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 the United States, the authors show how in addition to limitations on their movements, punitive policies enacted in the past year have further reduced healthcare access for undocumented migrants and their mixed-status families, while pandemic-fueled anti-immigrant discourse has further marginalized these groups.
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 in the United States fail to account for the realities of people’s lived experience. Lee builds on her original research on race, gender, and sexuality in the context of Asian immigration and demonstrates concretely how notions of family underpin one of the most pressing moral and policy issues of our time: the separation of family members crossing US borders.
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 of the US-Mexico border, whose lives are separated by stringent immigration policies. In highlighting the connections between immigration and the environment, Dietrich argues that a more humane approach to legal residency is critical to bolstering local resilience to climate change on both sides of the border.
