Associate Professor of Sociology in Hillyer College Karen Tejada will speak on "Border Politics: Handling Immigration Humanely" as part of the Presidents' College Fall Lectures. Her talk will take place Monday, Sept. 30, 11:20 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., in the Greenberg Center of the Harry Jack Gray Center.
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“The border remains a contested zone—we can’t look away, and we can’t agree on what we see there,” claimed Rachel Monroe of The New York Times recently. The numbers of migrants crossing the southern border is rising. Whereas they once came to escape poverty, many now make the risky journey to flee violence—only to find themselves “more vulnerable to violence, exploitation, and death.” In this election year, immigration is a hot-button issue confounding both parties. Only 28 percent of the country supports President Biden’s immigration policy. Trump paints immigration as “country-wrecking.” Yet the roughly 10.5 million undocumented immigrants (Pew Center) remain essential to the American economy. When immigrants are politicized or demonized for the agendas of political parties, it is easy to lose sight of the human fates behind the numbers. Who really benefits from immigration? Why does enforcement not work? How can we better reform policies to make immigration more humane?
Karen Tejada-Peña is a first-generation scholar and proud alumna of UC Santa Barbara and SUNY-Albany. Dr. Tejada's publications examine political habits, gender, transnationalism, and most recently, crimmigration studies (that is, the criminalization of immigration). Her book project, Putting them on ICE: Policing Salvadoran Communities in Long Island, spans three years of ethnographic work on Salvadorans in Nassau and Suffolk counties and was supported by a Russell Sage Foundation grant. In Hillyer College she teaches introduction to sociology, alongside courses on immigration, the criminal justice system, and Ethnic Studies. A member of Latino Sociology section of the American Sociological Association, she embraces activist scholarship and is working on issues related to language access rights on Long Island. In addition, she recently received a 2024 National Hispanic Heritage Month Award from the University of Hartford.