Maria C. Abascal
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Columbia University

Maria Abascal is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Dr. Abascal recently completed a postdoc in the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University. She received her PhD in sociology and social policy from Princeton University. Broadly, she is interested in intergroup relations and boundary processes, especially as they pertain to race, ethnicity and nationalism. Her dissertation explores the impact of Hispanic population growth – real and perceived – on relations between Blacks and Whites in the United States. Dr. Abascal’s research draws on a range of quantitative methods and data sources, including original lab, survey, and field experiments. Other research projects deal with the consequences of diversity, the determinants of skin color perception, the sources of the criminal immigrant stereotype, the predictors of immigrant naturalization, and the geographic distribution of patriotic behaviors.

Silas W. Allard
Managing Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion
Harold J. Berman Fellow in Law and Religion
Emory University

Silas W. Allard is managing director of the Center for Law and Religion (CSLR) and Harold J. Berman Senior Fellow in Law and Religion. He is managing editor of the Journal of Law and Religion, published as a joint venture between CSLR and Cambridge University Press. His work has appeared in Refuge and Political Theology. A scholar of law and religious ethics, Mr. Allard’s work focuses on issues of migration and human rights. In addition to his scholarly work, he serves in leadership roles for El Refugio, a ministry of hospitality for the families of detained immigrants, and the Georgia Immigration Working Group.

Mr. Allard joined CSLR, his alma mater, in 2013, following a two-year clerkship with Chief Judge Donald C. Pogue at the United States Court of International Trade. A 2011 joint law and theology degree graduate, he served as editor-in-chief of the Emory International Law Review, and received the university’s highest student honor, the Marion Luther Brittain award. In addition to his Juris Doctor and Master of Theological Studies from Emory, he holds a Bachelor of Arts in religious studies from the University of Missouri.

Omar al-Muqdad
Journalist, Documentary Filmmaker, and Former Syrian Refugee

Omar al-Muqdad is a Syrian-American journalist and a documentary filmmaker who has resided in Alexandria, Virginia since 2012. Mr. al-Muqdad holds a degree in political science and international relations from the University of Damascus. Prior to his resettlement in the United States, he was a prisoner of conscience in Syria for more than two years. Mr. al-Muqdad reported on the Syrian Revolution from his hometown, Dara’a, located in southern Syria, and later from Turkey when he was forced to escape the war. The private newspaper he founded was shut down three times by Syrian security forces for publishing articles critical of the Syrian regime. With more than a decade of journalism experience, Mr. al-Muqdad continues to cover international events. Since his arrival to the United States, he has attained US citizenship, published numerous articles in various international newspapers and has appeared on several international news networks, speaking on and analyzing the Syrian war and the refugee crisis. Mr. al-Muqdad has produced two documentaries, one of which aired on BBC World in 2015. He currently has a film and book in production.

Kevin Appleby
Senior Director of International Migration Policy
Center for Migration Studies

Kevin Appleby is the senior director of international migration policy for the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) and the Scalabrini International Migration Network (SIMN). Prior to joining CMS and SIMN, Mr. Appleby served as the director of migration policy and public affairs for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). He has also worked as deputy director of the Maryland Catholic Conference in Annapolis, Maryland. Mr. Appleby has testified before Congress on immigration issues and represented the US Catholic bishops on these issues at public events and with the media. He is co-editor of the volume, On Strangers No Longer: Perspectives on the US-Mexican Catholic Bishop’s Pastoral Letter on Migration. Mr. Appleby worked for Senator Russell Long of Louisiana and select committees of the US Senate, including the Senate Select Committee on the Iran-Contra Affair. He received his BA from the University of Notre Dame, an MA in international affairs from George Washington University, and a law degree from the University of Maryland.

H.E. Most Rev. Bernardito Auza
Titular Archbishop of Suacia
Apostolic Nuncio
Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations
Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the Organization of American States

A native of Talibon, Bohol, in the Philippines, Archbishop Bernardito Auza is Apostolic Nuncio and Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations in New York and to the Organization of American States in Washington, DC. He was ordained a priest in 1985, and after studying at the Vatican diplomatic school, the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, he joined the diplomatic corps of the Holy See in 1990. He served in Madagascar, Mauritius, Bulgaria, Albania, and the United Kingdom before being appointed as counsellor of the Second Section of the Vatican Secretariat of State from 1999 to 2006. He then came to New York to serve at the Holy See’s mission to the United Nations from 2006 to 2008. In 2008, he was appointed Nuncio to Haiti, where he served after the devastating 2010 earthquake. On July 2, 2014, Pope Francis appointed Archbishop Auza head of the Holy See’s Permanent Observer Mission to the United Nations.

Irene Bloemraad
Professor of Sociology, Thomas Garden Barnes Chair of Canadian Studies, and Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative
University of California, Berkeley

Irene Bloemraad is Professor of Sociology and the Thomas Garden Barnes Chair of Canadian Studies at Berkeley. She is also the founding Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. From 2014 to 2015, she served as a member of the US National Academies of Sciences committee reporting on the integration of immigrants into American society.

Dr. Bloemraad studies the nexus between immigration and the political system. She is the author of Becoming a Citizen: Incorporating Immigrants and Refugees in the United States and Canada, which argues that the United States’ lack of general integration policies has led to lower levels of citizenship among immigrants in the United States compared to Canada, and poorer outcomes in political incorporation. Dr. Bloemraad’s work suggests that any effective immigration policy must examine not just border control, but also integration and settlement policies. She is also the co-editor of Civic Hopes and Political Realities about the civic inequalities that arise from unequal voice and visibility for immigrant organizations. She co-edited Rallying for Immigrant Rights, the first book-length treatment of the 2006 immigration rallies that brought millions of people into the streets to oppose the criminalization of undocumented migrants. More recently, she co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Citizenship, a state-of-the-art synthesis of current scholarship on citizenship. Her current work looks at the effects of multiculturalism policy on sociopolitical outcomes, the prevalence of immigrant nonprofits in suburbs and central cities, the political socialization of people living in mixed legal status families, and the resonance of rights claims in shifting voters’ views on immigration policy.

Karina Gareginovna Ambartsoumian Clough
Stateless, Advocate, and Founding Member
United Stateless

Karina Gareginovna Ambartsoumian Clough is of Armenian and Ukrainian descent born in the former Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic. Stateless since the age of four years old and married to a US citizen, Ms. Clough has sought a path to citizenship within the US immigration system, but with little progress and solution has turned to advocacy.

In 2018, Ms. Clough cofounded “United Stateless,” a stateless-led national organization whose mission is to build and inspire community among those affected by statelessness, and advocate for their human rights. Through advocacy, education, community building, and story sharing, United Stateless seeks for the US government to adhere to the United Nations 1954 and 1961 Conventions relating to stateless people.

Most Rev. Nicholas DiMarzio
Bishop of Brooklyn

The Most Reverend Nicholas DiMarzio is a Roman Catholic bishop who has led the Diocese of Brooklyn since October 2003. He has been a forceful voice on behalf of migrants and immigrants since his Ordination to the Priesthood in 1970. Bishop DiMarzio received a master’s degree in social work from Fordham University, and a doctorate in social work research and policy from Rutgers University. In 1976, Bishop DiMarzio was appointed refugee resettlement director and the director of the Office of Migration at Catholic Community Services for the Archdiocese of Newark. In 1985, he was appointed executive director of Migration and Refugee Services for the US Catholic Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington. He frequently testified on matters affecting migrants and immigrants before the committees of the US House of Representatives.

Pope John Paul II named him Prelate of Honor by in 1986, and in 1996 he was ordained a bishop. In 1999, Bishop DiMarzio was appointed Sixth Bishop of Camden. From 2003 to 2005, Bishop DiMarzio served as the US representative on the Global Commission on International Migration, a 19-member body sponsored by the United Nations. Bishop DiMarzio also serves as board chair for the Center for Migration Studies of New York and serves on the board of trustees for the Migration Policy Institute.

Sharon Granados Mahato
Coordinator of Networking and Development
Scalabrini Centers in the United States and Scalabrini International Migration Network

Sharon Granados Mahato is a social geographer who specializes in international migration with an emphasis on multiculturalism, human rights, organized crime, and territorial and urban transformations. Ms. Granados Mahato is a native of Costa Rica and has been dedicated to the protection and defense of the human rights of Latin American migrants, refugee seekers, victims of human trafficking and migrant smuggling, as well as those that are force-displaced from organized crime and climate change. She has worked as an expert advisor for the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants in places of extreme poverty in Central America and Mexico, and as a Strategy and Development Researcher at Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Currently, she is the Coordinator of Networking and Development of the Network of Scalabrini Centers in the United States. Ms. Granados Mahato holds an MSc in urban development from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and a BA in geographical sciences with an emphasis on land use planning from the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica.

Karen Grisez
Public Service Counsel
Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP

Karen Grisez is full-time Public Service Counsel in the Washington, DC office of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP. In that capacity, she supports the firm’s attorneys in a variety of subject matter areas, including social security disability, landlord/tenant, family law, veterans benefits, and other civil litigation. Since the mid-1990s, Ms. Grisez has increasingly concentrated her practice in immigration matters. She is former Chair of and current Special Advisor to the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Commission on Immigration, is a member of the advisory board of the ABA’s Immigration Justice Project in San Diego, and is a former co-chair of the ABA Section of Litigation’s Immigration Litigation Committee. She is also a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, serves on its national Pro Bono Committee, and is a former trustee of the American Immigration Council. Ms. Grisez has been a volunteer case screener for the US Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) Pro Bono Project for over a decade. She is also a member of the board of directors of the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and the Washington Council of Lawyers.‎

Ms. Grisez received her BA degree summa cum laude from the University of Maryland in 1987 and her JD from the Columbus School of Law, Catholic University of America in 1990. She has successfully represented numerous asylum applicants and other immigrants before US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the asylum offices, immigration judges, the BIA, and in federal court, and litigates a variety of other immigration matters. She also speaks frequently on asylum and other immigration-related topics.

Timothy Herrmann
Attaché
Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations

Timothy Herrmann is an Attaché for the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations. He serves as the negotiator for the Mission for the UN’s Third Committee on Social, Humanitarian & Cultural Issues.

Mr. Herrmann is a Fulbright Scholar educated in the United States, Latin America, and Europe with unique international experience working at the United Nations and abroad in Latin America. He has experience in foreign policy, diplomacy, and international advocacy. He holds a master’s degree in international affairs from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, and a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. He also speaks fluent Spanish and Italian, as well as conversational Portuguese.

Donald Kerwin
Executive Director
Center for Migration Studies

Donald Kerwin is the executive director of the Center for Migration Studies of New York. The organization is an educational institute/think tank devoted to the study of international migration, to the promotion of understanding between immigrants and receiving communities, and to public policies that safeguard the dignity and rights of migrants, refugees, and newcomers. CMS is a member of the Scalabrini International Migration Network, which consists of more than 270 organizations that serve, safeguard, and advocate for migrants throughout the world. Mr. Kerwin previously worked for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC) between 1992 and 2008, serving as its executive director (ED) for 15 years and its interim ED for six months in late 2012 and early 2013. Upon his arrival in 1992, he coordinated CLINIC’s political asylum project for Haitians. Between 2008 and 2011, he served as 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 non-resident senior fellow at MPI; a member of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration; a member of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Immigration Task Force; a board member for Jesuit Refugee Services-USA, the Capital Area Immigrant Rights (CAIR) Coalition, and the Border Network for Human Rights; an advisor to the USCCB’s Committee on Migration; and a member of numerous advisory groups. Mr. Kerwin writes and speaks extensively on immigration policy, refugee protection, access to justice, national security, and other issues.

Anna O. Law
Associate Professor of Political Science and Herbert Kurz Chair of Constitutional Rights
Brooklyn College, City University of New York

Anna Law holds the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights. Her publications appear in both social science and law journals and investigate the interaction between law, legal institutions and politics. Her first book, The Immigration Battle in American Courts (Cambridge University Press 2010), examined the role of the federal judiciary in US immigration policy, and the institutional evolution of the Supreme Court and US Courts of Appeals. Professor Law is a former program analyst at the bipartisan, blue-ribbon US Commission on Immigration Reform. She has shared her expertise with the US Senate Judiciary Committee, Department of Homeland Security and National Science Foundation. In 2007, she appeared as a recurring narrator with other academic experts and two Supreme Court justices in a PBS award-winning documentary. Her current projects include a second book on immigration federalism and slavery, and a National Science Foundation-funded research project with Karen Musalo on gender-based asylum decisions.

Amy Emel Muedin
Migration Officer
Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for International Migration
United Nations

Amy Emel Muedin is currently a Migration Officer with the United Nations Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for International Migration since March 2017.  She is loaned to this office from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), where she has worked since 2005. At IOM, she worked on international migration policy within the political, social, economic, and humanitarian debates of the United Nations. Working in IOM’s Special Liaison Office in New York, she was the focal point for UN-based funding, providing guidance and support to numerous IOM field missions on leveraging various UN grant mechanisms, while also fostering IOM’s institutional relationship with the United Nations.

Ms. Muedin completed her Master of Arts degree in international relations and diplomacy in 2005 at the John C. Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University. She is an American national.

Mike Nicholson
Researcher
Center for Migration Studies

Mike Nicholson is a researcher at the Center for Migration Studies. Previously, Mr. Nicholson worked as a research analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and as a consultant for the Center for American Progress. He has also held internships at the Migration Policy Institute’s Transatlantic Council on Migration and at the US Department of State. Mr. Nicholson holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania and received a PhD in political science from the University of California, San Diego in June 2018. While a doctoral candidate, he was an INTEGRIM Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, and a ThinkSwiss fellow at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where he conducted a study on immigrants’ political engagement. From 2005 to 2006, he was a Fulbright scholar in Istanbul, Turkey.

Pia Orrenius
Vice President and Senior Economist
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

Pia Orrenius is Vice President and Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and Adjunct Professor at the Hankamer School of Business, Baylor University. Dr. Orrenius manages the regional/microeconomics group in the Dallas Fed Research Department where her work concerns the drivers of regional economic growth. Her academic research focuses on the labor market impacts of immigration, unauthorized immigration, and US immigration policy, and her work has been published in the Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Development Economics, International Migration Review, Demography, among others. She is coauthor of the book Beside the Golden Door: US Immigration Reform in a New Era of Globalization (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2010) and coeditor of Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2014).

Dr. Orrenius is a Research Fellow at the Tower Center for Political Studies, Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center (both at Southern Methodist University), and at the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, as well as Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She was senior economist on the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President, Washington DC in 2004 to 2005, where she worked on immigration, labor, and health issues. She received her PhD in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles and BA degrees in economics and Spanish from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Rachel Perić
Executive Director
Welcoming America

Rachel Perić is the Executive Director of Welcoming America. Inspired by her family’s refugee story and by the worldwide movement of welcomers, Ms. Perić works to create communities where all residents — including immigrants and refugees — can thrive and belong. Since joining the organization in 2011, she has served as the organization’s deputy director and in other senior leadership roles, helping grow Welcoming America from a nascent startup to an award-winning organization with a global footprint. The White House honored Welcoming America and 10 of its leaders as White House Champions of Change for their innovations in immigrant integration. In 2014, the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) and BMW Group distinguished Welcoming America as a recipient of their Intercultural Innovation Award, honoring its work in promoting intercultural understanding.

Prior to Welcoming America, Ms. Perić served as Executive Director of the Montgomery Coalition for Adult English Literacy (MCAEL), a community literacy coalition that strengthens and promotes adult literacy and English language learning in suburban Washington, DC, where she was recognized by Montgomery Women with the Rising Star Award. She also served as Regional Director with the United Way of the National Capital Area, where she led fundraising and community impact efforts in Montgomery County, Maryland. She began her career managing international development programs with a private consulting firm, Management Systems International (MSI).

The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, Ms. Perić also serves on the board of Art and Remembrance, a nonprofit devoted to using art and personal narrative to recognize individual courage and resilience. Ms. Perić holds a BA in international studies from Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Public Management from the University of Maryland.

Michele Pistone
Non-Resident Fellow and Associate Editor, Journal on Migration and Human Security
Center for Migration Studies
Professor of Law and Director of the Clinic for Asylum, Refugee and Emigrant Services (CARES)
Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law

Michele R. Pistone is a professor of law at Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law, where she has taught since 1999. At Villanova, she founded the school’s in-house clinical program, which she directed for nine years, as well as the Clinic for Asylum, Refugee and Emigrant Services (CARES). Through CARES, Professor Pistone works with law students to provide free legal representation to asylum seekers and others fleeing persecution and violence. Professor Pistone has served on the University’s Partnership Committee with Catholic Relief Services (CRS) since its inception in 2004, and through the Partnership has organized conferences on human trafficking, Iraqi refugees, and the migration of unaccompanied children in collaboration with CRS.

Professor Pistone is currently developing a new online educational program at Villanova University, to train non-lawyer accredited representatives to represent immigrants before immigration courts and the Department of Homeland Security. The new program, called Villanova Interdisciplinary Immigration Studies Training for Advocates (VIISTA), will launch in 2020.

Professor Pistone has written extensively on immigration and refugee protection, including on issues related to detention of asylum seekers, the one-year deadline for asylum applications, expedited removal, overseas refugee resettlement, as well as on the migration of skilled and educated migrants. Her book, Stepping Out of the Brain Drain: Applying Catholic Social Thought in a New Era of Migration (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), which she co-authored with JMHS associate co-editor, John J. Hoeffner, as well as other articles and book chapters, looks at migration through the lens of Catholic Social Thought.

Professor Pistone has taught at American University Washington College of Law, Georgetown Law, and as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Malta. Before becoming a professor, she served as the acting legal director of Human Rights First, where she coordinated a Congressional campaign to defeat certain legislative initiatives that would have imposed stricter restrictions on asylum protection.

Jamie Winders
Editor, International Migration Review
Center for Migration Studies
Professor and Chair, Department of Geography
Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs
Syracuse University

Jamie Winders is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. She was appointed editor of the International Migration Review, starting November 2017. Dr. Winders specializes in cultural and social geography and international migration. She co-edited The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and published Nashville in the New Millennium: Immigrant Settlement, Urban Transformation, and Social Belonging (New York: Russell Sage, 2013). She holds a PhD from the University of Kentucky.

Holiday Inn Express New York City – Wall Street
126 Water Street
New York, NY 10005

Nightly rate for October 8: $209
Nightly rate for October 9: $269

Rates guaranteed until September 8, 2018. For bookings after September 8th, call (212) 747-9222 and mention the Center for Migration Studies to determine whether the hotel can honor the group rate.

Book your group rate for Center for Migration Studies