Welcome to Items & Issues, the relaunched monthly newsletter from the Social Science Research Council. Since 1947, Items has served as a platform for sharing the SSRC’s work and fostering broader conversations about the social sciences. This newsletter continues that tradition, offering a curated selection of social science readings drawn from Council platforms and the wider field.
This month’s theme is Immigration, a subject long central to social science and to the Council in particular. In the 1920s, the United States enacted its first national origin quotas for immigration, and in response, the SSRC appointed its first research committee—the Committee on Human Migration—which investigated widespread concerns about immigration’s impacts. In the century since, social scientists have produced a rich body of research on the economic and societal effects of immigration, as well as the consequences of restrictive immigration policies and anti-immigrant sentiment.
Today, immigration policy is shifting rapidly again, with enforcement and detention expanding and public scrutiny of federal immigration operations increasing. This month we highlight social science research that can help illuminate how immigration intersects with labor, race, foreign policy, surveillance, and more.
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