Watch the Symposium

To mark the publication of The End of Compassion: Children of Immigrants in the Age of Deportation, this special event features editors and authors in conversation with one another and with immigrants in the Princeton area.

Zoom link will be provided in advance of the symposium.

Alejandro Portes

Before joining the University of Miami School of Law, Alejandro Portes was the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Sociology and director of the Center for Migration and Development at Princeton University. He has formerly taught at Johns Hopkins University, where he held the John Dewey Chair in Arts and Sciences; Duke University, and the University of Texas at Austin. In 1997, he was elected president of the American Sociological Association and served in that capacity in 1998-99. Born in Havana, Cuba, he came to the United States in 1960. He was educated at the University of Havana, Catholic University of Argentina, and Creighton University. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Portes is the author of 250 articles and chapters on national development, international migration, Latin American and Caribbean urbanization, and economic sociology. He has published 30 books and special issues. His books include City on the Edge – the Transformation of Miami (University of California Press 1993), co-authored with Alex Stepick and winner of the Robert Park Award for best book in urban sociology and the Anthony Leeds Award for best book in urban anthropology in 1995; and Immigrant America: A Portrait, 3rd edition, (University of California Press 2006), designated as a Centennial Publication by the University of California Press in 1996.

His current research is on the adaptation process of the immigrant second generation in comparative perspective, the role of institutions on national development, and immigration and the American health system.

Roberto Gonzales

Roberto Gonzales is professor of education at HGSE and director of the newly formed Immigration Initiative at Harvard (IIH), a university-wide effort aimed at advancing and promoting interdisciplinary scholarship and intellectual exchange around issues of immigration policy and immigrant communities. His research centers on contemporary processes of immigration and social inequality, and stems from theoretical interests at the intersection of race and ethnicity, immigration, and policy. Gonzales’ research examines the effects of legal contexts on the coming of age experiences of vulnerable and hard-to-reach immigrant youth populations. His work has been cited across a broad range of disciplines and has garnered awards from sociology, anthropology, psychology, education, law, and social work.

Since 2002 Gonzales has carried out one of the most comprehensive studies of undocumented immigrants in the United States. His book, Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America (University of California Press), is based on an in-depth study that followed 150 undocumented young adults in Los Angeles for twelve years. Lives in Limbo has won eight major book awards, including the Society for the Study of Social Problems C. Wright Mills Award, the American Education Research Association Outstanding Book Award, the Law and Society Association Herbert Jacob Book Award, and the Society for Social Work and Research Book Award. It has also been selected by six universities as a Common Read. In addition, several groups around the country have used the book to train staff, including the Madison Police Department, Teach for America, and 23 public schools. Last year, the book was optioned for theatrical production, and plans are underway for the release of a second edition.

Patricia Gándara

Patricia Gándara is a research professor and co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. She is also chair of the Working Group on Education for the University of California-Mexico Initiative, in which she is spearheading a number of California-Mexico education projects. Gándara is a fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the National Academy of Education, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy, the French-American Association at Sciences Po Graduate Institute, Paris, and an ETS fellow at Princeton, New Jersey. In 2011 she was appointed to President Obama’s Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanics, and in 2015 received the Distinguished Career Award from the Scholars of Color Committee of the American Educational Research Association.

Her most recent books include The Latino Education Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2009) with Frances Contreras; Forbidden Language: English Learners and Restrictive Language Policies (Teachers College Press, 2010) with Megan Hopkins, and The Bilingual Advantage: Language, Literacy, and the U.S. Labor Market (2014), with Rebecca Callahan, a compilation of studies that demonstrates the economic value of biliteracy in a rapidly globalizing world.

Patricia Fernández-Kelly

Patricia Fernández-Kelly is professor of sociology and research associate at the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, and associate director of the Program in American Studies. She is also the director of the Center for Migration and Development at the same institution. Fernández-Kelly is a social anthropologist with an interest in international economic development, gender, class and ethnicity, and urban ethnography. As part of her dissertation research in the late 1970s, she conducted the first global ethnography focusing on export-processing zones in Asia and Latin America. Her book on Mexico’s maquiladora program, For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico's Frontier (1983) was featured by Contemporary Sociology as one of twenty-five favorite books in the last decade of the 20th century. With Lorraine Gray, she co-produced the Emmy-award winning documentary “The Global Assembly Line.” She has written extensively on migration, economic restructuring, women in the labor force, and race and ethnicity. With Paul DiMaggio, she produced Art in the Lives of Immigrant Communities in the United States (2010). With Alejandro Portes she is the editor of The State and the Grassroots: Immigrant Transnational Organization in Four Continents (Berghahn Books, 2016). Her book The Hero’s Fight: African Americans in West Baltimore and the Shadow of the State (2016) received a C. Wright Mills Finalist Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems.