Download the Immigration Symposium Program

Welcome and Goals for the Meeting

• Melvin L. Oliver, Symposium Chair, UC Santa Barbara

An Overview of Immigration

• David M. Kennedy, Stanford University

Economic Integration and Fiscal Impacts

• James P. Smith, The RAND Corporation
• Stephen Trejo, University of Texas

Social and Political Integration

• Guillermina Jasso, New York University
• Louis DeSipio, UC Irvine

Individual and Community Well-Being</p>

• Ruben G. Rumbaut, UC Irvine
• José J. Escarce, The RAND Corporation

What Role Can the National Academies Play in Addressing the Questions Raised in the Symposium?

• Lorraine M. McDonnell, Symposium Rapporteur, UC Santa Barbara

Download the Speaker Biographies

Louis DeSipio is an associate professor of Political Science and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). His research focuses on Latino politics, the process of political incorporation of new and formerly excluded populations into U.S., politics and public policies such as immigration, immigrant settlement, naturalization and voting rights. He is the author of Counting on the Latino Vote: Latinos as a New Electorate (1996) and the coauthor of Making Americans/Remaking America: Immigration and Immigrant Policy (1998). He is also the author and editor of a seven-volume series on Latino political values, attitudes and behaviors. He serves as Chair of the UCI Department of Chicano/Latino Studies.

José Escarce is professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles and senior natural scientist at the RAND Corporation. His research interests include racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care, immigrant health, provider and patient behavior under economic incentives, technological change in medicine, and the impact of health care market structure on costs and quality. He has served on the National Advisory Council for Health Care Policy, Research, and Evaluation of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; was a member of the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Understanding and Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care and the National Research Council’s Panel on Hispanics in the U.S.; and is co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Health Services Research. He is a graduate of Princeton University and has an A.M. in physics from Harvard University and M.D. and Ph.D. degrees, the latter in health economics, from the University of Pennsylvania.

Guillermina Jasso is Professor of Sociology at New York University. She served as Special Assistant to the Director of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and as Director of Research for the U.S. Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy. Professor Jasso’s major research interests are basic sociobehavioral theory, distributive justice, status, international migration, mathematical methods for theory building, and factorial survey methods for empirical analysis. She has published numerous articles in scholarly journals on these topics. She was a member of the NAS-NRC Panel on the Demographic and Economic Consequences of Immigration, the NAS-NRC Committee on Redesign of the U.S. Naturalization Test, and the Core Research Group of the Binational Study of Migration Between Mexico and the United States. Currently she is Co-Principal Investigator of the New Immigrant Survey, the first national longitudinal survey of immigrants in the United States. Professor Jasso was elected to the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars and to the Sociological Research Association, was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and is a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn, Germany, and a Fellow of the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality at Stanford University. She received a Ph.D. in sociology from Johns Hopkins University in 1974.

David M. Kennedy is Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University and the Co-Director of the Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West at Stanford. Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Professor Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. His 1970 book, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, embraced the medical, legal, political, and religious dimensions of the subject and helped to pioneer the emerging field of women's history. Over Here: The First World War and American Society used the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system, economy, and culture in the early twentieth century. Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War recounts the history of the United States in the two great crises of the Great Depression and World War II. Dr. Kennedy holds a Ph.D. from Yale University in American Studies.

Melvin L. Oliver is a professor of Sociology and Dean of Social Sciences in the College of Letters & Sciences, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has authored numerous publications on such topics as poverty, inequality and social policy and interethnic relations. His publications include the edited collection Prismati Metropolis: Inequality in Los Angeles (with Lawrence Bobo, James H. Johnson, Jr. and Abel Valenzuela) and Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (with Thomas Shapiro). Dr. Oliver received a Ph.D. from Washington University.

Ruben G. Rumbaut is professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. He is the founding chair of the section on international migration of the American Sociological Association and a member of the National Research Council’s Committee on Population. He codirects the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, began in 1991, as well as a large-scale study of Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles. He is the author of more than one hundred scientific papers on immigrants and refugees in the U.S., and coauthor or coeditor of a dozen books, including Immigrant America: A Portrait (3rd edition, 2006); Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race and Ethnicity in America; California’s Immigrant Children: Theory, Research, and Implications for Educational Policy; Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America; Immigration Research for a New Century: Multi-disciplinary Perspectives; and On the Frontier of Adulthood: Theory, Research, and Public Policy. The book he coauthored with Alejandro Portes, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation, won the distinguished scholarship award of the American Sociological Association and the W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki award for best book in the immigration field. A native of Havana, Cuba, he has a Ph.D. in sociology from Brandeis University.

James P. Smith is a Senior Economist at RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. Dr. Smith has served as principal investigator on a number of projects, including a study of black-white wages and employment; migration in developing countries; racial income differences; the measurement and causes of income inequality of individuals and families; a survey of new immigrants; and the economic impact of immigration. In his previous position at RAND, Dr. Smith was the Director of Labor and Population Studies Program, where he was responsible for all research studies at RAND that dealt with domestic labor markets, demographic trends in the United States, and economic development in the third world. Dr. Smith holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.

Stephen Trejo is an associate professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously he was a member of the economics faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on public policy issues involving labor markets, including overtime pay regulation, the experiences of immigrants, and obstacles to the economic progress of minority groups. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.

Louis DeSipio