About CCIS

Mission and Vision 

The Center for Comparative Immigration Studies advances research and transformative dialogue on migration, displacement, and borders. We center (im)migrants and refugees in collaborative, community-accountable work. Our projects address the most pressing challenges of our time, from our home in the US-Mexico border region to migration systems around the globe.

Current Priorities 

Currently, CCIS is building on its long-standing reputation for scholarly excellence and policy impacts while deepening its role as a community-rooted hub for research, dialogue, and action on migration and borders. At a moment of intensified displacement, climate crisis, and vilification of immigrants, CCIS is committed to advancing knowledge that is ethically grounded, collaborative, and consequential.

Guided by these priorities, CCIS aims to serve as a space where migrants, students, scholars, artists, and organizers come together to ask difficult questions, develop innovative research, and translate knowledge into practice.

Reimagining Refuge

From 2025–2028, Reimagining Refuge serves as CCIS’s primary initiative for advancing community-led migration research and practice. Through this project, CCIS is piloting new models of collaboration, training, and impact. Building a network of migrants, organizers, artists, students, and scholars across California and the US–Mexico border, the initiative brings research, imagination, and practice together to confront the urgent challenges facing migrants today. By incubating innovative, multi-scalar work and centering migrants’ lived experiences and leadership, Reimagining Refuge models CCIS’s commitment to producing work that not only explains migration, but actively contributes to more just futures for migrants—in San Diego/Tijuana, in California, in the United States, and around the world.