Senior Fellow

Kathyrn(Kathy) Kopinak (Canada)

Research Project:“Industrial Relocation and Migration: the Role of the Export Industries in Countries of Origin: Morocco and Mexico” Kathy is currently engaged with a team of other Canadian, U.S., and Spanish researchers in a comparison of the impact of working in maquiladora export industries on migration from Mexico to the U.S. and from Morocco to Spain.

Biography: Kathy received her BA and MA in Sociology from the University of Western Ontario and her Ph. D. from York University. She is a Canadian Sociologist at King’s University College, University of Western Ontario who began formal research on northern Mexico in the early eighties when North America’s industrial heartland started to dramatically transfer production to the US-Mexico borderlands. Research and publications have included the study of the labor process in Mexican maquiladora industries, the gendered division of labor in northern Mexico, environmental impacts of Mexican industrialization, the relationship between maquiladora employment and migration, and the influence of Mexican export industries on the growth and character of regional and global economies. She has received research grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a teaching award from the Ontario Council of University Faculty Associations.

Post – Doctoral Fellow

Research Project:“Local Context of Reception and Immigrant Adaptation Among Los Angeles Fruit Vendors” This project is an extension of a dissertation that examined the social and economic lives of a group ofstreet vendors in Los Angeles. It explores how local quality of life ordinances have impacted immigrant vendors working within the informal sector. It also examines how social capital is created through routine street-level interactions between fruit vendors and customers.

Biography: Rocio Rosales completed her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California-Los Angeles in 2012. She received her A.B. in Sociology (cum laude) with a certificate in Latin American Studies from Princeton University. Her research interests involve international migration, informal work, Latinos/as in the U.S. and urban ethnography. Her work will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and as a chapter in a forthcoming edited book published by the Russell Sage Foundation.

Pre – Doctoral Fellow

Research Project:“Empathy and Immigration Policy Preferences: The Interactive Pathway for Permissive Change”

Biography: Chris Haynes is a PhD candidate in political science from the University of California Riverside.  His NSF-funded dissertation examines the effects of empathy in the context of immigration policy preferences.  More broadly, his research includes a book manuscript on the framing effects on public opinion on immigration, working papers on Asian-American co-ethnic linked fate, the implications of ethnic media consumption on the political knowledge of Latinos, Asian-Americans, and African-Americans, and work with the second iteration of the National Asian American Survey.

Visiting Research Scholars

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Research Project:Labour Trafficking through Illegal Migration and Human Smuggling

Biography:Viresh Kumar Bhawra is an international Humphrey Fellow (Fulbright Scholar) 2012-13 from India. He is a senior police officer in India from federal police service (Indian Police Service) and is working in the state of Punjab, heading the state level crime investigation wing of Punjab Police. He has written a paper of ‘Irregular migration from India to EU – Evidence from Punjab’ which has been published by European University Institute in 2013. The Humphrey fellowship is a fellowship program of US department of state and is administered by Institute of International Education, Washington DC. His field of study during fellowship is ‘Trafficking in persons’. After completing major portion of fellowship at University of Minnesota Law School, he has joined Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California San Diego for a study of ‘Illegal Migration from Mexico to US and its comparative study with illegal migration from/to India’.

Maria Lorena Cook (United States)

Research Project:“As Citizens Among Us: Global Migration and Migrant Advocacy”

Biography:Maria is a Professor in the Department of International and Comparative Labor at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley and was previously a Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for US-Mexican Studies at UCSD. She has written on Mexican trade unions and politics, labor law reform in Latin America, and unauthorized migration and pro-migrant advocacy movements. Her books include The Politics of Labor Reform in Latin America: Between Flexibility and Rights (2007); Organizing Dissent: Unions, the State, and the Democratic Teachers’ Movement in Mexico (1996); The Politics of Economic Restructuring: State-Society Relations and Regime Change in Mexico (1994, co-editor); and Regional Integration and Industrial Relations in North America (1994, co-editor). Maria’s project while at CCIS focuses on migrant advocacy movements and is based on fieldwork in Spain, Arizona, and Australia.

Sae Jae Lee (Korea)

Research Project:Characteristics of Asian Immigrant Technologists

Biography: Sae Jae Lee received a BA in economics from Seoul National University, MA in economics from Rutgers University and Ph.D in economics from University of Washington. His doctoral dissertation and following research concentrates mainly on migrant occupational selection. He is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Industrial Management and Engineering, Kumoh National Institute of Technology, Gumi, Korea teaching and researching on industrial economics and engineering economics.

Cetta Mainwaring (United Kingdom)

Research Project:“Controlling Mobility: The Rise of Visa Regimes in the UK and the US”

Biography: Cetta Mainwaring has just finished her PhD at the University of Oxford in International Relations, where she was also affiliated with the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society. Her research interests include migration, borders, small state power, and the use of ethnographic methods in the field of International Relations. Cetta’s PhD examined irregular immigration into southern Europe, exploring the relationship between the EU and small peripheral member states in order to understand how these relationships shape and are shaped by irregular immigration flows. She is now working on a book manuscript and developing a post-doc project on visas as a form of immigration control.

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Visiting Graduate Students

Milosz Miszczynski

Research Project:Mobility of Foreign Direct Investment in the NAFTA Zone and Central and Eastern Europe. A Comparative Study of Local Receptions

Biography: Milosz is a PhD candidate in sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Poland and a Tokyo Foundation Fellow (Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund).  He holds an M.A. in Sociology; B.A. in international relations from the Cracow University of Economics, Poland; and B.A. in Human Resources Management from Glamorgan University, UK.  In addition to Mexico, his fieldwork includes sites in Poland, the Ukraine and Romania. Milosz’s current research focuses on a comparative analysis of social receptions of global flows.

Stevie Ruiz

Research Project:“The Color of Development: Race, Conformity and Land Conflict in Imperial County, 1900-1945”

Biography:Stevie Ruiz is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego.  His dissertation, “The Color of Development: Race, Conformity and Land Conflict in Imperial County, 1900-1945” focuses on the power dynamics oscillating between White colonial settlers, Asian tenants, Mexicans farm workers and Native people over land.  American westward expansion is typically conceived as a movement toward greater political and economic freedom directly following the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo of 1848, when the United States seized the northern territory of Mexico and Indigenous nations. Claims to land have bifurcated into debates in Chicano Studies over citizenship rights to land and, on the other hand, an analytical focus on settler-colonialism in Native-American Studies.  In his dissertation, he analyzes two dimensions that have not been discussed by the existing literature on race and colonialism: a geographical focus on Imperial County and an examination of the centrality of land subsidy programs to colonialism as practiced at the U.S.-Mexico border in the early 20th century.  Fifty years after the end of Spanish-American War, the United States federal government instituted its largest land subsidy program to promote White settlement to the American Southwest, resulting in massive land confiscation through the use of the Reclamation Act of 1902 and Alien Land Law that annulled immigrant’ claims to land and thus citizenship. At its core, this dissertation uncovers complex dimensions to the history of U.S. colonialism and settlement practiced domestically by analyzing conflicts between settlers, migrants and the Cocopah Nation (Native people) over the same land in Imperial County, a region located 90 miles east of San Diego and 10 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border.  At its core, his dissertation argues that U.S. citizenship was contingent upon land confiscation of racially marginalized populations.  Fundamentally, his research tackles the critical question as to how poor working-class people dissented from, or conformed to, settler colonial ambitions.In addition to his work on political geography, race and Chicano Studies, Ruiz has research and teaching interests that intersect with Queer Studies, Architecture and the Built Environment.  He has written extensively on the uses of Gay and Lesbian history, as well as human rights at the U.S.-Mexico Border.