Tomás R. Jiménez
Tomás Jiménez is a Professor of Sociology and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the founding co-director of Stanford's Institute for Advancing Just Societies. He is also the director of the Qualitative Initiative in the Immigration Policy Lab. His research and writing focus on immigration, policy, assimilation, social mobility, and ethnic and racial identity. His latest book, States of Belonging: Immigration Policies, Attitudes, and Inclusion (Russell Sage Foundation Press) (with Deborah Schildkraut, Yuen Ho, and John Dovidio) uses survey data (with an embedded experiment) 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. The American Sociological Association’s Population Section selected the book for its Otis Dudley Duncan Distinguished Book Award. His second 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. Professor Jiménez has also published his research in Science, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, American Political Science Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Social Problems, International Migration Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Science Quarterly, DuBois Review, Social Currents, Qualitative Sociology, and the Annual Review of Sociology.
Professor Jiménez also researches immigration policy with Stanford's Immigration Policy Lab, directing the Lab's Qualitative Initiative to integrate qualitative and quantitive approaches in research to have policy impact. Current projects examine naturalization, refugee resettlement, and health and language access.
In other lines of research, Professor Jiménez and Sofia Avila examine 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.
Professor Jiménez has taught at the University of California, San Diego. He was the 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 editorials on immigration in several major news outlets, including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CNN.com, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Hill, and the San Diego Union-Tribune. He has also offered commentary for media outlets, including NBC News, National Public Radio, and Univision.
