The research agenda of the members in the Immigration/Migration primary research area spans multiple aspects of health and well-being of migrant populations in NYC, the United States, and globally, addressing fundamental research questions about changing patterns and social and economic consequences of immigration/migration.
Leadership
Yao Lu is a Professor of Sociology. She is a member of the CPRC’s committee on Research on Immigration/Migration. Lu’s research focuses on how migration and immigration intersect with social, economic, and political processes across diverse contexts. She conducts comparative research using large-scale datasets and a variety of quantitative methods. Her recent and ongoing projects include the impacts of demographic processes such as migration on political outcomes; the sources of racial/ethnic and nativity inequality among highly educated workers; immigrant labor market outcomes in the U.S. and Canada; and the consequences of parental migration for child well-being.
An economist and journalist by training, Dr. Kaushal is an expert on comparative immigration policy and the author of a new book on this topic, Blaming Immigrants.
She is professor of Social Policy and chair of the doctoral program at Columbia School of Social Work. She is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at IZA, the Institute of Labor Economics (Bonn, Germany).
Her current research includes labor market impacts of foreign-trained registered nurses and physicians, how immigration of foreign-trained physicians impacts healthcare use and health outcomes of the U.S. population, cross-national research on immigration in the United States and Canada, the impact of local policies (such as local immigration enforcement and state DREAM Acts) on the health and mental health of undocumented immigrants, the effect of the Syrian refugee crisis on electoral preferences in Turkey, and the long-term impact of tribal resettlement in India.
Dr. Kaushal is the author of Blaming Immigrants: Nationalism and the Economics of Global Movement (2018, Columbia University Press), in which she investigates the core causes of rising disaffection towards immigrants globally and tests common complaints against immigration. She has authored or co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed scientific articles and book chapters on immigrants and other vulnerable populations. She writes a monthly column in the Economic Times, India’s largest financial daily, and she is currently working on a documentary on tribesfolk in India.
She holds a BA in economics from Sri Ram College of Commerce (India), an MA in economics from the Delhi School of Economics, and a PhD in economics from the Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York.