In my teaching I like to get students out into the “real world.” I have worked closely with dozens of students on independent research projects and have taught the department’s capstone course for majors for several years. I also co-direct a border studies program in which students and faculty spend a week on the US-Mexico border learning first-hand about immigration issues from those whose lives and work are shaped by their powerful effects.

Dean Birkenkamp, Editor, Routledge

Dean Birkenkamp is senior editor for social science with Routledge Publishers. He lives in Boulder.

Alice Bloch, University of Manchester

Alice Bloch’s research focuses on understanding the lived experiences of forced migrants. Key themes include: marginalisation and exclusion, rights and agency, engagement in transnational relations, social and community networks, economic strategies and labour market experiences and the ways in which experiences intersect with class, gender, ethnicity and power. She is also interested in methodology, especially innovative methodologies in relation to sensitive research with vulnerable groups and in developing capacity building strategies for longer term non-academic impact and engagement. Alice has undertaken a number of research projects including research for the Department for Work and Pensions exploring access and barriers to the labour market for refugees in Britain; with the International Organisation for Migration examining the economic lives and transnational activities of Zimbabweans in the UK and South Africa; for the Paul Hamyln Foundation exploring the lives and experiences of young undocumented migrants in England and has recently completed an ESRC project (2011-2014) with Professor Sonia McKay from the Working Lives Research Institute, London Metropolitan University, ‘Undocumented Migrants, Ethnic Enclaves and Networks: Opportunities, traps or class-based constructs’. Current research includes a book published by Policy Press in  2016, Living on the Margins: Undocumented Migrants in a Global City, co-authored with Sonia McKay based on their recent ESRC research and a collaborative project (2014-2015) ‘Children of Refugees in Europe‘ with Professor Milena Chimienti and Professor Catherine Withol de Wenden funded by the Swiss Network for International Studies.

Dominik Doemer, Communications Manager, Scholars Strategy Network

Dominik Doemer is a Communications Manager at the Scholars Strategy Network. Over the last 2 years, he has worked with the communications team to promote scholars’ work in the media, including connecting them to reporters and editing and pitching OpEds. He is also the producer for the Scholars Strategy Network’s podcast, No Jargon. Dominik is a graduate of Tufts University with a B.A. in Sociology and Environmental Studies.

Katharine Donato, Georgetown University

Katharine Donato holds the Donald G. Herzberg Chair in International Migration and is Director of the Institute for the Study of International Migration in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty, she was on the faculty of Vanderbilt and Rice Universities. She has examined many research questions related to migration, including the economic consequences of U.S. immigration policy; health effects of Mexico-U.S. migration; immigrant parent involvement in schools in New York, Chicago, and Nashville; deportation and its effects for immigrants; the great recession and its consequences for Mexican workers; and gender and migration. Her recent book is Gender and International Migration: From Slavery to Present, published by the Russell Sage Foundation (with Donna Gabaccia at the University of Toronto). She is currently writing a book on U.S. child migration.

Joanna Dreby, University at Albany, SUNY

Professor Dreby’s research primarily focuses on families, with specific expertise in research with Mexican migrants and with children. Her work includes a variety of qualitative methods, emphasizing ethnography, comparative research and in-depth interviews techniques. She is author of the award-winning book Divided by Borders: Mexican Migrants and their Children (University of California Press 2010) and is co-editor of Family and Work in Everyday Ethnography (Temple University Press 2013). Her research projects, conducted in both Mexico and in the United States, prioritize child-centered approaches. Along with interviews she has used content analysis, observations, surveys and drawings with young children. Professor Dreby’s written work explores the themes of gender, work-family balance, child care, transnational ties, context-specific settlement patterns and return migration. Her most recent book, Everyday Illegal: When Policies Undermine Immigrant Families (University of California 2015) explores the impacts of immigration enforcement policies on families. The book as well as her award-winning article “The Burden of Deportation on Children in Mexican Immigrant Families” (Journal of Marriage and Family 2012), draws from a comparative study of Mexican families living in two new destination communities in central New Jersey and northeast Ohio. Professor Dreby comes to academia with a background in social services and retains interest in community based work.

Irma Elo, University of Pennsylvania

What Accounts for Race/Ethnic and Socioeconomic Differences in Health and Mortality? Race/ethnic and socioeconomic differences in health and mortality are well known, but factors that underlie them are less clearly understood. My research focuses on how societal inequalities affect these health disparities across the life course, including possible effects of early life conditions and neighborhood context. My current research projects include analysis of race/ethnic disparities in maternal and infant and child health in Philadelphia and nationally, early life conditions and adult mortality in Finland, differences in health and mortality among native-born and foreign-born US residents, and black-white differences in “avoidable” mortality in the United States between 1980 and 2005.

Cynthia Feliciano, University of California at Irvine

Cynthia Feliciano’s research investigates the development and consequences of group boundaries and inequalities based on race, ethnicity, class, and gender. This work primarily, but not exclusively, focuses on how descendants of Latin American and Asian immigrants are incorporated in the United States, a question at the center of prominent theoretical debates, and of great practical importance given current demographic trends. She pursues these issues through two main strands of research: 1) determinants of educational inequality and 2) ethnic and racial boundary-making and relations. Professor Feliciano is the author of Unequal Origins: Immigrant Selection and the Education of the Second Generation (LFB Scholarly, 2006), and numerous articles in journals including American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Social Forces, Sociology of Education, and Demography. She received her B.A. from Boston University and her Ph.D. from UCLA, and has been a fellow of the Ford Foundation, the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Program, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation.

Chenoa Flippen, University of Pennsylvania

Chenoa Flippen’s research addresses the connection between racial and ethnic inequality and contextual forces at the neighborhood, metropolitan, and national level. Her work falls into three broad categories: 1) racial and ethnic inequality in the United States 2) life-course and aging, particularly as it relates to minority well-being and 3) Hispanic immigrant adaptation, especially in new areas of destination across the American South. In her research, she combines quantitative and qualitative methods, drawing upon diverse sources of existing data as well as collecting original survey and ethnographic data. She has applied these methods to diverse topics such as the relationship between housing appreciation and neighborhood composition, the relationship between residential segregation and minority homeownership, pathways to retirement for black and Hispanic elders, and the impact of migration on men’s HIV risk behaviors and women’s interpersonal power. She is currently conducting the project “Vivir Racionado (Living on Rations): A Study of the Economic Survival Strategies of Migrant Latinos.” This project examines the labor market experiences of undocumented Hispanic migrants, the role of income pooling in surviving low wage work, and forms of informal savings groups such as “la tanda.” With this research she hopes to provide greater understanding of both the financial position of migrant Hispanics and the process and antecedents of wealth accumulation for this group, shedding light on the main impediments to Hispanic asset accumulation through the inclusion of factors not commonly captured in large-scale surveys of wealth inequality.

David FitzGerald, University of California at San Diego

David FitzGerald’s expertise is on international migration, nationalism, transnationalism, comparative immigration and nationality law. His research analyzes policies regulating international migration in countries of origin, transit, and destination. His books include Culling the Masses: The Democratic Roots of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas (Harvard University Press, 2014), which won the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Distinguished Scholarly Book Award. FitzGerald’s current projects include directing the California Immigration Research Initiative and writing a book on the externalization of borders to deter asylum seekers from entering the Global North. He co-directs the San Diego hub of the Scholars Strategy Network and was awarded the ASA International Migration Section’s “Award for Public Sociology” in 2013. He frequently provides comment on U.S. immigration and border enforcement policy and Mexican migration to media such as the Economist, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Guardian (UK), and CBS’s 60 Minutes.

Shannon Gleeson, Cornell University

Shannon Gleeson’s research focuses on workplace rights, the experiences of immigrant workers, and the role of advocacy organizations in holding government bureaucracies accountable. Her books include Precarious Claims: The Promise and Failure of Workplace Protections in the United States (University of California Press, 2016), The Nation and Its Peoples: Citizens, Denizens, Migrants (Routledge, 2014, edited with John Park), and Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston (Cornell University Press, 2012). She is engaged in various collaborative projects that examine the implementation of immigrant worker rights. With Xóchitl Bada, (University of Illinois, Chicago), she is researching the role of the Mexican Consulate in protecting the rights of immigrant workers, and the perspective of enforcement agencies and nonprofit advocates across the United States. With support from the National Science Foundation, she and Els de Graauw (Baruch College, the City University of New York) are conducting an institutional analysis of the implementation of the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in three metropolitan regions: the San Francisco Bay Area, the Greater Houston Area, and the New York City Metro Area. With Kate Griffith (Cornell University), she is also examining the effects of temporary immigration status on worker legal mobilization in New York City.

Tanya Golash-Boza, University of California at Merced

Tanya Golash-Boza is a prolific author. She has published five sole-authored books and 35 articles and book chapters. In addition, she has published dozens of OpEds and essays in popular venues. Many of her publications have received awards, including her latest book Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor and Global Capitalism, which was awarded the Distinguished Contribution to Research Book Award from the Latino/a Studies Section of the American Sociological Association. She also won an article award from that same section for “Dropping the Hyphen: Becoming Latino(a)-American through Racialized Assimilation.” Additionally, she won the Distinguished Early Career Award from the Racial and Ethnic Minorities Studies Section of the American Sociological Association in 2010. Tanya Golash-Boza’s scholarship ranges from issues of race and identity in Peru to human rights to immigration policy and deportation. Her latest book Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor and Global Capitalism (New York University Press, 2015) explains mass deportation in the context of the global economic crisis. Tanya Golash-Boza earned her B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Maryland, College Park, a Certificate of Anthropology from L’Ecole d’Anthropologie in Paris in 1996, and her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2005.

Monika Gosin, College of William & Mary

Primary research interests include: Afro Cuban and other Afro Latino immigration experiences in the U.S.; African American and Latino relations; immigrant incorporation into US society. My current research focuses on the impact of two waves of Cuban immigration, the 1980 Mariel boatlift and the 1994 Balsero crisis, on the African American and Cuban exile communities in Miami. The project also foregrounds the experiences of Afro-Cubans in the U.S., a demographic which grew in the course of these migration waves. This work is the basis for a broader study utilizing data from interviews I previously conducted in Miami, Los Angeles, and Cuba to examine the effect of migration experiences on Afro-Cuban notions of race and identity; experiences which challenge U.S. and Latin American racial and ethnic categories, as well as notions of whiteness, Pan-Africanism, and of Pan-Latinidad.

Jacqueline Hagan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Jacqueline Hagan is Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her central research area is international migration, with a special focus on migration between the United States and Latin America. She has conducted research on religion and migration, immigration policy effects, gender and migration, human rights and migration, and migration and labor markets. She is author of Deciding to be Legal (Temple University Press, 1994), and award-winning books, Migration Miracle (Harvard Press, 2008), and (co-authored with Ruben Hernandez Leon and Jean Luc Demonsant) of Skills of the Unskilled: Work and Mobility among Mexican Migrants (University of California Press, 2015).

Hon. Dorothy Harbeck*, National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ)

Judge Dorothy Harbeck is an Immigration Judge for the U. S. Department of Justice, Executive Office for Immigration Review (US- DOJ-EOIR). She is the Eastern Region Vice President of the National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ) and has initiated a trial skills project at area law schools– a series of volunteer lectures at law school clinics focusing on the importance of clear direct and cross examination skills. She was appointed to the Elizabeth, NJ Immigration Court in 2006. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree, cum laude, from Wellesley College, with honors in English and a special studies certificate with honors from the Universite’ Catholique De L’Ouest in Angers, France. She earned her Juris Doctor degree from Seton Hall University School of Law, where she was awarded the ASCAP/Nathan Burkan Prize for a meritorious paper on the use of demonstrative evidence in musical copyright infringement cases. Judge Harbeck’s particular research interests include citizenship and identity, as well as the presentation of evidence in trial court. She has authored two peer review law journal articles and several legal periodical articles on the importance of trial skills and other timely practical considerations for lawyers involved in matters coming before the Immigration Courts. She is a member of the executive board of the Federal Bar Association – Immigration Law Section and was recognized by two separate FBA components for her efforts in education and legal scholarship. Prior to her appointment to the bench, Judge Harbeck was a litigation attorney in private practice. She has tried civil jury cases and New Jersey Department of Labor cases. Judge Harbeck is a member of the N.J. and N.Y. state bars.

*The presenter is the Eastern Regional Vice President of the National Association of Immigration Judges. The views expressed here do not necessarily represent the official position of the United States Department of Justice, the Attorney General, or the Executive Office for Immigration Review. The views represent the author’s personal opinions, which were formed after extensive consultation with the membership of the NAIJ.

Mark Hetfield, HIAS

Mark Hetfield was appointed President and CEO of HIAS after a 25-year career, much of it served at HIAS. Mark began his career as a HIAS caseworker in Rome, Italy assisting Jewish refugee applicants from the Soviet Union. He later rejoined the agency as its Washington, D.C. representative, and again as its director of international operations. Between his various roles at HIAS, Mark served as senior advisor on refugee issues at the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, where he directed a congressionally-authorized study on the treatment of asylum seekers. Released in 2005 and still widely used, it is the most comprehensive study on expedited removal to date. Mark and his team were recognized for their work with the Arthur C. Helton Award for the Advancement of Human Rights, presented by the American Immigration Lawyers Association. An expert in refugee and immigration law, policy, and programs, Mark has led HIAS’ transformation from an organization focused on Jewish immigrants to a global agency assisting refugees of all faiths and ethnicities. As a result, HIAS currently is a major implementing partner of the United Nations Refugee Agency and the U.S. Department of State. Under Mark’s leadership, HIAS has gained international prominence and recognition as the pre-eminent voice of the American Jewish community on refugee and immigration issues. He is passionate about the organization’s mission to help all who flee ethnic cleansing, violence, and other forms of persecution.

Onoso Imoagene, University of Pennsylvania

My research is in the areas of International Migration and Immigrant Incorporation with a special focus on first and second generation African immigrants in the British and American Diasporas; Inter-ethnic group (black-on-black) relations; the intersection of race, ethnicity, and class in assimilation outcomes of the African second generation; Impact of National Factors on Assimilation Outcomes; Immigration and Education; and Migration and Development. I take a comparative approach in my research. The findings from my just concluded research project on the identity formation processes of the adult Nigerian second generation is forthcoming in a book published by University of California Press titled Beyond Expectations: Second Generation Nigerians in the United States and Britain. My current research project–The Dreams Project–is a multi-site study on Ghanaian and Nigerian Diversity Visa Lottery Winners in the United States and their families back home.

Tomás Jiménez, Stanford University

Tomás Jiménez’s research and writing focus on immigration, assimilation, social mobility, and ethnic and racial identity. His latest book, The Other Side of Assimilation: How Immigrants are Changing American Life (University of California Press, 2017), uses interviews from a race and class spectrum of Silicon Valley residents to show how a relational form of assimilation changes both newcomers (immigrants and their children) and established individuals (people born in the US to US-born parents).  His first book, Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity (University of California Press, 2010) draws on interviews and participant observation to understand how uninterrupted Mexican immigration influences the ethnic identity of later-generation Mexican Americans. The book was awarded the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Latinos/as Section Distinguished Book Award. Professor Jiménez has also published his research in Science, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology,Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Social Problems, International Migration Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Science Quarterly, DuBois Review, and the Annual Review of Sociology.

William Kandel, Analyst in Immigration Policy at Congressional Research Service

William Kandel is an Analyst in Immigration Policy with the CRS Domestic Social Policy Division. He covers family-sponsored and employment-based immigration policy, naturalization, unaccompanied alien children, inter-country adoptions, immigrant integration, immigration and crime, and the demography and fiscal impacts of the U.S. foreign-born population. Prior to CRS, he conducted demographic and social science research on immigration in rural America (nonmetro counties) and hired farm workers for the USDA’s Economic Research Service. William received a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.S. in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago.

Helen Marrow, Tufts University

Helen B. Marrow is a sociologist of immigration, race and ethnicity, social class, health, and inequality and social policy. Her work explores Latin Americans’ incorporation trajectories and racial and ethnic identities in the United States and Europe, the impact of immigration on social life and race relations in the rural American South, variation in public bureaucracies’ approaches to unauthorized immigration (especially in education, law enforcement, and health care), and the relationship between immigrant-native contact, trust, and civic engagement. As an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tufts University, she teaches courses on sociology, social policy, immigration and the media, and research methods.

Douglas Massey, Princeton University

Douglas S. Massey has served on the faculties of the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on international migration, race and housing, discrimination, education, urban poverty, and Latin America, especially Mexico. He is the author, most recently, of Climbing Mount Laurel: The Struggle for Affordable Housing and Social Mobility in an American Suburb (Princeton University Press, 2013) and Brokered Boundaries: Creating Immigrant Identity in Anti-Immigrant Times (Russell Sage, 2010). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He is currently president of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences and past-president of the American Sociological Association and the Population Association of America. Ph.D. Princeton University.

Dina Okamoto, Indiana University Bloomington

Dina G. Okamoto received her PhD in sociology from the University of Arizona in 2001 and was Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis. Her research examines how group boundaries and identities shift and change, which has broader implications for immigrant incorporation as well as intergroup conflict and cooperation. Dina’s current projects investigate the civic and political incorporation of immigrants in the United States, intergroup relations between immigrants and U.S.-born minority and majority groups in the 21st century, and the ways in which youth-serving community organizations deal with increasing ethnic, racial, and language diversity. She has been a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York and a visiting fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford. She is the winner of the 2016 Book Award from American Sociological Association’s Section on Asia and Asian America: Redefining Race: Asian American Panethnicity and Shifting Ethnic Boundaries.

Moira O’Neil, FrameWorks Institute

Moira manages a team of communications professionals and social scientists who help fields of practice frame social issues in ways that have the proven power to deepen understanding and inspire action. She oversees the team’s efforts to synthesize framing research, teach advocates to apply it to strategic communications, and train sectors to unite around evidence-based framing recommendations. A senior researcher, Moira also directs the organization’s efforts to analyze framing patterns in the media and nonprofit sector and writes in-depth research reports on a wide range of topics, including immigration, child mental health, and housing and homelessness. A sociologist with expertise in how frames impede or advance social movements, Moira has helped hundreds of organizations strengthen their communications capacity. She regularly delivers presentations and lectures on issue framing at nonprofit organizations, colleges, and universities around the country and abroad. And she publishes regularly in the academic press, with articles appearing in peer-reviewed journals including Child Abuse and Neglect, Generations, Qualitative Research, and the Revue Internationale d’Education de Sèvres. Her work has also appeared in USA Today, The Hechinger Report, and other publications. She has conducted framing research around dozens of social issues and has led major projects to reframe the public discourse around immigration, race, and criminal justice. She also brings deep expertise in issues related to sexual violence, equity, and equality. Prior to joining FrameWorks, Moira worked as a research associate for the Vera Institute of Justice on projects related to immigration policy and at the Institute for Scientific Analysis on issues related to illicit drug use and drug policy. She holds a BA in sociology from the University of California at Santa Cruz and master’s and doctoral degrees in sociology from the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she studied the medicalization of war trauma at the turn of the 20th century in the United States.

Gul Ozyegin, College of William & Mary

Professor Ozyegin is a recipient of the 2011 Plumeri Award for Faculty excellence and received a fellowship from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) during 2006-07 academic year. Her main research topics are gender and class in domestic labor; sex, love, selfhood, and the youth; and intersections of gender, generation, and (un)belonging among different generations of Turks in Germany.  She is the author of Untidy Gender, published by Temple University, and New Desires, New Selves: Sex, Love, and Piety among Turkish Youth (NYU Press, 2015). She is also editor of Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures (Ashgate Press, 2015). Her work appeared in edited volumes and she has published articles in such journals as European Journal of Women’s Studies, and Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation, and Culture. Professor Ozyegin’s current research is on Turkish immigrants in Berlin, tentatively entitled (Un)Belonging and Identity: A Home Divided? Gender and Generational Histories of Turks in Germany.

Emilio Parrado, University of Pennsylvania

Emilio Parrado’s research has migration as it central focus and its interaction with other demographic and social processes. His interests fall into three broad categories: 1) The Hispanic population of the United States, especially issues of immigrant adaptation and new areas of migrant settlement; 2) International migration, with special emphasis on its determinants and consequences for sending and receiving regions including health and family outcomes; 3) Social and demographic change in Latin America, including social mobility and family behavior. Presently, he has concentrated his efforts in studying the intersection of gender, migration, and health risks among Mexican and Honduran migrants in sending areas and receiving communities in the U.S. Throughout his research, he combines quantitative and qualitative methods. Parrado draws upon diverse sources of existing data such as population and economic statistics and survey data, as well as collecting original survey and ethnographic data. He uses a variety of advanced statistical methods for data analysis, and draws upon ethnographic and historical materials for contextualizing relationships and interpreting outcomes. This mixing of research methods and data sources enhances his analyses of complex social and demographic phenomena.

Marisa Pineau, FrameWorks Institute

Marisa Pineau, is a researcher at the FrameWorks Institute. A sociologist by training, she has focused her research on gender and family, medicine, culture, and public policy. Prior to joining FrameWorks, she served as a program officer with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, where she worked with panels of leading experts on a variety of topics. Most recently, she co-edited “The Integration of Immigrants into American Society,” a comprehensive review of immigrant integration in the United States. Marisa received her BA in sociology from New College of Florida and her MA and PhD in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Temple University

Professor Jaya Ramji-Nogales specializes in immigration law, international law, procedure and process. She currently teaches civil procedure, evidence, gender and migration, and refugee law and policy.  Professor Ramji-Nogales’ research areas include empirical assessment of asylum adjudication, global migration law, and transitional justice. Along with her Georgetown University co-authors, Professor Ramji-Nogales has published several quantitative and qualitative studies of the U.S. asylum system. Their first study, Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication and Proposals for Reform, was the first empirical study of decision-making at all four levels of the American asylum process.  Their most recent co-authored study, Lives in the Balance: Asylum Adjudication by the Department of Homeland Security, provides an in-depth examination of the first level of that process, enriching its quantitative findings with interviews and surveys of asylum adjudicators.  Both works offer suggestions for systemic reform. Professor Ramji-Nogales also writes in the field of global migration law, focusing on forced migration as well as the intersection of immigration and international human rights law. Her most recent works explore the role of international migration law in constructing migration emergencies and critique  human rights law as insufficiently attentive to the interests of undocumented migrants. Professor Ramji-Nogales has also written on the situation of forced migrants under international criminal law and international humanitarian law. She is a Senior Research Associate of the Refugee Law Initiative of the School for Advanced Studies at the University of London. Finally, Professor Ramji-Nogales explores questions of process and systemic design in the transitional justice context. Her work in that field suggests that existing efforts are under-theorized and inadequately tailored to local contexts and offers a pluralist theory to guide future transitional justice projects. As a Senior Legal Advisor to the Documentation Center of Cambodia for over fifteen years, Professor Ramji-Nogales has authored several pieces on transitional justice in Cambodia, the lessons of which inform all of her work in the field. She is also the co-editor of Bringing the Khmer Rouge to Justice: Prosecuting Mass Violence Before the Cambodian Courts.

Rubén G. Rumbaut, University of California at Irvine

Rubén G. Rumbaut is the Founding Chair of the ASA’s International Migration Section, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education. He has written prolifically on a wide range of immigration topics and conducted seminal empirical studies in the U.S. over the past four decades. Since 1991 he has directed (with Alejandro Portes) the landmark Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), which followed the trajectories into adulthood of thousands of youth representing dozens of different nationalities from Latin America and Asia. Throughout the 1980s he conducted several of the principal studies of refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (including the IHARP and SARYS projects); in the 1990s he also directed the first National Survey of Immigration Scholars in the United States (NASIS); in the 2000s, the Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA) study; and in the 2010s, The Second Generation in Middle Adulthood (with Cynthia Feliciano), an in-depth follow-up of the CILS San Diego subsample nearly 25 years after the baseline surveys, with respondents who completed their adult transitions during and after the Great Recession. Among many other books, he is the coauthor of Immigrant America: A Portrait (University of California Press, 2014, 4th edition), and Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation (University of California Press and Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), which won the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Scholarship Award and the W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki Award for Best Book in the immigration field.

Leah Schmalzbauer, Amherst College

I am an ethnographer interested in how contemporary global Capitalism affects the movement of people across international borders as well as within nation-states. I am especially interested in how the institution of the family influences and is influenced by immigration. Drawing from Sociology, Anthropology, Critical Ethnic and Gender Studies, I teach about contemporary globalization, labor migration between the United States and Latin America, and the ways in which social inequalities influence the experiences of childhood and adolescence in the U.S. Inspired by the pedagogy of Paolo Freire, I structure my courses around discussions of power, and challenge students to explore how intersections of privilege and subordination shape life experiences and opportunities. This means that while we study theories of globalization, inequality and migration, and engage with empirical research, we also explore how these sociological phenomena relate to our own lives. My current teaching menu includes two introductory classes, the first- Latino Migration and the second- Unequal Childhoods, and three advanced seminars – Globalization, Inequality and Social Change; Gender, Power and Migration; and Immigration and the New Second Generation. I also co-teach the Building Community seminar in American Studies. My first book, Striving and Surviving: A Daily Life Analysis of Honduran Transnational Families (Routledge, 2005) and related articles focus on the gender dynamics of Honduran transnational families, those divided between their home and host countries. My second book, The Last Best Place? Gender, Family and Migration in the New West (Stanford University Press, 2014) explores the intersections of gender, migration and rurality in Montana, a new immigrant destination in the American West.  My third book (with Cecilia Menjivar and Leisy Abrego), Immigrant Families (Polity, 2016), draws from ethnographic, demographic and historical data to analyze how key axes of inequality (race, class, gender, generation and legal status) influence how immigrant families fare in the United States. I am currently in the early phases of a life history project exploring the social mobility paths of low-income Latino youth in elite colleges and universities. I am especially interested in how gender, family and immigration shape youth’s experiences of social mobility as well as their future aspirations.

Audrey Singer, Specialist in Immigration Policy at Congressional Research Service

Audrey Singer specializes in immigration policy at the Congressional Research Service. Her portfolio includes immigration enforcement; including the U.S. border, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); immigration courts; inadmissibility; deportation and removals. She also covers immigrants and public benefits. Prior to CRS she conducted research at The Urban Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, taught at Georgetown University, and was a labor analyst at the U.S. Department of Labor. She earned a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.

Robert Smith, Baruch College, CUNY

Robert C. Smith authored Mexican New York: Transnational Worlds of New Immigrants (University of California, 2006), which won ASA’s 2008 Distinguished Book Award and three section awards (International Migration; Latino/a Sociology; and Urban and Community Sociology), and a CUNY Presidential Award. He has received grants from NSF, SSRC, Spencer and other foundations; and has been both a Russell Sage Foundation Fellow and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. Smith’s public sociology seeks to identify strategic sites of intervention, and use social science research to affect those sites. He chairs MASA (masany.org), a nonprofit promoting educational achievement and civic engagement in the Mexican community in New York. He founded and has been the Lead Faculty for the Baruch College-Mexican Consulate Leadership Program; and is a Board Member of the CUNY Mexican Studies Institute. He served as an expert witness for the Department of Justice in the case of US v. Port Chester, about which he is now writing a book. He also routinely advises community organizations and public and private institutions working with immigrants. He also does expert testimony in deportation and wrongful death cases. Smith is writing two books. Horatio Alger Lives in Brooklyn, But Check His Papers (California, forthcoming) ethnographically follows the paths of 100 children of Mexican immigrants through adolescence into early adulthood, seeking to explain their differing life outcomes. This long term research demonstrates the disruptive effect of long term legal status on the well-being of these youth compared to their US citizen counterparts. This is Still America! Voting Rights and Immigration (with Andy Beverage) analyzes the political integration of immigrants into Port Chester New York, including the 2007 Voting Rights Act lawsuit against the town, and the subsequent changes in politics after the voting system was changed.

John Solomos, University of Warwick

My main areas of scholarship and research lie in the areas of the sociology of race and ethnicity, the study of racism and anti-racism, processes of racialisation, political mobilisation and race, multiculturalism and comparative race and ethnic relations. My teaching has been focused on the sociology of race and ethnicity, race and politics, social movements, human rights, and social and political theory. Current and recent research projects include: Rethinking the Boundaries of Race and Racism;Becoming Londoners: Ethnographies of New Generations and Processes of Change; Anti-Racism in Theory and Practice; Transnational Social Movements and Vulnerable Groups; and Racist Movements, Social Change and Political Mobilisation.

Veronica Terriquez, University of Southern California

Veronica Terriquez’s research examines how individuals’ demographic characteristics -as well as their ties to civic organizations, schools, and other institutions -reproduce or challenge patterns of social inequality. Focusing on educational inequality, immigrant integration, and organized labor—her work is linked to education justice and immigrant rights organizing efforts in California. Much of her research has implications for policies affecting low-income, immigrant, and Latino communities. Terriquez has prior experience working as a community organizer and volunteer for various education reform, immigrant rights, labor rights, and racial justice efforts. She is the principal investigator of the California Young Adult Study and the Youth Leadership and Health Study (CYAS), a mixed-methods investigation of youths’ access to postsecondary education, employment, and civic engagement opportunities. Terriquez is currently working on a study of parental engagement in Los Angeles County. Drawing on survey and semi-structured interviews data, she seeks to understand how individual parents acquire the confidence, cultural capital, and problem-solving skills to actively participate in school affairs. She is particularly interested in examining how labor and community organizations support various forms of school-based civic participation among Latino immigrants and other racially diverse parents.

Rebbeca Tesfai, Temple University

Rebbeca Tesfai’s research focuses on the economic incorporation of immigrants. Specifically, she focuses on black immigrant assimilation/incorporation in the United States and Europe through analyses of large scale-quantitative survey data. This work offers insights into immigrant assimilation, the mechanisms of the racial hierarchy in major immigrant host countries, and the role immigrants play in re-formulating conceptions of race through three main streams of research. The first investigates black immigrants’ economic and political incorporation in the United States through studies of African immigrant wage and housing market outcomes. The second research stream consists of a set of studies investigating the causes and consequences of immigrants’ residential patterns in the United States. As their population has increased, immigrants have come to redefine racial distinctions in the U.S. Hence their settlement patterns provide a new opportunity to investigate both the living conditions of minorities and the effect of minority concentration on neighborhood characteristics. Because the U.S. is one of the largest immigrant receiving countries in the world, the patterns observed could be assumed to occur in other immigrant receiving countries; however, there is a great deal of cross-national variation in immigrant incorporation. Her current work uses cross-national comparative research to empirically test assumptions made in theories of immigrant incorporation.

Kevin Thomas, Pennsylvania State University

Kevin Thomas is an Associate Professor of Sociology, Demography and African Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, and a faculty affiliate of Penn State’s Global and International Affairs program. Thomas’s research focuses on international migration, racial and ethnic inequality, children and families, as well as population and development issues in Africa. His work on these issues has appeared in several leading journals including Demography, International Migration Review, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Social Science Research. He served on the 2014 National Academy of Sciences panel on the integration of immigrants in the US, and on its 2015 panel on the educational success of young English language learners. He currently serves as a deputy editor of the journal Demography. Kevin Thomas is the author of two books: Diverse Pathways: Race and the Socioeconomic Incorporation of Black, White, and Arab-origin Africans in the US (Michigan State University Press, 2014) and Contract Workers, Risk, and the War in Iraq: Sierra Leonean Labor Migrants at US Military Bases (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017).

Van Tran, Columbia University

Van C. Tran’s interdisciplinary research and writing broadly focus on the incorporation of Asian and Latino immigrants and their children, as well as its implications for American culture, politics and society. Within this area, his contribution lies in the study of the immigrant second generation (i.e. those born in the U.S. to immigrant parents) and how ethnic neighborhoods shape social mobility among second-generation Asian and Latino/a Americans. He has developed two new lines of research on second-generation assimilation in the aftermath of the Great Recession and on the impact of hyper-gentrification on urban inequality in the aftermath of the housing crisis in New York City. As an immigration scholar and urban sociologist, his research and teaching are deeply intertwined with the vibrancy and diversity of the city. He follows a long tradition of sociologists who engage with the city as a social laboratory for original research that seeks to inform urban social policy. His recent work adopts a comparative approach to the study of race, ethnicity and migration in China, in Europe and in the U.S. His research has been published in a range of sociology and interdisciplinary journals, including Social Forces, International Migration Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, City & Community, Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, and The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. His scholarship has also been recognized with awards from the Section of International Migration, Section on Latino/a Sociology and Section on Community and Urban Sociology of the American Sociological Association.

Zulema Valdez, University of California at Merced

Zulema Valdez is the author of two books, The New Entrepreneurs: How Race, Class, and Gender Shape American Enterprise (Stanford University Press, 2011) and Entrepreneurs and the Search for the American Dream (Routledge, 2015). She is the editor for a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies on entrepreneurship (2016) and the editor of a college-level anthology, Beyond Black and White: A Reader on Contemporary Race Relations (Sage, 2016). Professor Valdez has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, The National Science Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. Her work has been published widely in social science journals and featured in several edited volumes. She has presented her research in a variety of public forums and settings, ranging from the Chowchilla Women’s Prison in California to a congressional briefing at the nation’s capital.

Natasha Warikoo, Harvard University

Natasha Warikoo is an expert on the relationships between education, racial and ethnic diversity, and cultural processes in schools and universities. Her most recent book, The Diversity Bargain: And Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions, and Meritocracy at Elite Universities (University of Chicago Press, 2016) illuminates how undergraduates attending Ivy League universities and Oxford University conceptualize race and meritocracy. The book emphasizes the contradictions, moral conundrums, and tensions on campus related to affirmative action and diversity, and how these vary across racial and national lines. Her first book, Balancing Acts: Youth Culture in the Global City (University of California Press, 2011), analyzes youth culture among children of immigrants attending low-performing high schools in New York City and London. Balancing Acts won the Thomas and Znaneicki Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s International Migration Section. Warikoo is a Guggenheim Fellow for 2017-18. During her year as a Guggenheim Fellow, Warikoo has been working on a book about racial change in suburban America. She is studying how the settlement of the nation’s most successful immigrant groups in privileged, previously predominantly white communities shapes the nature of racial boundaries, beliefs about success and achievement, and youth cultures. The findings will have implications for how to address racial diversity and student competition in privileged communities.