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.
History
The Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (CCIS) was established at the University of California San Diego in March 1999 under the leadership of Dr. Wayne Cornelius, a pioneering scholar of international migration. From its founding, CCIS was conceived as a hub for rigorous, comparative, and interdisciplinary research on global migration, grounded in UC San Diego’s distinctive position near the U.S.–Mexico border. Over its next two decades, CCIS grew into an organized research unit at UC San Diego and a recognized home for high-quality policy-oriented research on international migration. Under the leadership of subsequent Co-Directors Dr. David FitzGerald, Dr. John Skrentny, and Dr. Claire Adida, the Center expanded its research portfolio, academic programming, and global reach, to study international migration from a broad geographical and interdisciplinary perspective. CCIS research came to span migrant-sending and receiving contexts across North America, Europe, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region. The Center also looked at all kinds of different migrants, including refugees and the forcibly displaced.
Today, from its vantage point just 30 miles from the Mexican border, CCIS maintains a worldwide network of scholars and partner institutions. This network includes more than 355 Research Associates based in 25 countries and 35 institutional affiliates, including 12 outside the United States.
Throughout its 25+ year history, CCIS faculty, staff, and fellows have contributed regularly to local, national, and international media and public discourse, and their scholarship has informed migration policy and practice around the world.
In addition, CCIS has long prioritized public engagement and education. Based at UC San Diego’s Eleanor Roosevelt College, the Center serves as a key site for undergraduate and graduate training, offering distinctive academic programming on campus and through experiential initiatives such as the Mexican Migration Field Research Program. CCIS has also maintained a longstanding Visiting Research Fellowship Program and research seminar series, open to the campus community and the public, fostering intellectual exchange among visiting fellows, guest scholars, UC San Diego faculty, and international speakers.
