The conference will take place in the Weaver Center of the Institute of the Americas – University of California, San Diego.  For directions, click here.

If you are interested in attending the conference, contact Ana Minvielle.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Research on Immigration, Population and Public Policy, UC Irvine; UCLA Program on International Migration; and Gifford Center for Population Studies, UC Davis

8:00-8:30am COFFEE AND WELCOME

David FitzGerald, UC San Diego

John Skrentny, UC San Diego

8:30-10:00am PANEL 1. Local Policy Responses

Karthick Ramakrishnan, UCR, “Polarized Change:  An Evidence-Based Theory of Subnational Immigration Regulation”

Jennifer Chacon, UCI, “Overcriminalizing Immigration”

Angela Garcia, UCSD, “Return to Sender? A Comparative Analysis of Immigrant Communities in ‘Attrition through Enforcement’ Destinations”

Discussant: Zoli Hajnal, UCSD

10:00- 10:30am BREAK

10:30am-12:30pm PANEL 2. Unauthorized Migration

Wayne Cornelius, UCSD, “Evaluating the Costs and Efficacy of U.S. Immigration Enforcement: A National Academy of Sciences Study”

Frank Bean, UCI, “Unauthorized Mexican Migration:  Effects on Second-Generation Educational Attainment”

Ruben Hernandez-Leon, UCLA, “The (Undocumented) Migration Industry as a Bastard Institution”

Discussant: Esther Castillo, UCI

12:30-1:30pm LUNCH

Speaker: Roberto Suro, USC, “After the Storm:  The immigration policy debate in the wake of the great recession”

1:30-3:00pm PANEL 3. Latino Politics

Cristina Mora, UCB, “Hispanic Panethnicity”

Rodney Hero, UCB, “Exploring the Strength of ‘American’ Identity among Latinos: Considering the Role of ‘Liberal’ Values, Ascriptive Factors, and Demographic Characteristics”

David Sears, UCLA, “Do national and ethnic identities collide?”

Susan Bibler Coutin, UCI, “Memory, Membership, and Rights:  Activism among Salvadoran Youth”

Discussant: Susan Brown, UCI

3:00-3:30pm BREAK

3:30-5:00pm PANEL 4. Refugees and Security

Phil Wolgin, Center for American Progress (formerly UCB), “Encouraging Defection while Discouraging Admissions: U.S. Policy toward Refugees in Asia’s Berlin, 1950-1965″

Kate Jastram, UCB, “Seeking Asylum, Suspected of War Crimes: Weighing Persecution by the Persecuted”

Robbie Totten, UCLA/CCIS, “Security Objectives and U.S. Refugee Policy”

Discussant: David Pedersen, UCSD

6:00pm DINNER & KEYNOTE ADDRESS (invited panelists and discussants only)

Edward Alden, Council on Foreign Relations, “Are U.S. Borders Finally Secure? Evidence and Implications for the Immigration Debate”

The study of the contours and antecedents of U.S. public opinion on immigration has been characterized by several strategies: 1) analyzing differences between whites and African Americans only; 2) controlling for race when estimating inferential models by using dummy variables; 3) utilizing models of white opinion to explain attitudes among minority Americans; and 4) analyzing one racial or ethnic group in isolation. Professor Junn argues that these approaches are insufficient to both the descriptive and inferential task facing analysts of public opinion in a diverse American polity. Instead, she advocates a comparative relational approach that considers the opinions of all Americans, and generates hypotheses based on the interactive and historically-grounded experiences of racial groups in the United States. With this approach, she develops a theory of the political context of racial structural positionality and articulate how this context and the development of racialization structures agency  and constraint for Americans classified by race.

Jane Junn is Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California. She is the author of four books on political participation in the U.S. Her first book, Education and Democratic Citizenship in America (with Norman Nie and Ken Stehlik-Barry, University of Chicago Press, 1996), won the Woodrow Wilson Foundation award from the American Political Science Association for the best book published in political science. She is also the author of Civic Education: What Makes Students Learn (with Richard G. Niemi, Yale University Press, 1998), New Race Politics: Understanding Minority and Immigrant Politics (edited with Kerry L. Haynie, Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Asian American Political Participation: Emerging Constituents and their Political Identities (with Janelle Wong, Karthick Ramakrishnan and Taeku Lee, Russell Sage Foundation, 2011). This most recent book is based on data from the 2008 National Asian American Survey. She is currently at work with Natalie Masuoka on a book on political attitudes in the U.S. entitled Conditional Welcome: Public Opinion on Immigration and the Politics of Belonging.

Jane has been Vice President of the American Political Science Association, a Fulbright Senior Scholar and a recipient of an Outstanding Teacher Award from Columbia University Teachers College. She was a member of the Social Science Research Council National Research Commission on Elections and Voting and a member of the National Academy of Science Committee on the U.S. Naturalization Test Redesign. She was the director of the USC – Los Angeles Times Poll during the 2010 California election.

Seminar to be held on Thursday, January 26th in ERC 201 at 12:30 pm.

We love freedom. We hate racism. But what do we do when these values collide? This talk, based on the speaker’s 2011 book of the same title, advances descriptive, explanatory, and normative arguments. It explores policies that the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and other liberal democracies have implemented when forced to choose between preserving freedom and combating racism. Using a comparative historical approach, it reveals that while most liberal democracies have increased restrictions on racist speech, groups, and actions since the end of World War II, this trend has resembled a slow creep more than a slippery slope. Outcomes have varied across time and place, however, and have been less the product of differences in minority mobilization, constitutional law, or culture, than of conjunctures of factors in particular political contexts. From a normative standpoint, it develops a framework for evaluating the extent to which policy responses are proportionate to the level of harm the racism inflicts. It also asserts that the best way for societies to preserve freedom while fighting racism is through processes of public deliberation that involve citizens in decisions that impact the core values of liberal democracies.

Erik Bleich is professor of political science at Middlebury College in Vermont. His most recent book is The Freedom to Be Racist? How the United States and Europe Struggle to Preserve Freedom and Combat Racism (Oxford University Press, 2011). He is also the author of Race Politics in Britain and France: Ideas and Policymaking since the 1960s (Cambridge University Press, 2003), the editor of Muslims and the State in the Post-9/11 West (Routledge, 2010), and the author of articles on race, ethnicity, and policymaking in liberal democracies that have appeared in journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, the European Political Science Review, Theory & Society, and World Politics.

* Light refreshments will be provided

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CCIS graduate student researchers Angela García and David Keyes, along with CCIS pre-doctoral fellow Robbie Totten, discussed contemporary immigration and border issues with a group of undergraduates visiting from University of Maryland on January 11, 2012.

Seminar to be held on Tuesday, January 10th in ERC 115 at 12:30 pm.

What explains immigrant exclusion in urban West Africa? Africa scholars have long recognized the dynamic and political nature of citizenship in Africa. Immigration scholars have long debated the determinants of immigrant exclusion in industrialized democracies. But we know very little about the character of immigrant exclusion in Africa. This research contributes to our understanding of immigrant insecurity in the developing world by comparing and explaining the fates of two immigrant ethnic groups – the Nigerian Yorubas and Hausas – in three West African cities: Accra, Cotonou and Niamey. Relying on surveys of immigrants and their host populations, as well as interviews with local community leaders, it finds that, in environments lacking a formal-legal path to citizenship, the immigrant experience is shaped by local actors who benefit from immigrant insecurity and vulnerability. Consequently, cultural similarities between immigrants and hosts do not necessarily improve immigrant integration; they may, in fact, exacerbate exclusion.

Claire Adida is an assistant professor in the department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University in 2010. Her research is in Comparative Politics, and more specifically in the study of ethnicity and identity, government and non-state provision of public goods, inter-group cooperation and violence, and trust and informal institutions. Her work has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and in Comparative Political Studies. She is completing a book manuscript on Immigrant Exclusion and Insecurity in Africa, where she offers one of the first systematic analyses of the immigrant experience in a region that experiences large flows of voluntary migration.

* Light refreshments will be provided