Immigrant Integration Under Pressure: What Does Resilience Mean?

Dina Refki is the director of the Center for Women in Government & Civil Society (CWGCS) at the University at Albany. Refki studies and researches the interplay of gender with institutional structures in the US and international context. She applies gender mainstreaming and budgeting analysis from transnational perspectives. Prior to assuming leadership at CWGCS in 2009, she held different positions at the Center, including as director of the Immigrant Women & State Policy Program, which facilitated interagency collaboration, promoted dialogues with civil society and immigrant women at the state level, and worked to identify and address barriers to the integration of immigrant women in the social, economic, and political fabric of local communities. Refki studies the challenges of migration, the barriers facing immigrant women and their families, and the structural changes needed to better respond to the needs of immigrant women.

Dr. Cecilia Menjívar holds the Dorothy L. Meier Social Equities Chair and is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UCLA. Her research falls into two empirical areas: immigration from Central America to the United States and gender-based violence in Central America, with state power manifested in policies, bureaucracies, and laws as a theoretical umbrella. She has examined how immigration laws and enforcement strategies, through the production of various legal statuses, affect immigrants’ lives, including gender and generational relations, social networks, and religious communities.

Her award-winning scholarship includes 3 books, 17 edited volumes, and over 200 articles, chapters, and essays. Menjívar has received multiple awards for her scholarship, teaching, and mentorship, including a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, and two career awards from the American Sociological Association—the International Migration Section and the Latina/o Section. She is an elected member of the Sociological Research Association.

In 2015, she received the International Migration Section’s Public Sociology Award from the American Sociological Association. She served as Vice President of the American Sociological Association (2013-2016) and President (2020-2023). In 2023, she was elected as the W.E.B. Dubois Fellow to the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Before joining UCLA, she was a Foundation Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas; before that, she was Cowden Distinguished Professor at Arizona State University. She has served on two National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine panels: one on the Integration of Immigrants into American Society (2014-15) and, currently (2024-2025), on the Forced Migration Panel. In 2024, she received two major awards from the American Sociological Association.

Dr. Jody Agius Vallejo is Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity. She is also Associate Director of USC Equity Research Institute and Chair of the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association. She also co-edits the USC Equity Research Institute Blog. Her research areas include immigration, immigrant integration, race/ethnicity, and inequality, poverty, and mobility.

Her book, Barrios to Burbs: The Making of the Mexican American Middle Class (Stanford University Press, 2012) examines the mechanisms—such as parental legal status, access to higher education, and business ownership—that expedite social mobility and integration into the middle class for Mexican Americans. The book also examines middle-class Mexican Americans’ racial/ethnic and class identities, their connections to family and community, financial and social obligations to kin, and civic engagement.

Agius Vallejo’s next book, in progress, investigates middle-class Latino entrepreneurs and the Latino economic elite. The research examines the institutions that support the Latino economic elite and argues that the Latino elite have developed an alternative, ethnic-based economic system of ethnoracial capitalism to facilitate a pathway of marked economic integration and mobility. With Lisa Keister, she has also published on wealth attainment. In 2020 they co-edited a special issue of Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies on Immigrants and Wealth Attainment.

Agius Vallejo’s research has been funded by The National Science Foundation, The American Association of University Women, The Lusk Center for Real Estate, the American Sociological Association and National Science Foundation Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline, the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation, the UC Davis Center for Poverty Research, and the USC Office of the Provost.