Speakers

Catherine N. Barry is a PhD candidate in the graduate group in Sociology & Demography at the University of California, Berkeley. She has worked extensively with national and state-wide databases, including the American Communities Survey, the decennial U.S. Census, the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, the Current Population Survey, and the California Health Interview Survey. Her research interests include immigration, health, race & ethnicity, social stratification and military sociology. She is currently working on her dissertation, which examines the influence of the U.S. military on socio-economic outcomes and the construction of identities among two special groups of U.S. military veterans – the foreign-born (first generation immigrants) and those who are children of at least one foreign-born parent (second generation immigrants).

Dr. Hatem Bazian, received his Ph.D. in Philosophy and Islamic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, Bazian is a senior lecturer in the Departments of Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies. Dr. Bazian between 2002-2007, also served as an adjunct professor of law at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. In Spring 2009, Dr. Bazian founded at Berkeley the Center for the Study and Documentation of Islamophobia, a research unit dedicated to the systematic study of Othering Islam and Muslims.

Dr. Bazian’s published book, Jerusalem in Islamic Consciousness, is a reflection of his desire to contribute to a better understanding of Muslim attachment and informed political attitudes toward the Sacred City and Palestine in general. Currently, Dr. Bazian is working on two books, Silicon Rush: Documenting Muslim Communities in the Silicon Valley; and Virtual Internment: Muslims and the War on Terrorism. Bazian most recent publication is a chapter contribution in French on Islamophobia and an entry to Oxford’s Human Rights Encyclopedia covering the HR under the Palestinian Authority.

Dr. Bazian worked as Editor in Chief of Discourse Magazine, a monthly progressive publication in SF and post 9-11, co-hosted “Islam Today,” a 94.1 KPFA, KBFB in Berkeley and KFCF in Fresno weekly radio magazine show covering Islam and its diverse people around the world. Since September 11, he has appeared in many TV and Radio interviews, offered frequent commentary on current affairs and is a regular consultant for the San Francisco Chronicle on stories relating to Palestine, the Arab world, Islam, Muslims and world politics.

Andrew Becker covers immigration for the Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley, Calif. He has reported on the mistreatment of confidential informants, Mexican police officers seeking asylum, border corruption and infiltration by drug gangs, and aid workers searching the desert for migrants crossing into the United States. His latest reporting focuses on the Obama administration’s approach to immigration enforcement. His recent work has appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and National Public Radio. Before joining CIR, he was an investigative reporting fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he reported on human smuggling and corruption along the Southwest border for a joint New York Times and PBS FRONTLINE/World production. Previously he was a reporter for the Contra Costa Times. He has also written and reported for the Dallas Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, PBS/FRONTLINE, and KQED’s California Report. He received a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley.

Maria Blanco is a Vice-President at the California Community Foundation.  Formerly, she was Executive Director of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity & Diversity. Blanco is a Boalt alumna (’84) who brings more than 20 years of experience as a litigator and advocate for immigrant rights, gender equality and racial justice. She formerly served as the Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the Bay and as National Senior Counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. As a lawyer, she has successfully litigated such pivotal civil rights cases as Davis v. San Francisco which brought women for the first time into the San Francisco Fire Department; and Castrejon v. Tortilleria La Mejor, which established that undocumented workers are covered by federal anti-discrimination laws.

Kitty Calavita is Chancellor’s Professor Emerita of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. She was President of the Law & Society Association in 2000-2001, and is a Thorsten Sellin Fellow of the American Ac

ademy of Political and Social Science. She has published widely in the fields of immigration and immigration lawmaking. An early book, Inside the State: The Bracer

o Program, Immigration, and the INS (1992), used unpublished archival material to document the internal dynamics of the INS in shaping the Bracero Program, and connected structural contradictions in the political economy to the details of agency decisionmaking. Her interest in the interplay of economic forces and state power led to her investigation of white-collar crime in Big Money Crime: Fraud and Politics in the Savings and Loan Crisis (1997, with co-authors Henry Pontell and Robert Tillman). Another book, Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe (2005), examined immigrant marginalization in Italy and Spain, and the formal and informal legal processes that contribute to it. Her most recent book is Invitation to Law & Society: An Introduction to the Study of Real Law (2010). Interweaving scholarship with personal anecdotes and humor, it is an accessible guide to the prominent issues and distinctive approaches in the field of law & society.

Ronald Campbell is a reporter for The Orange County Register. He started The Register’s program in computer-assisted reporting and has participated in many investigations, including a probe of the trade in human body parts, abusive charitable fundraising tactics and fraudulent stock sale practices. He recently published a series examining California’s extraordinary dependence on immigrant labor; the story drew on his analysis of nearly four decades of census data. His work has won the Loeb, Investigative Reporters & Editors and National Education Writers awards. Before joining The Register in 1987 he worked for The (Fairfield, CA) Daily Republic and The Bakersfield Californian. A native of San Francisco, he earned a degree in history from Santa Clara University where he edited the student newspaper. He, his wife and their two sons live in Huntington Beach. In his spare time he reads history and climbs mountains.

Allison Davenport is the Director of the Women’s Institute for Leadership Development (WILD) for Human Rights, an initiative of the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law at Berkeley Law School.  WILD’s mission is to promote human rights domestically and globally through the conscious leadership of women and girls, in particular young women of color.  A Berkeley Law School graduate, Allison practiced immigration and refugee law for several years first in private practice and then went on to start an immigration legal services program at Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland where she later served as Legal Services Director.  Her legal practice focused on representing asylum-seekers, unaccompanied minors, and survivors of domestic violence and other crime victims before the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration Court, Board of Immigration Appeals, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.  She has presented dozens of trainings to lawyers, law students and community groups regarding immigration policy, asylum law, and immigrant rights.  Allison previously worked as a Staff Attorney with the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at U.C. Hastings School of Law where she provided technical assistance to lawyers around the country representing asylum-seekers as well as worked with an international coalition responding to the staggering murder rate of women and girls in Mexico and Central America.  Prior to law school, she worked in social services both with migrant farm workers in California’s Central Valley and immigrant families in San Francisco’s Mission District and later earned an M.A. in Latin American Studies from U.C. Berkeley, where her research focused on the impact of migration on indigenous sending communities in the Guatemalan highlands.

María Elena Durazo was elected to serve as Executive Secretary-Treasurer on May 15, 2006.  The daughter of Mexican immigrant farm workers, Maria Elena learned the importance of hard work and determination at a very young age. As a child, she traveled from Oregon to California with her parents and nine siblings to work in the fields. Before leading the Federation, Maria Elena was elected as President and built the hotel workers union UNITE-HERE, Local 11, into one of the most active unions in Los Angeles County. Her hard work led her to become the first Latina elected to the Executive Board of HERE International Union in 1996 and eventually in 2004, she became Executive Vice President of UNITE-HERE International.

Currently she serves as Chair of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s appointee to the Los Angeles Economy and Jobs Committee, Board of Directors for LA Inc., the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau and the California League of Conservation Voters. A resident of Los Angeles, Maria Elena is the mother of two sons, Mario and Michael, grandmother to Seneca and the widow of Miguel Contreras, former Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO. Maria Elena is a graduate of St. Mary’s College in Moraga and earned a law degree from the People’s College of Law in 1985.

Dr. John Eastman is the Donald P. Kennedy Chair in Law at Chapman University School of Law and was Dean from 2007 until February 2010, when he stepped down to pursue a bid to become California Attorney General.  He joined the Chapman law faculty in August 1999, specializing in Constitutional Law, Legal History, and Property.  He was named Interim Associate Dean of Administration in August 2006, and appointed Dean in June 2007.  He also serves as the Director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public interest law firm affiliated with the Claremont Institute that he founded in 1999.  He has a Ph.D. in Government from the Claremont Graduate School and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, and is Chairman of the Federalist Society’s Federalism & Separation of Powers practice group.

Prior to joining the Chapman law faculty, Dr. Eastman served as a law clerk to the Honorable Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States, and to the Honorable J. Michael Luttig, Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He practiced law with the national law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, representing major corporate clients in federal and state courts and with respect to State Attorneys General investigations, in complex commercial contract litigation and in consumer litigation.

Dr. Eastman has appeared as an expert legal commentator on numerous television and radio programs, including C-SPAN, Fox News, PBS, The O’Reilly Factor, OCN, NPR, KNX in Los Angeles, KFWB in Los Angeles, WABC in New York, and Airtalk with Larry Mantle, and has presented testimony before the U.S. Congress, including before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence regarding news media liability for publication of classified information. His November 2000 testimony before the Florida Select Joint Committee on the Manner of Appointment of Presidential Electors was carried live by C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, and numerous other networks throughout the world. He provided commentary on the Supreme Court’s decision in the Boy Scouts case that was carried by CBS Radio in New York, CNS Radio, The Associated Press, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Fox Television and Reuters News Service, among others.  He has a weekly segment on the nationally-syndicated Hugh Hewitt show debating current legal issues with Duke Law Professor Erwin Chemerinsky, publishes an occasional column entitled “First Principles” in the Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journals, and has published numerous op-eds in newspapers around the country, including the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Los Angeles Times, and the Orange County Register.

Maria Echaveste joined University of California’s Berkeley School of Law as a Lecturer after co-founding a strategic and policy consulting group, serving as a senior White House and U.S. Department of Labor official, and working as a community leader and corporate attorney.  She is also a Senior Fellow with the Law School’s Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity.

From 1998 to 2001, she served as assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff to President Bill Clinton. In this capacity, Echaveste managed domestic policy initiatives that focused on education, civil rights, immigration and bankruptcy reform, including the development of communications, legislative and public outreach strategies.  Ms Echaveste is also a non-resident fellow of the Center for American Progress working on issues such as immigration, civil rights and education.  She is a member of the Board of Directors of CARE (a humanitarian organization fighting global poverty), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the US/Mexico Foundation,  the Alliance for Excellent Education, the American Prospect magazine and Demos.

Ms. Echaveste received a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology from Stanford University in 1976. In 1980, Ms. Echaveste received a Juris Doctor from the University of California at Berkeley.

Ryan Gabrielson covers public safety for California Watch. He was a 2009-2010 investigative reporting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, his reporting for the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Az. exposed that immigration enforcement by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office undermined criminal investigations and emergency response; scholarship charities that were committing tax fraud; and widespread academic and financial malfeasance at the nation’s largest community college district. Gabrielson’s work has received numerous national and state honors, including a Pulitzer Prize, a George Polk Award and a Sigma Delta Chi Award. He began his career at The Monitor in McAllen, Texas and studied journalism at the University of Arizona.

Lisa García Bedolla is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and Chair of Berkeley’s Center for Latino Policy Research.  She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University and her B.A. in Latin American Studies and Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.  She is author of Latino Politics (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009) and Fluid Borders: Latino Power, Identity, and Politics in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) winner of the American Political Science Association’s Ralph Bunche Award for the best book in political science on ethnic and cultural pluralism and a best book award from the American Political Science Association’s Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section.  She is also co-author, with Melissa R. Michelson, of the forthcoming book, Mobilizing Inclusion: Redefining Citizenship through Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns (New Haven: Yale University Press).  Her work has appeared in the Journal of Politics, Politics and Gender, Latino Studies, American Politics Research, JESPAR, the Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy, State Politics and Policy Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, and in numerous edited volumes.  Professor García Bedolla has received fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, UCLA’s Institute of American Cultures, the James Irvine Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Huntington Library, and the American Political Science Association, among others.  Her research focuses on the political incorporation of Latinos and other racial/ethnic groups in the United States, with particular emphasis on the intersection of race, class, and gender.

Cynthia Gorney joined the faculty in 1999, after a career at The Washington Post that included serving as an award-winning national features writer, South American bureau chief and the first writer for the Post’s Style section based on the West Coast. She is the author of Articles of Faith: A History of the Abortion Wars, and has written for many magazines, including The New Yorker, National Geographic, Harper’s, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times Magazine, Runners World, O: The Oprah Magazine, and the American Journalism Review. She is currently a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and National Geographic. Gorney is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley.

She has also worked as a visiting Poynter Institute teacher, a newsroom writing coach and consultant, and a host and interviewer on “Forum,” the Northern California public affairs radio program on KQED-FM. Gorney is a past recipient of the American Society of Newspaper Editors feature writing award.

Lucas Guttentag is the founding national director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which he has led for twenty-five years. He is also Robina Foundation Distinguished Senior Fellow at Yale Law School, where he teaches courses on immigration law and constitutional litigation, and he has taught courses on the constitutional rights of immigrants at UC Berkeley Law School (Boalt Hall) for many years.

Guttentag has litigated major class action, constitutional and civil rights cases in courts nationwide for more than three decades; argued successfully in the United States Supreme Court to enforce habeas corpus rights for immigrants (INS v. St. Cyr); testified before Congress; received many honors for his litigation and leadership; is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and regularly speaks and writes on U.S. immigration law and constitutional issues.  Guttentag is an honors graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard Law School and served as law clerk to renowned federal judge William Wayne Justice in Texas.

Since 2006, the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project has developed and led the national litigation strategy challenging state and local anti-immigrant laws.  It has won major rulings against the ordinances enacted by Hazleton, Pennsylvania and many other cities, and it is currently challenging Arizona’s state employer sanctions statute before the Supreme Court (Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting) and litigating the civil rights lawsuit (Friendly House v. Whiting) against Arizona’s SB1070 law.

Luawanna Hallstrom is Principal of Collaborative Communications (TM). Previously, she served as Chief Operating Officer for Harry Singh & Sons, largest single vine-ripe tomato producer in the U.S and General Manager of Oceanside Produce Inc. She currently serves as a member of several agricultural organizations, including Western Growers Association Board, California Farm Bureau Labor Committee Member, U.C President’s Advisory Council Member, Western Vice President of the National Council for Agricultural Employers and Co-Chair of the National Agricultural Coalition for Immigration Reform. Currently she is serving as a board member for a second term with the California.

Tyche Hendricks is an editor for The California Report on KQED Public Radio in San Francisco. She spent more than a dozen years at newspapers, most of them at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she covered immigration, demographic trends and immigrant communities. She is a lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Hendricks has reported extensively on the U.S.-Mexico border and her book, “The Wind Doesn’t Need a Passport: Stories from the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” was published by the University of California Press in June 2010. Her work has taken her across the continent from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Lake Nicaragua.  Hendricks has worked at the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner, the San Jose Mercury News and the Seattle Times. She started her journalism career in radio, filing stories for Marketplace, Pacifica Network News and The California Report. Her work has won awards from the Society for Professional Journalists, the Best of the West and the National Federation of Community Broadcasters. She was a Knight Digital Media Fellow in 2010. She holds a BA from Wesleyan University, and an MA in Latin American Studies and an MJ in Journalism, both from UC Berkeley. She speaks fluent Spanish and passable French.

Laura E. Hill is a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. Her research interests include immigrant well-being, immigration policy, race and ethnicity, and youth. Recent reports focus on the labor market effects of an immigrant legalization program and a study of the impact of increasing the importance of skill in U.S. immigration.  She has been a research associate at The SPHERE Institute and a National Institute of Aging postdoctoral fellow. She holds a Ph.D. in demography from the University of California, Berkeley.

Miriam Jordan is a senior special writer for The Wall Street Journal.  She writes about immigrants nationally from a grass-roots perspective. She arrived in Los Angeles six years ago, after spending most of her career in the developing world.

She began in journalism in 1987 as a correspondent for Reuters News Agency and worked for the newswire in Mexico, Brazil and Israel, respectively, until December 1992. From January 1993 through mid-2000, Ms. Jordan was a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal in southeast Asia, based in Hong Kong, and then in India, based in New Delhi. She was posted in Brazil between 2000 and 2003.

Since returning to the U.S. in 2004, Ms. Jordan has received several awards for her coverage of immigrants; she was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 and 2009.

Born in New York City, Ms. Jordan earned bachelors’ degrees in international relations and psychology from Stanford University and a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.  She grew up in the United States and Brazil. Miriam speaks Portuguese, Spanish, French and Hebrew. She lives in LA with her husband, Jonathan Karp, who is also a journalist, and her 14-year-old twins, Maya and Daniel.

Aarti Kohli is Director of Immigration Policy at the Warren Institute.  She has served as a Consultant to the Office of Children’s Issues for the U.S. Department of State, where she has drafted federal regulations on international adoption and prepared agency responses to industry comments for publication in the Federal Register. Formerly, she was Judiciary Committee and Immigration and Claims Subcommittee counsel to Representative Howard Berman (D-CA).  Prior to working for Congress, she served as Assistant Legislative Director at UNITE union in Washington, DC.  In addition, she has also worked as a consultant to the National Immigration Law Center, the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, and the National Immigration Forum.  Aarti earned her J.D. from the University of California Hastings College of the Law and is a member of the California Bar.

Andrew Lam is a writer and an editor with the Pacific News Service, a short story writer. in 1996 He co-founded New America Media, an association of over 2000 ethnic media organizations in America.  He also contributed over 60 commentaries to NPR’s All Things Considered.

Lam was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University during the academic year 2001-02, studying journalism. He lectured widely at many universities and institutions, including Harvard, Yale, Brown, UCLA, USF, UC Berkeley, University of Hawaii, William and Mary, Hong Kong Univ, and Loyola university, and so on.

Lam, who was born in Vietnam and came to the US in 1975 when he was 11 years old, has a Master in Fine Arts from San Francisco State University in creative writing, and a BA degree in biochemistry from UC Berkeley.  He was featured in the documentary “My Journey Home,” which aired on PBS nationwide on April 7, 2004, where a film crew followed him back to his homeland Vietnam.  In 2010 he co-produced a segment for the Jim Lehrer News Hour on Vietnamese Americans in Vietnam.

His book, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora has won the Pen American “Beyond the Margins” Award in 2006. His second book, “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres” was published in the Fall 2010. He’ recently finished a collection of Short Storied called “Birds of Paradise and is currently working on a novel.

Taeku Lee is Director of the IGS Center on the Politics of Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity and Chair of the Diversity and Democracy Cluster of the Berkeley Diversity Research Initiative. Lee served as co-Program Chair for the 2008 Midwest Political Science Association annual meeting and has served in advisory and consultative capacities for community-based organizations, think tanks, and a Fortune 500 company.

Prior to coming to Berkeley, Lee was Assistant Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He was born in South Korea, grew up in Malaysia and New York City, and is a proud graduate of K-12 public schools, the University of Michigan (A.B.), Harvard University (M.P.P.), and the University of Chicago (Ph.D.).

Carlos Lozano has worked for the Los Angeles Times since 1987. As a reporter, his beats included politics, county government, education, courts and police. He was part of the paper’s award winning coverage for the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the 2000 Alaska Airlines jetliner crash and the 2003 Southern California Wildfires. As an editor, he currently oversees 10 reporters, whose beats include the state, immigration and demographics. With the largest Latino population in the country in California, immigration remains one of The Times’ top priorities as the national debate over legislative reforms continues.

Phuong Ly is a Knight Fellow at Stanford University studying social media and networks in immigrant communities. Previously, she was based in Chicago as a freelance writer and consultant. Her clients have included Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, and her articles have appeared in The Washington Post Magazine, the Washington Monthly, People, Business 2.0, Bloomberg News and other publications. She has taught classes on writing and diversity issues at the Poynter Institute, the Freedom Forum’s Diversity Institute and the Hearst Symposium.

For seven years, she was a reporter at the Washington Post, writing about immigrant culture, criminal justice and religion. A portfolio of her stories about immigrants won the American Society of Newspaper Editors/Freedom Forum Award for Outstanding Writing about Diversity and was included in the book “Best Newspaper Writing 2006-2007.” She has received fellowship grants from the Institute for Journalism and Justice, the International Reporting Project and Wesleyan University. She began her journalism career at the Charlotte Observer, where she chronicled the remaking of public housing.

Philip Martin is a professor at the University of California, Davis; chair of the UC Comparative Immigration & Integration Program; and editor of the Migration News and the Rural Migration News. He has consulted on migration issues with U.S. and international organizations and has authored many books and articles on migration policy.

Dr. Norm Matloff is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, and was formerly a professor of statistics at that university.  In addition to numerous technical papers, he has also written widely about the hiring of foreign engineers and programmers by U.S. firms, and has taught a freshman seminar on general immigration issues.  A speaker of Cantonese and Mandarin, he is active in the Chinese-American community, and has served as an invited speaker at a number of Asian-American public forums.  Prof. Matloff has been a recipient of the UC Davis Distinguished Public Service Award, in recognition of his work on social issues such as immigration and age discrimination, his work in support of affirmative action, and his defense of Asian-American scientists who have been discriminated against in our national laboratories.  He was born and raised in Los Angeles, and has a PhD in mathematics from UCLA.

Margie McHugh is the Co-Director of the National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, DC. Prior to joining MPI, Ms. McHugh served for 15 years as the executive director of The New York Immigration Coalition, an umbrella organization for over 200 groups in New York that uses research, policy development, and community mobilization efforts to address pressing immigration and immigrant integration issues.  During her time with NYIC, Ms. McHugh oversaw research, writing, and publication of over a dozen reports dealing with issues such as the quality of education services provided to immigrant students in New York’s schools; the lack of availability of English classes for adult immigrants; the voting behavior of foreign-born citizens; and barriers faced by immigrants seeking to access health and mental health services.

Angelo A. Paparelli is a partner in Seyfarth Shaw LLP in Southern California and New York, practicing all aspects of U.S. immigration law.   He is the founder and immediate past president of the Alliance of Business Immigration Lawyers – www.abil.com, a 38-member worldwide alliance of leading immigration firms Named the world’s leading corporate immigration lawyer (2009, 2006 & 2005, International Who’s Who of Business Lawyers) and a Band 1 business immigration lawyer (2010, 2009 and 2008, Chambers USA, and 2010 and 2009, Legal500).  In addition, he is a co-author of the New York Law Journal’s “Immigration” column, a blogger (www.nationofimmigrators.com), co-editor of The Immigration Compliance Book (ILW, 2009) and Expert witness/consultant on immigration to professional service firms, businesses and individuals.

Noah Pickus is the Nannerl O. Keohane Director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics and Associate Research Professor of Public Policy Studies at Duke University. Pickus co-directed the Brookings-Duke Immigration Policy Roundtable and is the author of True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism, Becoming American/America Becoming, and Immigration and Citizenship in the 21st Century. Prior to joining the Kenan Institute, he was the founding director of the Institute for Emerging Issues and a faculty member at Duke and at Middlebury College. He received his Ph.D from Princeton University.

Steven Pitts came to the Labor Center in August of 2001 from Houston, Texas. Steven received his Ph.D. in economics with an emphasis on urban economics from the University of Houston in 1994. His M.A. is also from the University of Houston and he holds an B.A. from Harvard University. For the 15 years prior to his arrival at the Labor Center, Steven taught economics at the Houston Community College and, for five years, he was an adjunct lecturer in the African American Studies Program at the University of Houston. At the Labor Center, Steven focuses on alternative strategies for worker organizing, and economic development and social policy with an emphasis on labor–community alliances. Steve is currently working with Alexis Mazón on a Ford Foundation-funded project to build solidarity between Latina/o immigrant and African American workers with the goal of increasing their power to lead and fight together for better work conditions and economic justice.

Susan Rasky was the congressional correspondent for The New York Times. A winner of a George Polk Award for National Reporting, she began her career in Washington, D.C., covering economic policy for the Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. and later reported for Reuters from Capitol Hill and the White House. Rasky was a columnist and contributing editor for the California Journal as well as a frequent political commentator for the Los Angeles Times, The Sacramento Bee and NPR. She established and supervises the J-School’s California News Service, which gives students experience covering government and politics for news organizations throughout the country. She joined the faculty in 1991. Rasky received her bachelor’s degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley and holds a master’s degree in economic history from the London School of Economics.

Ted Robbins serves as Southwest Correspondent for NPR.  He covers the Southwest: Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, West Texas, northern Mexico, and Utah.  Prior to joining NPR in 2004, he spent five years as a regular contributor to The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 15 years at the PBS affiliate in Tucson, work as a field producer for CBS News, stints at NBC affiliates in Tucson and Salt Lake City, as well as radio reporting in Salt Lake and print reporting for USA Today.  Robbins reporting has won numerous awards, including Emmys and a CINE Golden Eagle for a  documentary on Mexican agriculture .  Ted earned his B.A. in psychology and his master’s in journalism, both from the University of California at Berkeley. He also taught journalism at the University of Arizona for 10 years.

Rubén G. Rumbaut is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. He is the founding chair of the Section on International Migration of the American Sociological Association, has testified before the U.S. Congress, and lectured widely throughout North America, Europe and Asia on international migration issues.  Dr. Rumbaut directed (with Alejandro Portes) the landmark Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study; and has served as P.I. of the Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles study.  He is the author of more than 175 publications on immigration issues. Among his books are the critically acclaimed Immigrant America: A Portrait (with Portes), and Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation, which won the American Sociological Association’s top award for Distinguished Scholarship and the Thomas and Znaniecki Award for best book in the immigration field.  As a member of a panel of the National Academy of Sciences he worked on two companion volumes on the U.S. Hispanic population: Multiple Origins, Uncertain Destinies; and Hispanics and the Future of America.  He also edits (with Steve Gold) a research-oriented book series, “The New Americans: Recent Immigration and American Society,” which has published more than 70 titles since 2002 on a wide range of immigration topics.

Leticia Saucedo is an expert in employment, labor, and immigration law. She currently teaches immigration law and employment law at UC Davis School of Law.  She has developed courses in international and domestic service learning that explore the immigration consequences of crime and domestic violence in a post-conflict society.  Saucedo currently holds a position as a research scholar with the Chief Justice Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

Honorable Denise Noonan Slavin was first elected as Vice President of the National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ) in August 2001. Since then, she has been either Vice President or President of NAIJ. NAIJ is the collective bargaining unit for U.S. Immigration Judges nationwide. The NAIJ is affiliated with the International Federation of Professional and

Technical Engineers AFL-CIO & CLC (IFPTE), a well-established union representing more than 75,000 men and women in professional, technical, administrative and associated occupations.

IFPTE member locals include Social Security Judges, NASA scientists, nuclear engineers, architects, and accountants.

Roberto Suro holds a joint appointment as a professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the School of Policy, Planning and Development at the University of Southern California. He is also managing director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC, an interdisciplinary venue for experimentation and research on the digital media revolution and its impact on society. Prior to joining the USC faculty in August 2007, he was director of the Pew Hispanic Center, a research organization in Washington D.C. which he founded in 2001, and in 2004 he was part of the management team that launched the Pew Research Center.

Suro’s journalistic career began in 1974 at the City News Bureau of Chicago as a police reporter, and after tours at the Chicago Sun Times and the Chicago Tribune he joined TIME Magazine, where he worked as a correspondent in the Chicago, Washington, Beirut and Rome bureaus. In 1985 he started at The New York Times with postings as bureau chief in Rome and Houston. After a year as an Alicia Patterson Fellow, Suro was hired at The Washington Post as a staff writer on the national desk, eventually covering a variety of beats including the Justice Department and the Pentagon and serving as deputy national editor.

Arturo Venegas came to the U.S. from Mexico in 1958, settling in Santa Maria, CA.  A high school dropout, at 17, joined the Army serving with the 101st Airborne Division in the US and Vietnam. He began his policing career in 1969 with the Fresno Police rising to Deputy Chief until 1993 when he became Sacramento’s Chief, retiring in 2003. He is the Project Director of the Law Enforcement Engagement Initiative engaging policing executives in a sensible public dialogue over the need for comprehensive immigration reform.

A proponent and instructor of Community Policing, he knows that public safety and national security success can only be achieved with the trust and support of the entire community.  He just completed a U.S. State Department Distinguished Speaker tour in Costa Rica and Belize.

He has a BA from USF and a MS from Cal Poly, Pomona and a graduate of the FBI’s National Academy, National Executive Institute and the CA Law Enforcement Command College.  He belongs to the Police Executive Research Forum, International Association of Chiefs of Police, National Latino Peace Officers Association, Hispanic American Police Command Officers Association, National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives and California Police Chiefs Association.