This seminar examines the dynamics of migration, integration, and citizenship, both from the perspective of the receiving society and from the lived experiences of migrants themselves. The seminar focuses on processes of incorporation--economic, social, cultural, and political--but we also look at paradigms that challenge an integrationist reading of migration, in particular transnationalism and models of postnational citizenship.

This course will tackle three sets of questions in the study of migration and immigration. (1) Why do people migrate across international borders? How do states control migration and for what reasons? (2) How do immigrants become incorporated into the societies where they live? How do sociologists model, evaluate and theorize immigrant “assimilation?” (3) Is legal status (undocumented, refugee, citizen) a new axis of stratification and categorical inequality? How does bringing legal status into sociological work on inequalities by gender, class or race complement or change existing scholarship? A plurality of readings are by sociologists, but we will also read demographers, political scientists, economists, and legal scholars. The course is largely based on the U.S. case and American models, but will include some material on other countries and the lessons that they provide.

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