Douglas Massey of Princeton University will speak on “The New Reality of Mexico-U.S. Migration: The Effects of America’s War on Immigrants” on Tuesday, April 6 at 12:30 p.m. in Thompson 620. The talk is part of the Center for Public Policy and Administration’s Mellon-funded Grants Workshop Speaker Series and is co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology, the Department of History, and the Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies.
Massey is Princeton’s Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, and also holds an appointment with the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is widely known for his work on immigration, housing, race and poverty, and for his use of large-scale survey data to document and illuminate pressing social issues. He co-directs the Mexican Migration Project, a bi-national research effort that investigates the evolving nature of transnational migration between Mexico and the U.S. He also launched the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen, a comprehensive survey of white, black, Latino and Asian American first-year students that provided the data for The Source of the River, Massey’s widely-read book about issues affecting access to American colleges and universities. Douglas Massey is a past president of the American Sociological Association and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In his talk, Massey will discuss the ways that Mexico-U.S. migration patterns have historically shifted in response to changes in U.S. policy. He will especially focus on the end of the 20th century, when we saw several events that led to the militarization of the Mexico-U.S. border and the escalation of U.S. enforcement. Massey will argue that these events have caused undocumented migration to effectively cease, even though legal immigrants and guest workers continue to enter the country. However, because unauthorized immigrants already living here are not returning to Mexico, a majority of Mexicans living in the United States currently do so outside the protection of the law and at a time when penalties for illegality and the persecution of undocumented immigrants have reached record levels. Increasingly, Mexicans in the United States are cut off from their homeland and estranged by anti-immigrant policies, practices and attitudes, finding themselves in unusually marginalized and vulnerable positions.
While at UMass, Massey will also mentor Assistant Professor of History José Angel Hernández, who is developing a grant proposal for support of his research on the recent deportation of Mexicans living in New England. Hernández is a Fellow in the 2009-2010 CPPA Grants Workshop, which is supported by the UMass Amherst Office of Faculty Development’s Mutual Mentoring Initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
This talk is free and open to the public.
For more information, contact Susan Newton (snewton@pubpol.umass.edu or 413-577-0478)