Senior Fellow

Kathryn (Kathy) Kopinak (Canada)

Research Project: The Complementary Relationship Between International Migration and Mexican Maquiladora Employment

Biography: Kathryn Kopinak 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 who began formal research on northern Mexico in the early eighties when North America ’s old industrial heartland started to dramatically transfer production to the US-Mexico borderlands. Research in the last two decades has 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.

Pre – Doctoral Fellow

Robbie Totten (United States)

Research Project: “Security and United States Immigration Policy.”  This project details the strategic logic of immigration for the U.S. by providing a typology of security policy objectives for America in this area. It identifies three general categories of objectives that U.S. leaders have attempted to reach with immigration from the colonial era to the present-day: (1) foreign policy; (2); material and military interests; and (3) domestic security (preventing crime, espionage, and terrorism; epidemics; and ethnic violence). The analyses accompanying the categories will specify the relationships amongst the security areas and immigration, identify the policy instruments used by leaders to influence immigration for security, and present a large body of cases of historical U.S. immigration policies designed for security purposes.

Biography: Robbie is a doctoral candidate in the UCLA Department of Political Science.  Before embarking on his PhD, he received a BA in Political Science from Duke University and worked as an equity research assistant for Deutsche Bank.  He has served as a political science instructor at the UCLA College Summer Institute and UCLA Center for Community Learning and his research will appear in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History and Diplomatic History.  His research interests include, demography and security, foreign relations and state migration policies, nontraditional security threats, security and international migration, refugee crises, and U.S. immigration policy history.

Visiting Research Scholars

Research Project: Implications of the migrations in the development processes of the origin countries. Comparative study between two migratory systems: Mexico – USA and Andean countries – Spain.” This project forms a part of a wider study, directed by C. Blanco and financed by the Spanish Department of Science and Innovation, titled “Social implications of the transnational migration: beyond remittances.”

Biography: Cristina Blanco is Professor of Sociology at the University of the Basque Country (Spain). She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and Sociology from the University of Deusto (Spain). She is a Director of Master’s Degree in “International Migrations; knowledge and management of the migratory processes”, at the University of the Basque Country (Spain) and with the collaboration of the IOM, and she contributed to the foundation of the Basque Observatory of Immigration, by means of agreement between the University of the Basque Country and the Basque Government. She has worked for more than 20 years working in international migration, especially concerning the integration of immigrants in host societies.

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Eunice Akemi Ishikawa (Japan)

Research Project: Education and Ethnic Identity of Second-Generation Japanese-Brazilians in Japan

Biography: Eunice Akemi Ishikawa is an Associate Professor in the Department of International Culture at the Shizuoka University of Art and Culture, Hamamatsu city, Shizuoka prefecture, Japan. She teaches Multicultural Society and Ethnicity, International Labor Migration and the second and highest level of the institution’s Portuguese language. In addition to her teaching duties, she conducts research related to the reverse migration of Brazilians of Japanese ancestry to Japan and contributes to a colleague’s research into gender studies. A native of Londrina, in the state of Paraná, Brazil, Ms. Ishikawa earned her BA in International Relations from Tsukuba University, Japan, and MA in International Studies from Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. through Ochanomizu University, Japan.

Amparo González Ferrer

Research Project: “Roads to citizenship in Spain and the US: Exploring the connections between undocumented migration, family reunification and naturalization strategies among recent immigrants”

Biography: Amparo Gonzalez is a Research Fellow at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and member of the Group on Demographic Dynamics in her home institution. She has previously worked on policies and processes of immigrant family reunification in Europe, and the political integration of immigrants in European cities. She is currently involved in the ‘Migrations between Africa and Europe’ (MAFE) Project. Two of her most recent publications in English are: “Sampling international migrants with origin-based snowballing method. New evidence on biases and limitations” (with Cris Beauchemin), Demographic Research (2011), and “Explaining the labor performance of immigrant women in Spain: the interplay between family, migration and legal trajectories”, International Journal of Comparative Sociology (2011).

Akihiro Koido (Japan)

Research Project: Immigration Enforcement and Social Movement After September 11th

Research Project: Immigrants’ Entitlements in Welfare Services: Different Treatment in Search of Equality

Biography: Alberto Martín Pérez is Assistant Professor at the Sociology Department of the University of Barcelona (Spain). He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales of Paris (France) and has been postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Public Goods and Policies of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). He currently conducts research on the access of immigrants to welfare provisions and public services, focusing on the street-level practice of social policy. He is mostly interested in the social construction of citizenship in contemporary democratic societies.

Spyros Themelis (United Kingdom)

Research Project: Roma education in Europe

Biography: Spyros Themelis is a Lecturer in Education at Middlesex University, UK. He holds a PhD in sociology of education from the University of London, UK. In the past, he conducted research on the education of minority groups and took part in international projects on Roma/Gypsies in a number of European countries, including Italy, Greece, the UK and Romania. Currently, he publishes on issues about the educational and social  situation of of Roma/Gypsies as well as in the area of social mobility and education. He has an interest in issues of social and educational inequalities, meritocracy and education, social exclusion/inclusion and is a member of the advisory board of the ‘Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies’.

Research Project: Female migration projects. Colombian, Ecuadorian and Moroccan women towards Spain

Biography: Trinidad L. Vicente is lecturer in Sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities and researcher at the Institute of Human Rights, University of Deusto (UD, Bilbao, Spain).  She is member of the Research Team on Social and Cultural Challenges in a Changing World (UD) and member of the IMISCOE Research Network.   Her main research topics focus on international migrations, human rights and gender perspectives.

Visiting Graduate Students

Marie-Laurence Flahaux (Belgium-France)

Research Project: “Comparative analysis of Senegalese and Congolese migrants’ return and reintegration patterns in their home country”. This work is based on the MAFE quantitative and longitudinal surveys as well as on qualitative data collected through interviews realized with return migrants in the Dakar and Kinshasa regions. In particular, three different topics relative to return migration are studied: the return determinants, the “after return” reinsertion and the return policies.

Biography: Marie-Laurence received her B.A. in Law and her M.A.’s in Political Sciences and in Demography from the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium). She is currently a PhD student both at the Research Centre in Population and Societies of the Catholic University of Louvain and at the National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED, France). She is a member of the MAFE project, focused on international migrations between Africa and Europe.

Luisa Feline Freier (United Kingdom)

Biography: Feline is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Government of the London School of Economics (LSE). She received her B.A. in Latin American Studies (Economics) from the University of Cologne and her M.A. in Latin American Studies (Sociology & Law) from UW-Madison. Before embarking on her Ph.D. she worked for the International Organization for Migration and the Friedrich Naumannn Foundation in Uruguay, Germany and South Africa.

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Mayuri Ito (Japan)

Research Project: Analysis of how Somalis’ transnational networks have reconstructed, re-strengthened, or transformed after governmental intervention. In addition, the project will examine how transnational networks become multiple and complex networks after September 11.

Biography: Mayuri Ito received her B.A. in Sociology from the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan. She is currently a Master’s student at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, Japan.

Amaha Kassa (United States)

Research Project: “Rolling Up The Welcome Mat: The Rise of Immigrant Housing Exclusion Policies.” This project examines the legal, historical, political and social factors influencing the efforts of American cities and states to use housing and land use laws to exclude, control, or limit the presence of immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, within their jurisdiction, and considers alternative policy tools that localities might employ to respond to conflicts between immigrant and native-born residents.

Biography: Amaha Kassa is currently enrolled in a dual degree program, pursuing a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a Juris Doctor from UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). Amaha received his Bachelor of Arts from Brown University. Prior to graduate school, he worked as a labor and community organizer. For nine years, he ran the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, a labor-affiliated policy research and advocacy organization concerned with low-wage workers. His current research and future advocacy is focused on human rights, international law, and migration, particularly African immigrant and refugee communities in the United States.

Emma Kaufman (United Kingdom)

Research Project: “Making Citizens: The Politics of Foreign Nationality in British Prisons.” This project draws on a year of fieldwork in men’s prisons to examine the relationship between immigration and imprisonment in Great Britain. This thesis examines the role that nationality plays in prisoners’ experiences of incarceration, the relationship between immigration and penal policy, and the methodological implications of ethnographic research. The central question is how the challenges posed and felt by foreign nationals alter contemporary accounts of state power.

Biography: Emma Kaufman received her B.A. from Columbia University and her M.Phil. from Oxford University. She is currently a completing a doctorate in law at Oxford as a Clarendon Fellow. Emma has a background in gender and critical race studies, and her broader interests include comparative sentencing policy, preventive detention, and the sociology of punishment.

Biography: Kedar A. Kulkarni received his BA from Brandeis University, and is currently a PhD candidate in the Literature department at UC San Diego. His work focuses mostly on theatre and performance, in India and England.

Arianna Martinez (United States)

Research Project: The Politics of Latino Belonging – Law, Scale, and Identity in Municipal Anti-Immigrant Ordinances in the United States

Biography: Arianna Martinez is an Instructor of Urban Studies at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York. She will receive her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in Urban Planning and Geography this October. She holds an M.A. is International Affairs from the New School and a B.A. in Economics from Purchase College. Her research focuses on contemporary state and local exclusionary employment and housing laws that target Latino immigrants.

M. Tina Zarpour

Research Project: Transnational political engagement of Iranians in the diaspora: investigating online and offline impacts of the 2009 presidential election and subsequent events

Biography: M. Tina Zarpour holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Dartmouth College, and a M.A. in Applied Anthropology in 2007 from the University of Maryland. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of Maryland. Her research interests include skilled and middle class migrants, immigrant voluntary associations and civic engagement, diaspora philanthropy and volunteerism, and virtual ethnography.