Seminar to be held on Monday, June 3rd in ERC 115 at 12:00 pm.
This presentation draws on ethnographic research primarily conducted while I was employed as a regular production worker in a North Carolina meatpacking plant for sixteen months between 2009 and 2010. As part of a larger project that attempts to explain the character of social relations between Latina/o migrants and their chief counterparts in the workplace – African Americans – I trace the categories and meanings of shop floor racial talk with parallel attention to the diverse ethnoracial panoramas in Latina/o migrants’ origin countries. How are the terms …

Seminar to be held on Wednesday, May 22nd in ERC 115 at 12:00 pm.
To what extent is the French republican model still viable in debates over immigration and integration in France today?  Viewed from the perspective of the last thirty years, which saw the rise of a powerful anti-immigrant political movement, the Front National, one might conclude that immigration in postwar France has been raging out of control.  Yet despite the remarkable showing of the Front National in recent presidential elections, France has remained a relatively open immigration country, a tradition which dates from the middle of the nineteenth century.  …

Seminar to be held on Monday, April 29th in ERC 115 at 12:00 pm.

Will comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) pass in 2013? The momentum that has been building towards CIR, which accelerated with last November’s presidential election and has since grown even more with the recent introduction of the Senate ‘gang of 8′s” bill, has shown no signs of slowing down. As a matter of politics, the key question is whether there are enough votes in Congress? While there are no crystal balls to tell us how legislators will ultimately vote, the recent history of immigration politics in the U.S. provides …

Seminar to be held on Wednesday, April 17th in ERC 115 at 12:00 pm.
Research on immigration, educational achievement, and ethnoraciality has followed the lead of racialization and assimilation theories by focusing empirical attention on the immigrant-origin population (immigrants and their children) and effectively ignoring the third-plus generation (those who are US-born of US-born parents).  We depart from this orthodox approach by placing third-plus-generation individuals at center stage to examine how they adjust to norms that the immigrant-origin population defines.  We draw on fieldwork in Cupertino, California, a high-skilled immigrant gateway, where an Asian immigrant-origin population has established and enforces an amplified version of high-achievement norms.  The resulting ethnoracial encoding of academic achievement constructs whiteness as having “lesser-than” …

Seminar to be held on Monday, March 4th in ERC 115 at 12:00 pm.
Coming out of the Great Recession, slow economic recovery has U.S. communities seeking strategies that will grow jobs in the short term and improve standards of living over the long term. This talk focuses on immigrants in the labor force and their skills, an especially relevant topic given that debates about immigration policy reform have started.  How geographic regions can invest in the human capital and economic advancement of immigrants who are already living in their jurisdictions, to help boost short- and long-term U.S. economic growth, will …

Seminar to be held on Monday, January 28th in ERC 115 at 12:00 pm.
A largely dysfunctional American immigration system is only poorly explained by simple depictions of the political economy of lawmaking in this area, blaming functional economic policy-setting, longstanding public attitudes, explicit presidential discretion, or general gridlock. Instead, the structure of immigration law emerges from intersecting effects of three separate political economies – statutory compromises rooted in the political economy of lawmaking, organizational practices reflecting the political economy of implementation, and public reactions implicating the responses of policy elites and the larger public to each other. Together, these factors …

Seminar to be held on Monday, November 26th in ERC 115 at 12:00 pm
Social psychology research has shown that priming both emotion-giving and perspective-taking empathy can increase positive attitudes towards other groups.  Yet, political scientists have yet to explore the attitudinal implications of this emotional construct in a political context.  However, in a previous pilot study of students,  Chris Haynes finds evidence that empathy can have a permissive effect on people’s immigration policy preferences.  Here, he builds on these insights by presenting the results of two experiments, one laboratory and one online M-Turk, which evaluate the following expectations:  First, he …

Book discussion to be held on Monday, October 22nd in ERC 115 at 12:00 pm

The Politics of Trafficking: The First International Movement to Combat the Sexual Exploitation of Women
Sex trafficking is not a recent phenomenon. Over 100 years ago, the first international traffic in women for prostitution emerged, prompting a worldwide effort to combat it. The Politics of Trafficking provides a unique look at the history of that first anti-trafficking movement, illuminating the role gender, sexuality, and national interests play in international politics.
Initially conceived as a global humanitarian effort to protect women from sexual exploitation, the movement’s feminist-inspired vision failed …

Seminar to be held on Tuesday, June 5th in ERC 115 at 12:30 pm
In this research, Professor Nadia Y. Flores-Yeffal uses ethnographic longitudinal data collected in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico as well as the U.S. to introduce the concept of Migration-Trust Networks (MTN) from a transnational perspective. The concept contributes to the existing social capital theories of international migration by defining the particularities that characterize the social networks of migration in which a large number of migrants from Mexico to the U.S. lack legal documentation. She specifies membership requirements to participate in a MTN for those who migrate from …

Seminar to be held on Thursday, May 31st in ERC 115 at 12:30 pm.
Governments adopt a variety of approaches to regulating immigration, and make adjustments to these policies frequently. But currently there exist no comprehensive, cross-nationally comparable data on immigration laws and policies and how they have changed over time. This is a major problem for ongoing research on the determinants and impacts of immigration policies. The project is aimed at addressing this problem by compiling and analyzing comparable data on immigration laws and policies in 26 major recipient countries from 1960 until the present, with annual updates to follow. …