Democratizing Data and Promoting Legalization/Regularization without Federal Immigration Reform

Event Date and Time September 29, 2014 9:15 am

Event Ends September 29, 2014 3:00 pm

Venue Center for Migration Studies

Venue Address Center For Migration Studies, East 60th Street, New York, NY, United States

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Conferences

On Monday, September 29, 2014, the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) hosted a conference, entitled, “Democratizing Data and Promoting Legalization/Regularization without Federal Immigration Reform.” The conference featured the release of a variable developed by Robert Warren (Senior Visiting Fellow, Center for Migration Studies) that will allow researchers and others to tabulate data based on the legal status of non-citizens in the American Community Survey. Detailed estimates can be derived for states or for localities with population sizes of 100,000 or more. The conference also released the results from a survey of community-based legal service providers by Tom Wong (Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California San Diego) that attempts to estimate the percentage of unauthorized persons that may be eligible for immigration status/relief under current law. In addition, Roberto Suro (Professor, University of Southern California and Director of the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute) discussed his research on state and local initiatives that have attempted to stabilize the lives and regularize the status of unauthorized persons and their families. Findings from each of the panels will be synthesized and published in forthcoming issues of the Journal on Migration and Human Security (www.jmhs.cmsny.org).

The conference was part of CMS’s yearlong celebration of its 50th Anniversary and was made possible through the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Speaker Profiles

Kevin Appleby
Director, Office of Migration Policy and Public Affairs, Migration and Refugee Services
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB)

Kevin Appleby is the director of the Office of Migration Policy and Public Affairs at Migration and Refugee Services (MRS), United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. In that role Mr. Appleby assists the bishops in the development and promotion of migration and refugee policy positions within the context of the Church’s social and moral teaching. Mr. Appleby also implements MRS’s communications, public education and outreach, and legislative strategies that foster advocacy, awareness, understanding, and support for the work of MRS and the populations it serves. He holds a law degree from the University of Maryland and a master’s degree in international affairs from George Washington University. Mr. Appleby is frequently asked to speak on immigration issues to local and national groups, and he has worked on Capitol Hill for Senator Russell Long of Louisiana and the Senate Select Committee on Iran-Contra.

Jeanne Atkinson
Executive Director
Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC)

Jeanne Atkinson is the executive director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC). Prior to joining CLINIC, Ms. Atkinson served as the director of the Catholic Charities’ Immigration Legal Services (ILS) for the Archdiocese of Washington, where she led the active and successful legal services program, as well as the Catholic Charities’ Refugee Center. During her tenure at ILS she received the Griffen Foundation Award for outstanding service to Catholic Charities. Ms. Atkinson was also a partner in establishing the Family Justice Center in Montgomery County. Ms. Atkinson holds a law degree from Washington College of Law, American University and is a member of the Pennsylvania bar.

Maria Caba
Director of Operations and Outreach
ATLAS: DIY

Maria Caba is the director of operations and outreach at ATLAS: DIY, an incubator of education, empowerment, and community for unauthorized youth and their allies. Among its services, ATLAS: DIY offers legal services, language classes, college preparation programs, and mentoring programs for unauthorized youth. In 2013, Ms. Caba participated in ATLAS: DIY’s receptionist training program, where she excelled and became an integral part of the organizations day-to-day work. In April, 2014 Ms. Caba became the director of operations and outreach. In this capacity she works to educate and empower unauthorized youth and their allies. Ms. Cabot was born in the Dominican Republic and came to the United States at the age of two. In pursuit of a career in forensic psychology, she will be attending the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at The City University of New York beginning in the spring semester of 2015.

Guillermina Jasso
Silver Professor, Professor of Sociology, and Department Chair
New York University

Guillermina Jasso is a Silver Professor and professor of sociology at New York University. She was the founding director of the Methods Workshop at New York University and the founding director of the Theory Workshop at the University of Iowa, as well as co-founder of the Life Course Center at the University of Minnesota. She has served as special assistant to the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and as director of research for the US Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy. Professor Jasso has written extensively on basic sociobehavioral theory, distributive justice, status, international migration, and inequality, and she has published widely in scholarly journals, including two articles which recently won awards from the Population Section of the American Sociological Association and the Law and Society Association. She is a principal investigator of the New Immigrant Survey, the first national longitudinal survey of legal immigrants in the United States. Professor Jasso has been elected to the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars and to the Sociological Research Association; she has been a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Professor Jasso is currently a research associate at the Hobby Center for Public Policy at the University of Houston, a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany, a fellow at the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, and an external research fellow at the Center for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM), University College London. Professor Jasso serves on a number of boards, including the Scientific Advisory Board of DIW Berlin (Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung – German Institute for Economic Research) and the US Census Scientific Advisory Committee, of which she is chair. She has served as chair of five sections of the American Sociological Association, as president of the Research Committee 42 on Social Psychology of the International Sociological Association, and was recently elected chair of the Social Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association.

Donald Kerwin
Executive Director
Center for Migration Studies

Donald Kerwin is the executive director of the Center for Migration Studies of New York. Between 1992 and 2008, he worked for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC), including 15 years as its executive director. Upon his arrival at CLINIC, Mr. Kerwin coordinated CLINIC’s political asylum project for Haitians. Between 2008 and 2011, Mr. Kerwin served as the vice president for programs at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), where he wrote on immigration, labor standards, and refugee policy issues. He has also served as an associate fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center where he co-directed Woodstock’s Theology of Migration Project; a member of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration; a board member for Jesuit Refugee Services-USA; a board member for the Capital Area Immigrant Rights Coalition; and an advisor to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Migration. Additionally, he has been on the Council on Foreign Relations’ Immigration Task Force and numerous advisory groups. Mr. Kerwin is an non-resident senior fellow at MPI and on the board of directors for the Border Network for Human Rights in El Paso, Texas.

Mary Meg McCarthy
Executive Director
Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center

Mary Meg McCarthy is the executive director of Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), one of the nation’s leading immigrant and human rights advocacy organizations. Under her leadership, NIJC has grown from a staff of eight to 40, serving 10,000 immigrants each year through an unparalleled network of more than 1,000 pro bono attorneys. Through its unique combination of direct service, impact litigation, and advocacy, NIJC promotes due process protections before the US Supreme Court, Congress, and the Obama administration. Under Ms. McCarthy’s leadership, NIJC was a founding member of the Illinois Task Force on Unaccompanied Immigrant Children, the Freedom Network, and the Department of Homeland Security-Nongovernmental Organization Enforcement Working Group, which NIJC currently co-chairs. Ms. McCarthy has testified before congressional committees on human rights and immigration detention reform. In addition, she is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences on human rights and immigration law and is regularly quoted in leading news outlets such as The New York Times. Ms. McCarthy is a current member of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration and the steering committee of the Midwest Coalition for Human Rights. She has also been a member of the steering committees for the Detention Watch Network and the Freedom Network. Prior to joining NIJC in 1998, Ms. McCarthy practiced civil litigation and served as a pro bono attorney for NIJC’s asylum project. She is a recipient of numerous awards, including the Pax Christi 2013 Teacher of Peace Award, the Robert Bellarmine Award from Loyola University Chicago School of Law, the American Immigration Lawyers Association Chicago Chapter’s Joseph Minsky Mentor Award, Lawyers Trust Fund’s Esther Rothstein Award, and the Federal Bar Association’s Sarah T. Hughes Civil Rights Award.

Juan P. Osuna
Director
Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR)

Juan Osuna was appointed as the director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review in May 2011. He served as acting director from December 2010 to May 2011. Mr. Osuna received a bachelor’s degree from George Washington University, a law degree from the Washington College of Law, American University, and a master’s degree in law and international affairs from the School of International Service, American University. From June 2010 until December 2010, Mr. Osuna served as the associate deputy attorney general of the Department of Justice, where he worked on immigration policy and other issues. From May 2009 to June 2010, he was the deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Division, Office of Immigration Litigation, where, in addition to handling immigration policy, he oversaw civil immigration-related litigation in the federal courts. From September 2008 until May 2009, Mr. Osuna was chairman of the board of Immigration Appeals; from August 2000 to September 2008, he was a board member, serving as acting chairman and acting vice chairman. Prior to that, he held various senior editorial and management positions at West Group (now Thomson West), a leading legal publisher. Mr. Osuna teaches immigration policy at George Mason University School of Law and is a member of the Pennsylvania bar.

Jose Pacas
PhD Candidate, Applied Economics
University of Minnesota

Jose Pacas is a doctoral candidate in applied economics at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on labor economics, primarily on issues of immigration and racial/ethnic disparities in the labor market. He currently works for the Minnesota Population Center on the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series – Current Population Survey (IPUMS-CPS) project. Before starting graduate school, Mr. Pacas worked with a nongovernmental organization in Northfield, Minnesota that focuses on business development for immigrant families. He has conducted research on the rights of detained immigrants with Professor Katherine Fennelly (University of Minnesota) and currently researches the impact of E-Verify mandates on labor market outcomes of unauthorized workers. Mr. Pacas received a bachelor’s degree from Williams College and a master’s degree in public policy from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.

Kavita Pawria-Sanchez
Assistant Commissioner
New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs

Kavita Pawria-Sanchez is the assistant commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MOIA), after joining MOIA in the summer of 2013 as the general counsel. Prior to MOIA, Ms. Pawria-Sanchez served for five years as the executive director of the Office of Refugee and Immigrant Affairs –a policy unit at New York City’s Human Resources Administration/Department of Social Services (HRA/DSS) which administers cash assistance, food stamps, Medicaid, and many other social services for over 3 million New Yorkers. At HRA, Ms. Pawria-Sanchez spearheaded the development and implementation of policy and programmatic strategies to meet civil rights mandates for over 1 million immigrants served by the agency. Prior to making the leap to government, Ms. Pawria-Sanchez was immersed in legal, policy, and community organizing work as an advocate with diverse immigrant-based groups in New York City, including Desis Rising Up and Moving and CAAAV—Organizing Asian Communities. Ms. Pawria-Sanchez has a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Cornell University and a law degree, focusing on human rights law, from the City University of New York School of Law.

Cristina Rodríguez
Professor of Law
Yale Law School

Cristina Rodríguez is a professor of law at Yale Law School. As an expert on the effects of immigration on society and culture, as well as the legal and political strategies societies adopt to absorb immigrant populations, Professor Rodríguez joined Yale Law School in 2013 after serving as deputy assistant attorney for the Office of Legal Counsel at the US Department of Justice. She has previously taught law at the New York University School of Law and Harvard Law School. Her research interests include constitutional law and theory, immigration law and policy, administrative law and process, language rights and policy, and citizenship theory. Professor Rodríguez earned a bachelor degree and law degree from Yale University and also attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where she received a master of letters degree in modern history. Following law school, Professor Rodríguez clerked for Judge David S. Tatel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit and for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the US Supreme Court.

Roberto Suro
Professor of Journalism and Social Policy, Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism
Director, Tomás Rivera Policy Institute
University of Southern California

Roberto Suro is a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California (USC). Professor Suro is also the director of the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute at USC, an interdisciplinary research center exploring the challenges and opportunities of demographic diversity in the 21st century global city. Professor Suro’s latest book is Writing Immigration: Scholars and Journalists in Dialogue (University of California Press, 2011) co-edited with Marcelo Suarez-Orozco and Vivian Louie. Professor Suro serves on the board of directors of the Independent Sector, the nation’s largest association of philanthropies and charities, and as a trustee of the Haynes Foundation, a leading supporter of social science research in Los Angeles. He is also a non-resident senior fellow of the Brookings Institution. Prior to joining the USC faculty in August 2007, he was the director of the Pew Hispanic Center, a research organization in Washington, DC, which he founded in 2001. Professor Suro was part of the management team that launched the Pew Research Center in 2004, and he supervised the production of more than 100 publications chronicling the growth of the Latino population and its implications for the nation as a whole. Professor Suro’s journalistic career began in 1974 at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He has also worked at the Chicago Sun Times, the Chicago Tribune, TIME Magazine, The New York Times, and the Washington Post.

Vicky Virgin
Research Associate
New York City Center for Economic Opportunity

Vicky Virgin is a research associate for the New York City Center for Economic Opportunity. Her focus is immigration, particularly on immigration and legal status as it relates to program participation. Prior to joining the Center for Economic Opportunity, Ms. Virgin served as a demographic analyst for the New York City Department of City Planning for over 25 years. She has also worked as a statistician for the US Census and former Immigration and Naturalization Service. Ms. Virgin holds a degree in economics from the University of Utah.

Robert Warren
Senior Visiting Fellow
Center for Migration Studies

Robert Warren is a senior fellow at the Center for Migration Studies of New York. He has served as a demographer for 34 years with the United States Census Bureau and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Mr. Warren was director of the INS’s Statistics Division from 1986 to 1995. One of his accomplishments at INS was to project accurate ranges of the number of unauthorized immigrants that would apply in each state under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. During his service, he also worked with the staff of the Panel on Immigration Statistics of the National Academy of Sciences, which published the report, “Immigration Statistics: A Story of Neglect” co-edited with Daniel B. Levine and Kenneth Hill (National Academy Press, 1985). Mr. Warren retired from the INS in January 2002. Currently, he is developing methodology for assigning legal status to non-US citizens counted in the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey. In 2013 Mr. Warren released “Unauthorized Immigration to the United States: Annual Estimates and Components of Change, by State, 1990 to 2010,” International Migration Review 47(2): 296–329, with John Robert Warren. His other signature publications include: “A Count of the Uncountable: Estimates of Undocumented Aliens Counted in the 1980 United States Census,” Demography 24(3): 375-393, with Jeffrey S. Passel, and The Elusive Exodus: Emigration from the United States (Population Reference Bureau, 1985), with Ellen Percy Kraly.

Tom Wong
Assistant Professor of Political Science
University of California, San Diego

Tom Wong is an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego. Professor Wong’s research focuses on the politics of immigration, citizenship, and migrant illegality. His work also explores the links between immigration, race and ethnicity, and the politics of identity. Professor Wong is the creator of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Blog (CIR Blog), which predicts support and opposition to comprehensive immigration reform among all 535 current members of Congress, and he is the lead researcher on one of the first nationwide surveys of unauthorized youth. Professor Wong recently completed a book manuscript, which analyzes the immigration control policies of 25 Western immigrant-receiving democracies, and he is beginning another book on the politics of comprehensive immigration reform in the United States, among other projects. Professor Wong’s research has been used by policymakers in the United States and Mexico, as well as by organizations that serve immigrant communities. Professor Wong and his work have been covered by Fusion, National Public Radio, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Yahoo News, and Univisión in Mexico. His most recent publication is the first nationwide analysis of the Obama administration’s policy of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which provides relief from deportation for unauthorized youth.