Tomás R. Jiménez

Tomás Jiménez is Professor of Sociology and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.  He is also Director of the Undergraduate Program on Urban Studies. 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 American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Latinos/as Section selected the book for its Distinguished Book Award. Professor Jiménez has also published his research in Science, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Social Problems, International Migration Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Science Quarterly, DuBois Review, Social Currents, and the Annual Review of Sociology.

He is currently working on several research projects. The first, with social psychologist John Dovidio (Yale), political scientist Deborah Schildkraut (Tufts), and social psychologist Yuen Ho (UCLA), uses survey data (with embedded experiments) and in-depth interviews to understand how state-level immigration policies shape belonging among Latino immigrants, US-born Latinos, and US-born whites in Arizona and New Mexico. Professor Jiménez and his collaborators are completing a book manuscript titled Immigration and States of Belonging: How Immigration Policy and Climate Define Membership in the United States. This project is funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and the United Parcel Service Endowment Fund at Stanford. A second project looks at how immigration becomes part of American national identity by studying a sample of high school US history textbooks from 1930-2007. This research employs hand-coding and computer-assisted text analysis of the textbook sample. A third project, with Marrianne Cooper (Clayman Institute, Stanford University) and Chrystal Redekopp (Laboratory for Social Research, Stanford), examines how Silicon Valley residents find housing in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. Professor Jiménez is embarking on new research examining how governments can effectively facilitate immigrant integration. As a Stanford Impact Labs Fellow, he is developing relationships with community partner organizations that will ultimately serve as collaborators in the research.

Professor Jiménez 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 University (CASBS). He was the American Sociological Association Congressional Fellow in the office of US Rep. Michael Honda, where he served as a legislative aide for immigration, veterans’ affairs, housing, and election reform. His writing on policy has appeared in reports for the Immigration Policy Center, and the Migration Policy Institute. He has written opinion-editorials on the topic of immigrant assimilation in several major news outlets, including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CNN.com, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the San Diego Union-Tribune. He has also offered commentary for media outlets, including NBC News, National Public Radio, and Univision.