CCIS Director and Professor of Sociology, UCSD
Center for Comparative Immigration Studies
University of California at San Diego
La Jolla, CA 92093-0548
Email: jskrentn@ucsd.edu
Telephone: (858) 822-4447
Fax: (858) 822-4432

John Skrentny’s CV »

John Skrentny has written two books and edited another on the historical development of laws and policies to protect the rights and opportunities of minorities in the US. These studies have included a wide variety of groups, including African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and white ethnics, as well as immigrants, the disabled, gays/lesbians and women of all races and ethnicities. This research has sought to bring a cultural approach to the fields of historical institutionalism and American political development. Starting with the premise that no policy is developed without the decisions of policy makers, Skrentny has focused his research on the worldviews and actions of policy-making elites, situating them in their historical, local and global contexts.

Specifically, Skrentny’s books have included The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture and Justice in America (University of Chicago Press, 1996), a study of the development and politics of affirmative action in employment for African Americans. This book was featured in a author-meets-critics panel at the conference of the Social Science History Association, and was reviewed in a wide variety of academic journals, as well as The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. More recent is The Minority Rights Revolution (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), which won the Distinguished Book Award from the Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and was a finalist for the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award of the Organization of American Historians. The book was featured in author-meets-critics panels at meetings of the American Sociological Association, the Midwest Political Science Association, and the Western Political Science Association. This work was also widely reviewed in academic journals, as well as The Washington Post Book World, The Boston Globe, and The Nation. Skrentny’s work has also appeared in a variety of leading academic journals.

Research Expertise

Politics, law, social movements, ethnicity, globalization, and culture

Geographical Regions of Specialization

United States, Asia, Europe

Current Research Projects

After Civil Rights: Analysis of the meaning of race in the workplace in the contemporary United States and its relationship to legal and policy development. Book project in progress.

“The Three Worlds of Immigration”: Exploration of variations in immigration policy in East Asia, Europe and North America. This project will be run through the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, and may be connected to a series of conferences and projects, as well as a solo-authored book.

Working Group to Track and Analyze the Obama Administration’s Efforts to Reorient U.S. Public Policy: “Theda Skocpol (Harvard University) and Larry Jacobs (University of Minnesota) have formed a working group of eight scholars to trace and analyze the Obama administration’s efforts to reorient U.S. public policy in a series of key areas. With an award from the Russell Sage Foundation, the group will take a real-time and comprehensive look at Obama’s policy initiatives, putting the challenges he faces in reorienting U.S. domestic socio-economic policy in institutional-historical perspective, and tracing what happens with efforts to change federal interventions, spending, taxes, and regulation. … John Skrentny (University of California, San Diego) will look at the administration’s adjustments to immigration policy.”

Media Interview Topics

Skrentny can provide expertise on the history and politics of immigration in the US, civil rights law, relations of immigrants with African Americans, assimilation and acculturation, the role of immigrants in the American workplace, and immigration politics and policy in Europe and Asia, especially Japan and South Korea.

Selected Publications

Forthcoming “Elite Status and Social Change: Using Field Analysis to Explain Policy Formation and Implementation.” Social Problems

2011 With Micah Gell-Redman. “Comprehensive Immigration Reform and the Dynamics of Statutory Entrenchment.” The Yale Law Journal Online 120: 325-346.

2009 With Dong-Hoon Seol. “Why Is There So Little Migrant Settlement in East Asia?” International Migration Review 43: 578- 620

2009 With Dong-Hoon Seol. “Ethnic Return Migration and Hierarchical Nationhood: Korean Chinese Foreign Workers in South Korea.” Ethnicities 9: 147-174

2008 “Culture and Race/Ethnicity: Bolder, Deeper and Broader.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 619: 59-77

2008 “Are America’s Civil Rights Laws Still Relevant?” Du Bois Review 4: 1-22

2007  With Stephanie Chan, Jon E. Fox and Denis Kim. “Defining Nations in Asia and Europe: A Comparative Analysis of Ethnic Return Migration Policy.” International Migration Review 41: 793-825. Also published in Takeyuki Tsuda, ed., Diasporic Homecomings: Ethnic Return Migrants in Comparative Perspective (Stanford University Press)

2006 “Law and the American State.” Annual Review of Sociology 32: 213-44

2006 “Policy-Elite Perceptions and Social Movement Success: Understanding Variations in Group Inclusion in Affirmative Action,” American Journal of Sociology. 111 (May): 1762-1815

2004 With Dong-Hoon Seol. “South Korea: Importing Undocumented Workers.” In Wayne A. Cornelius, Takeyuki Tsuda, Philip L. Martin, and James F. Hollifield, eds., Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective [second edition], Stanford University Press, pp. 475-513

2002 The Minority Rights Revolution, the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

2001 (editor) Color Lines: Immigration, Affirmative Action and Civil Rights Options for America, University of Chicago Press

1996 The Ironies of Affirmative Action:  Politics, Culture and Justice in America, University of Chicago Press

Academic Background

1994 Harvard University, Ph. D., Sociology

1990 Harvard University, A.M., Sociology

1988 Indiana University, B.A., Sociology and Philosophy