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 migration” research as his first clustered area of excellence, and he has continued to recruit more faculty members along those lines.

The Migration Initiative will continue to prioritize research with publicly facing results and impact.  We will continue to partner with academic centers and research policy centers in the United States and around the world, while also maintaining robust connections to campus organizations and community partners in and around Santa Barbara. We will continue to further UCSB’s commitments as a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution (AANAPISI). 

As we continue to build our programs, we will also initiate collaborative research efforts to leverage and to enhance the interdisciplinary research that has become a hallmark of UC Santa Barbara.  We will bring together scholars who study climate change and global pandemics, among other important topics, across the humanities and the sciences, to consider how global migrations have shaped and will continue to shape our world.