How Immigration Changes the "Natives"

  Join us on Friday morning when we welcome Tomás Jiménez as our speaker. Tomás is Associate Professor of Sociology and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford. He is also Director of the undergraduate program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and Director of graduate studies in sociology.  His research and writing focus on immigration, assimilation, social mobility, and ethnic and racial identity. His latest book, The Other Side of Assimilation: How Immigrants are Changing American Life (University of California Press, 2017), uses interviews from a race and class spectrum of Silicon Valley residents to show how a relational form of assimilation changes both newcomers (immigrants and their children) and established individuals (people born in the US to US-born parents).  His first book, Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity (University of California Press, 2010) draws on interviews and participant observation to understand how uninterrupted Mexican immigration influences the ethnic identity of later-generation Mexican Americans. The book was awarded the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Latinos Section Distinguished Book Award.

  He is currently working several other projects. The first looks at how immigration becomes part of American national identity by studying a sample of high school US history textbooks from 1930-2005.  A second project uses survey data (with embedded experiments) and in-depth interviews to understand how state-level immigration policies shape the sense of belonging and related intergroup attitudes, behaviors, and support for immigration policies among immigrants and host-society members in the United States. A third project uses Yelp! data to examine the contextual factors that predict whether Mexican food has entered a mainstream. In another project, Tomás is studying how Silicon Valley residents find housing in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world.

  Tomás graduated from Santa Clara University with a B.S. in sociology; magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and was Class Valedictorian. He has an A.M. and Ph.D. in sociology, both from Harvard. He has taught at the University of California, San Diego. He has been named a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer (2017-19). He has also been an Irvine Fellow at the New America Foundation and a Sage Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He was the American Sociological Association Congressional Fellow in the office of U.S. Rep. Michael Honda, where he served as a legislative aide for immigration, veterans’ affairs, housing, and election reform.