Irene BLOEMRAAD

Irene Bloemraad (Ph.D. Harvard; M.A. McGill) is Associate Professor of Sociology and the Thomas Garden Barnes Chair of Canadian Studies at Berkeley. She is also a Scholar with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. 

I study how immigrants become incorporated into political bodies and the consequences of their presence on politics and understandings of membership. My research stands at the intersection of immigration studies and political sociology, with a strong interdisciplinary (and international) scope.   It falls into four broad areas:

(1)  Citizenship & Multiculturalism – How do immigrants’ gain formal political membership?  My book, Becoming a Citizen, compares immigrants’ acquisition of citizenship and political participation in the United States and Canada. I show how settlement assistance and an official policy of multiculturalism facilitate immigrant political incorporation more in Canada than in the United States.  In the context of current U.S. immigration debates, my work suggests that immigration policy must focus not just on border control and entry, but also on integration and settlement policies. For a video profile of some of this research, see here.

(2) Immigrant Community Organizations – What role do community organizations play in facilitating immigrants’ political and civic visibility and influence?  Working with Karthick Ramakrishnan (UCR) and Shannon Gleeson (UCSC), with generous support from the Russell Sage Foundation, we develop the idea of civic stratification in Civic Hopes and Political Realities, documenting how immigrants face civic inequality and invisibility in many spheres of politics. Additional articles in the American Journal Sociology and Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly can be found below. 

(3) Political Socialization in Mixed-Status Families – What effect does parents’ legal status have on US-born children’s civic and political incorporation? For this project, also funded by Russell Sage, my research team interviewed almost 200 Mexican-, Vietnamese- and Chinese-origin youth and their immigrant parents living in the Bay Area.  Early results published in American Behavioral Scientist argue that political socialization, traditionally viewed as a parent-child dynamic, can also occur from children to parents.  More recently, in Studies in Law, Society and Politics, I examine the importance of birth in the US for one's sense of membership and draw out implications for political debates challenging 14th Amendment birthright citizenship.

(4) Diversity & Democracy – What are the implications of a more diverse population for democracy, civic life and public policies? In an article with Christel Kesler in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, we find that national institutions and policy environments mediate the relationship between diversity and social trust, civic engagement and political participation; diversity could enhance -- rather than depress -- civic activism in the right policy context.  In Perspectives on Politics, Matthew Wright and I shows that despite politicians' backlash against multiculturalism, immigrants in countries with more diversity policies show similar or higher political trust, engagement and attachment than those living in countries with more assimilatory policies.  Multiculturalism might be good for democracy.

I also have interests in national identity, social movements and immigration legislation.  My colleague Kim Voss and I published an edited volume on the massive immigration rights protests of 2006, Rallying for Immigrant Rights.  I also write on comparative research methods, which flows in part from my undergraduate and graduate teaching of research methods.

Excellence in research and teaching should go hand-in-hand.  In 2013, I was award the American Cultures Innovation in Teaching prize, in 2012, I was honored with the campus’s Distinguished Teaching Award in Social Sciences, and in 2008 I received the Sarlo Distinguished Mentoring Award for my work with graduate students.  

My interest in immigration comes from personal experience: I was born in Europe, moved to Canada as a young girl, and migrated to the United States in my early 20s. But it is also a vital issue to the state -- more than one in four Californians was born outside the United States -- and to many countries in the world.  Over the last decade, I have worked hard to both broaden and deepen immigration studies at Berkeley. (See the Berkeley NewsCenter article on some of these efforts, and students doing work in this area, here.) I have developed immigration seminars at the graduate and undergraduate levels and I run an informal immigration workshop for those researching immigrant-related topics.  I’m also interested in reaching out beyond the walls of the academic ivory tower, and so I regularly present my work to policy makers, academics and the general public.