2019-2020 News

A new Migrant Narrative by Graduate Student Affiliate Lizbeth de la Cruz and Robert Irwin uses the stories of two victims of deportation to shed light on the issues of migration law on childhood arrivals. The criminalization of undocumented youth through racial profiling and other structural issues often leads to deportation, placing victims in an unfamiliar country away from the life they've built.

Read here.

Evidence from European elections shows that the skill of immigrants rather than origin helps to drive voter and party attitudes regarding the welfare state. Higher-skilled immigrants cause a higher support among voters for a welfare state while the opposite is true for low-skilled immigrants. This research was published in a special issue of Labour Economics focusing on the economics of migration and features the work of GMC Director Giovanni Peri. 

The UC Collaborative to Promote Immigrant and Student Equity (UC PromISE) is pleased to announce the second call for proposals for UC faculty small research grants.

Humanizando la Deportación(Humanizing Deportation), a multi-media project by GMC Deputy Director Robert Irwin, is cosponsor of the publication of Caravaneros, a testimonial dramatization of the voyage of the migrant caravan of fall 2018 from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, to the US-Mexico border city of Tijuana by Honduran refugee Douglas Oviedo, who obtained political asylum in the United States last year. The book features an introduction, "La historia insólita de la caravana migrante de 2018 y del hondureño Douglas Oviedo," by Robert McKee Irwin and Aída Silva.

Stacy D. Fahrenthold's book, Between the Ottomans and the Entente, was awarded an Arab American Book Award by the Arab American National Museum. From the announcement:"Drawing on transnational sources from migrant activists, this wide-ranging work reveals the degree to which Ottoman migrants "became Syrians" while abroad and brought their politics home to the post-Ottoman Middle East."

View the announcement here.

Robert McKee Irwin's Humanizing Deportation project recently provided consulting for National Public Radio "Outside/In" program on "The Darién Gap", a notoriously perilous section of the migrant trail between Colombia and Panamá, where many migrants and asylum seekers pass on their northward journey, in hopes of reaching the US-Mexico border.

Despite the Trump Administration's effort to protect American jobs by closing off the United States to foreign workers, economic research shows foreign workers of all skill levels to be drivers of the U.S. economy. A new LA Times op-ed by Giovanni Peri and Chad Sparber was released today and cites multiple studies that show the importance of foreign-born workers as drivers of the U.S. economy, a counterpoint to the Trump Administration's efforts to halt the influx of foreign workers in April and June. 

GMC Affiliate Stacy Fahrenthold was recently appointed co-editor of Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies. From the announcement:

Fahrenthold’s research blends migration and borderlands approaches to social history, drawing on informal archives to critique the production of place-based histories...Fahrenthold brings to the journal her wide-ranging and highly-regarded scholarship, editorial experience, and innovative ideas.

GMC Affiliate Philip Martin and visiting scholar Daniel Costa's commentary on the impact of H-2A visas were both recently cited in an article, "The Scramble to Pluck 24 Billion Cherries in Eight Weeks", detailing the conditions faced by seasonal workers amid the pandemic. 

Read the full article here.

We are excited to welcome a new visiting scholar for the academic year 2020-2021. Daniel Costa is an attorney and the Director of Immigration Law and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute(EPI). Costa’s areas of research include a wide range of labor migration issues, including governance of temporary labor migration programs, both high- and less-skilled migration, worksite enforcement, and immigrant workers’ rights, as well as farm labor, global multilateral processes related to migration, and refugee and asylum issues.