The Migration Initiative supports scholars at UCSB who’ve studied migrants around the world, from multiple disciplinary and intellectual perspectives. Our faculty affiliates have produced important research on immigrant integration and acculturation, health access and outcomes, refugee policies, and immigration histories in the United States and elsewhere, especially in the context of emerging nationalist politics and hostility toward immigrants. We have partnered with immigrant rights organizations in the Central Coast and across California, and we seek to provide a framework for our scholars to inform community groups, public officials, and other important stakeholders.
The Dean of the Division of Social Sciences, the Executive Vice Chancellor, and the Vice Chancellor for Research established the Migration Initiative in 2019, and we maintain a close affiliation with the Broom Center for Demography at UCSB. We also have strong ties to several departments and schools, including Anthropology, Asian American Studies, Black Studies, Chicano and Chicana Studies, Communications, Education, Feminist Studies, Geography, Global Studies, History, Political Science, and Sociology—all of their leading faculty members have published important work on migration. Moreover, the Dean of Social Sciences, Charles Hale, identified “global immigration” research as his first clustered area of excellence, and he has continued to recruit more faculty members along those lines.
