The SSRC's first-ever research committee was formed in response to the restrictive immigration laws of the 1920s. A century later, as enforcement and detention expand and public scrutiny of federal immigration operations increases, this issue of Items & Issues gathers social science research on immigration and its connections to labor, race, foreign policy, surveillance, and more.
Featured Theme: Immigration
Heide Castañeda and William D. Lopez explore historical connections and future impacts of the pandemic on border management and human mobility. Focusing on immigrants in…
For our “Sexuality & Gender Studies Now” series, Catherine Lee, a 2000 fellow of the SSRC’s Sexuality Research Fellowship Program, describes how conceptualizations of kinship…
Alexa Dietrich co-launches the “Just Environments” series by reflecting on the environmental challenges faced by transnational communities—in this case, families that live on opposite sides…
Border BattlesMore Collections >
Myths and stereotypes about immigrants and crime often provide the underpinnings for public policies and practices.
Influential voices in the media and in public policy circles have sustained the impression and perhaps heightened the concern that high levels of immigration harm…
On July 2, 2000, Vicente Fox became Mexico’s first democratically-elected opposition president, and almost made good on a campaign promise to re-examine US-Mexican migration relations…
Trending Essays
Aliza Luft tackles a question essential for social science and for human rights work—how, and how much, does dehumanizing propaganda spread by planners of genocide…
Introduction Even as most Americans celebrate their heritage and identity as a “nation of immigrants,” there is deep ambivalence about future immigration. There is a…
When I think of Mexican migration, I think of a powerful metaphor and its sediments: tierra. Land. Earth. Soil. Subsoil. Dirt. Dust. Especially in the…
Frontiers
This article explores the bureaucratic mechanisms of exclusion of Latinas in the Texas–Mexico border region from coverage under Medicaid for Pregnant Women, a safety net…
An examination of the US refugee resettlement program shows that its administrative pipelines create path dependent imbalances in the distribution of scarce resettlement spaces.
This essay in American Historical Review explores the inter-American origins of the Bracero Program (1942–64), a bilateral agreement to regulate labor migration between the United…