Dear RSF Staff and Class of 2017-18,

Please join me in welcoming Visiting Scholar Katharine Donato for her seminar entitled, “Children in Immigrant America: Between Compassion and Security in a Deportation State.” The talk will be held in the Library on Wednesday, April 4th, from 11 AM to 12.30 PM.

Katharine M. Donato holds the Donald G. Herzberg Chair in International Migration and is Director of the Institute for the Study of International Migration in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Prior to joining Georgetown, she was on the faculty of Vanderbilt and Rice Universities. She has examined many research questions related to migration, including the economic consequences of U.S. immigration policy; health effects of Mexico-U.S. migration; immigrant parent involvement in schools in New York, Chicago, and Nashville; deportation and its effects for immigrants; the great recession and its consequences for Mexican workers; and gender and migration.

Her recent book is Gender and International Migration: From Slavery to Present, published by RSF (with Donna Gabaccia at the University of Toronto). In July 2016, together with Douglas Massey (Princeton), she published Undocumented Migration in a Global Economy: Twenty-First-Century Globalization and Illegal Migration, a special issue of The Annals of The Political and Social Science. In the last few years, she has been a co-Principal Investigator on two externally funded projects (with colleagues from Vanderbilt University). The first examines how environmental stressors affect out-migration from communities in southwestern Bangladesh, and the second analyzes data from the Vanderbilt Inpatient Cohort Study to understand how social support affects the health of patients admitted to the hospital with coronary heart disease at the time of hospitalization and after discharge.

I hope everyone is looking forward—as I am—to what will no doubt be an interesting and productive discussion.