Immigration Conference

8:30 – 9:00 a.m. – Breakfast and Registration 

9:00 – 9:10 a.m. – Welcoming Remarks

Linda Essig, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, Baruch College, CUNY

Els de Graauw, Professor, Baruch College, CUNY

9:10 – 9:55 a.m. – Plenary Presentation

When the Flow Slows: Demographic Impacts of Declining Asylee and Refugee Admissions in New York City

Presenters: Joseph Salvo (former Director of the Population Division, NYC Department of City Planning) and Peter Lobo (former Chief Demographer of New York City)

Moderator: Prof. Robert Smith (Marxe School at Baruch College-CUNY)

9:55 – 10:00 a.m.: Coffee break but make it quick!

10:00 – 11:30 a.m. – Panel 1 — Narratives and Politics of Asylum

Moderator: Prof. Sarah Bishop (Baruch College-CUNY)

1. The ‘Crisis’ of Asylum: NYC’s Asylum-Seeker Discourse (2022–25); Presenter: Jackie Vimo (Montclair State University)
2. ‘New York City Has Reached Its Capacity’: Asylum-Seekers, Housing, and the Conjuring of an Asylum Crisis; Presenter: Michael Samers (University of Kentucky)
3. Preferred Profiles of New Immigrants to NYC during the Migrant Influx of the 2020s: A Conjoint Experiment Revealing the Role of Legal Status in Public Opinion; Presenters: Liza Steele (John Jay College and Graduate Center, CUNY), Jat Laam Yiu (CUNY Graduate Center), Laird Gallagher (Brown University), and Philip Kasinitz (CUNY Graduate Center)
4. Asylum and the ‘Good Immigrant/Bad Immigrant’ Binary: Protection, Deservingness, and Inequality among Immigrants with Criminal Records in NYC Immigration Courts; Presenter: Sarah Tosh (Rutgers University)

11:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m.  – Panel 2 — Urban Governance and Policy Response (lunch included)

Moderator: Prof. Neil Hernandez (Marxe School at Baruch College-CUNY)

1. Same Crisis, Different Year: Asylum, Immigration Governance, and New York City’s Infrastructure Problem; Presenter: Camille Mackler (The Other 54 Strategies)
2. Municipal Innovation and the New York City Asylum Application Help Center; Presenters: Sam Solomon, Masha Gindler, Alicia Berenyi, Ann Cheng, Kate Dempsey, Susana Liu-Hedberg, Tanya Molina, Arabella Walley, and Kelly Yzique-Zea (all NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene)
3. Beyond English Default: Building Multilingual-First Infrastructure for Asylum Response; Presenter: Young Kwon (NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs)
4. Reflections on Seven Years of Pro Se Asylum Service Provision in NYC; Presenter: Noah Elias Habeeb (The Ark at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah)

1:30 – 1:45 p.m. – Refreshment break

1:45 – 3:15 p.m. – Panel 3 — Reception, Shelter, and Urban Space

Moderator: Prof. Hilary Botein (Marxe School at Baruch College-CUNY)

1. Exploring Latin American and West African Migrant Experiences in NYC; Presenters: Felicia Arriaga, Edwin Grimsley, Masooma Amin, Daisy Flores, and Nishanthini Mahendran (all Marxe School at Baruch College – CUNY)
2. Surplus Space and the Politics of Asylum: Top-Down Governance and Bottom-Up Inhabitation in New York City and Berlin; Presenters: Sophie Gonick (New York University and Harvard University) and René Kreichauf (Free University Brussels and Harvard University)
3. The Lives & Possibilities of African Asylum Seekers in New York City; Presenters: Dialika Sal (Lehman College – CUNY), Heba Gowayed (Hunter College – CUNY), Ethan Mayer-Rich (CUNY Graduate Center), and Sauda Muhammad (CUNY Graduate Center)
4. Statelessness, Protection Gaps, and Protracted Displacement: The Rohingya Refugee Crisis in Global Asylum Governance; Presenter: Ro Oji Ullah (Elevate Youth Global)

3:15 – 3:30 p.m. – Refreshment break

3:30 – 5:00 p.m. – Panel 4 — Communities, Activism, and Migrant Lifeworlds

Moderators: Prof. Els de Graauw (Baruch College-CUNY) and Prof. Jackie Vimo (Montclair State University)

1. Nail Chains: Supporting Nepali Salon Workers in New York; Presenter: Sondra Hausner (University of Oxford)
2. Solidarity and Support: Comparing LGBTQ+ Refugee/Asylum Seeker Support in Ottawa and New York; Presenter: Emily Regan Wills (University of Ottawa)
3. ‘Brighton Beach Pride Parade is Our Stonewall’: Post-Soviet Queer and Trans Refugee Activism in New York City; Presenter: Alexandra Novitskaya (University of Maryland)
4. Becoming Legible: Nonprofit Mediation and Muslim Asylum Claims; Presenter: Anika Kabani (University of Oxford)

Masooma Amin

Masooma Amin is a graduate student at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College, completing a Master of International Affairs degree. She has worked with the United Nations and the EU in Afghanistan.

Felicia Arriaga

Felicia Arriaga is assistant professor at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College. Her research focuses on race and ethnicity, immigration, and crimmigration—the intersection of criminal and immigration law. She is the author of Behind Crimmigration: ICE, Law Enforcement, and Resistance in America, which examines how federal immigration enforcement operates through local law enforcement in North Carolina. Her current work includes a related project in New York State and a collaborative study on New York City’s response to the recent ‘migrant crisis.’ A public sociologist, Arriaga aims for her scholarship and community engagement to inform debates on crimmigration policies, with particular attention to issues of accountability, transparency, reform, and abolition.

Sarah Bishop

Sarah C. Bishop is professor at Baruch College, is Amnesty International USA’s El Salvador Specialist, and serves as a country conditions expert witness on asylum cases from El Salvador. She is the author of the books A Story to Save Your Life: Communication and Culture in Migrants’ Search for Asylum (Columbia University Press, 2022), Undocumented Storytellers: Narrating the Immigrant Rights Movement (Oxford University Press, 2019), and US Media and Migration: Refugee Oral Histories (Routledge, 2016).

Hilary Botein

Hilary Botein is associate professor at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College, and her research examines the drivers of urban development, with a focus on the social politics shaping affordable housing and community development policies and programs. She is particularly interested in how housing initiatives serve—and sometimes fail—vulnerable populations. Before entering academia, she spent 18 years as an attorney and policy analyst working on affordable housing and economic justice issues, primarily in New York City. She holds a PhD from Columbia University’s Division of Urban Planning, a JD from Northeastern University School of Law, and a BA from Swarthmore College.

Els de Graauw

Els de Graauw is professor of political science, public policy, and international migration studies at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, where she also directs the MA program in international migration studies. Her research examines how governments and nonprofits advance immigrant integration and representation. She is the author of Making Immigrant Rights Real: Nonprofits and the Politics of Integration in San Francisco (Cornell University Press, 2016), co-author of Advancing Immigrant Rights in Houston (Temple University Press, 2024), and co-editor of Migrants, Minorities, and the Media: Information, Representations, and Participation in the Public Sphere (Routledge, 2017). Beyond academia, she regularly collaborates with community organizations and local governments in the United States and Europe to advance immigrant integration through local action. Els is a 2025–26 Faculty Fellow at the Howard J. Samuels State and City Local Policy Center.

Linda Essig

Linda Essig, MFA, PhD, was appointed Baruch College’s Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs on July 1, 2021. As provost, she is responsible for all teaching, learning, and research activities of the College. Motivated by a passion for both student and faculty success, she has launched or led initiatives such as a New Transfer Student Experience Program (launching in 2024), the annual Cross-College Faculty Research Symposium, and the initiation of the Office of Experiential and Community-Engaged Learning (ExCEL).  Prior to joining Baruch College, she was Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Cal State LA, Director of the School of Theatre and Film and Professor and Director of Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Programs in Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, and Professor and Chair of Theatre and Drama at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Daisy Flores

Daisy Flores is a staff assistant with the Westchester County Department of Health. She earned her Master of Public Administration degree from Baruch College in 2025. Her interests focus on supporting immigrant communities and examining how public policy impacts their well-being.

Masha Gindler

Masha Gindler is the Civil Justice Coordinator for New York City, within the Department of Social Services. She has previously served as the executive director of the NYC Asylum Application Help Center and in various roles in the Mayor’s Office, NYC Health + Hospitals, and beyond.

Edwin Grimsley

Edwin Grimsley is assistant professor at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College. His research uses quantitative methods to examine how immigration arrests, court processes, and deportation decisions affect racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Before academia, he worked as a Senior Case Analyst at the Innocence Project, helping investigate wrongful convictions that led to the exoneration of seven individuals. He also worked with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, where he investigated post-9/11 immigration arrests, detentions, and deportations in New York and New Jersey.

Sophie Gonick

Sophie Gonick is associate professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, where she teaches in the urban studies program. She is the author of Dispossession and Dissent: Immigrants and the Struggle for Housing in Madrid (Stanford, 2021). Her current research exams immigrant housing practices in NYC, with a focus on the informal and popular markets new arrivals inhabit in order to claim belonging and attain stability. She writes for both academic and public audiences about immigration, urbanism, and radical urban politics.

Heba Gowayed

Heba Gowayed is associate professor of sociology at CUNY Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center. Her work centers the lives of people who migrate across borders and the unequal and often violent institutions they face.

Noah Elias Habeeb

Noah Habeeb is the Director of the Ark at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST), which provides pro se legal assistance to immigrant New Yorkers. Noah has spent seven years growing the Ark at CBST and building capacity citywide. Noah has designed and led more than 400 in-person and remote pro se legal clinics to assist immigrant New Yorkers to apply for asylum, employment authorization, SIJS, and other forms of relief. Noah has contributed to statewide capacity building through I-ARC and as a founder of the NYC Pro Se Collaborative, which regularly convenes pro se clinics and has expanded the Ark’s model to other faith-based communities statewide. He has an MA in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning from Tufts UEP. He is a law student at CUNY Law and a DOJ fully accredited representative, one of roughly 200 non-attorneys nationwide permitted to represent immigrants before USCIS, EOIR, and the BIA.

Sondra Hausner

Sondra Hausner is professor of anthropology of religion at the University of Oxford. Her ethnographic work focuses on India, Nepal, and the Himalayas, and her theoretical work spans migration and diaspora experience; religion and religious life; and the past and present of nationalism and transnationalism. Sondra grew up in Nepal; with a background in public policy as well as sociocultural anthropology, she returned to Kathmandu in 2003 to work for non-governmental organizations on the issues of cross-border migration in the region. From 2009 to 2013, she co-ran a major research project on Nepali migration globally, and she is the co-editor of five volumes on the subject, including Global Nepalis: Religion, Culture, and Community in a New and Old Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2018). She lives in London.

Neil Hernandez

Neil Hernandez is a scholar-practitioner at Baruch’s Marxe School of International and Public Affairs whose research examines policy implementation, particularly how bureaucratic reorganization shapes policy outcomes. He develops the framework of “policy innovation through bureaucratic reorganization” and has published award-winning work in journals such as Journal of Policy History and Social Science History, recognized by the Society for History in the Federal Government. His current research analyzes asylum adjudication processes and institutional constraints within US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Drawing on extensive public service—including leadership of the New York City Department of Juvenile Justice and service as an asylum officer—he also contributes to the field through professional engagement with the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Anika Kabani

Anika Kabani is a DPhil candidate in social anthropology at the University of Oxford and Farhad Daftary Doctoral Scholar at the Institute of Ismaili Studies. She is also convener of Migration Oxford, a network that fosters dialogue and collaboration between students, researchers, and academics working on migration and mobility from across the University of Oxford. Anika holds an MSc in social anthropology from the University of Oxford, an MA in Islamic studies and humanities from SOAS, and BA degrees in anthropology and international studies from Washington University in St. Louis. Her doctoral research ethnographically explores the shaping of Muslim subjectivity through the US humanitarian immigration system, with a geographic focus on New York City. She has held visiting research scholar positions at New York University School of Law (2023-2024) and the City University of New York Graduate Center’s Center for Place, Culture, and Politics (2025-2026).

René Kreichauf

René Kreichauf is professor of urban studies and planning at the Department of Geography and a senior researcher and FWO fellow at the Brussels Institute for Social and Population Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. From January to December 2026, he is the John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at Harvard University.

Young Kwon

Young Kwon is currently the Deputy Director of Interagency Partnerships/Language Access at NYC’s Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, where she leads strategic initiatives to advance language access across 46+ City agencies. With experience spanning government and nonprofit sectors, she specializes in transforming complex challenges into community-centered, evidence-based solutions through stakeholder engagement and data-driven strategies. Young holds a Master of Social Work from Washington University in St. Louis and dual bachelor’s degrees in International peace studies and strategic communication from the University of Missouri. She is committed to advancing equity and access for immigrant communities.

Arun Peter Lobo

Arun Peter Lobo is the former Chief Demographer of New York City who also served as the Director of the Population Division of the New York City Department of City Planning. A demographer and sociologist, Lobo received his PhD from the University of Michigan. He is the lead author of The Newest New Yorker series and has published widely on the demographic effects of immigration, as well as on methodological issues pertaining to the use of survey data. He has served on the Commerce Secretary’s Census Advisory Committee and in 1999 he received the Hammer Award, established by Vice President Gore to reward excellence in government service, for his work on the American Community Survey. In 2009, he was a recipient of the Sloan Public Service Award from the Fund for the City of New York.

Camille J. Mackler

Camille Mackler is the founder and principal of The Other 54 Strategies, an immigration consulting practice. A licensed immigration attorney with more than twenty years at the bar, she has spent fifteen years working at the intersection of immigration legal services, crisis coordination, and policy design in New York City. She founded the Immigrant Advocates Response Collaborative in 2017 as a project of the New York Immigration Coalition and spun it out as an independent nonprofit in 2020, leading it for five years before departing to launch her consulting practice. Her direct experience spans successive immigration crises in New York, from the unaccompanied children arrivals of 2014 through the 2022 bus arrivals and the current federal enforcement landscape. She is a Truman National Security Fellow and Visiting Senior Fellow at the Truman Center for National Policy, where her work focuses on the relationship between federal policy and local immigration governance.

Nishanthini Mahendran

Nishanthini Mahendran is a research assistant at Baruch College, where she is pursuing a Master of Public Administration. Her work and academic interests focus on social policy, with particular emphasis on humanitarian protection, immigration, housing, and social justice. She is especially committed to advancing equitable access and protecting the rights of immigrant communities.

Ethan Mayer-Rich

Ethan Mayer-Rich is a doctoral student in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center studying how communities conceive of risk and habitability in refugee camps and the work to reduce environmental vulnerabilities within them.

Sauda Muhammad

Sauda Muhammad is a doctoral student in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center currently researching social epidemiology and health disparities in the African diaspora in urban centers.

Alexandra Novitskaya

Alexandra Novitskaya (women’s, gender, and sexuality studies PhD, Stony Brook University) is a visiting assistant professor of teaching in gender, women’s, and sexuality studies at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Indiana University and a research fellow at the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in DC. Her research interests are at the intersections of sexuality, geopolitics, migration, transnational feminist and LGBTQ activism, gender and militarism, and feminist ethnography. Her articles and book chapters have been published in Communist and Post-Communist Studies, NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, Post-Soviet Affairs, The Russian Review, Journal of Europe-Asia Studies, Sexuality & Culture, The Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia, and others.

Rahul Pathak

Rahul Pathak is assistant professor of public budgeting and financial management at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College and Director of the Howard J. Samuels State and City Policy Center. His research sits at the intersection of public finance and social policy, with a focus on strengthening subnational governments in both US and international contexts. His work has appeared in leading journals, including Public Administration Review and Regional Science and Urban Economics, and he serves as associate editor for Public Finance and Management. Pathak is president of the ASPA New York Metro Chapter and chair of the Northeastern Conference of Public Administration. He previously worked at Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School, the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, and the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, and holds a PhD in public policy from Georgia State University.

Dialika Sall

Dialika Sall is assistant professor of sociology at Lehman College-CUNY. Her research in the areas of immigration and race examines racialization processes through the lives of contemporary African migrants in the U.S. Her forthcoming book focuses on how second-generation West African youth negotiate racial and ethnic identities and boundaries. Additional projects center the experiences of African asylum-seekers and return migrants. Dr. Sall’s work has been supported by grants from the Fulbright Program, the Mellon Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation and the National Science Foundation and has been published in several peer-reviewed journals. Dialika earned her PhD in sociology from Columbia University and is originally from the Bronx, NY.

Joseph Salvo

Joseph Salvo is currently Chair of a 2030 Census National Working Group, whose purpose is to help ensure that the address list used for the next decennial census is accurate and complete for all areas of the nation. For more than three decades, Dr. Salvo served as Director of the Population Division at the New York City Department of City Planning, where he ushered the city through four decennial censuses, and most recently was a Fellow at the University of Virginia as part of a 2030 Census methods team. He has testified before Congress, been an advisor to the U.S. Census Bureau, served on multiple panels at the National Academy of Sciences, and worked as an expert in litigation related to the 2020 census. He has co-authored articles on settlement patterns of race/ethnic groups, census history and methods, and survey evaluation. He received MA and PhD degrees from Fordham University, is a recipient of the Sloan Public Service Award from the Fund for the City of New York, a recipient of the Population Association of America’s Public Service Award, and is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute.

Michael Samers

Michael Samers (DPhil, Oxford University) is professor in the department of geography at the University of Kentucky, having previously taught at the University of Liverpool and the University of Nottingham. He has published widely on migration and immigration over the last 30 years, and is the author and co-author (with Michael Collyer) of two editions of Migration (Routledge), co-editor with Felicitas Hillmann of Cities, Migration and Governance: Beyond Scales and Levels (Routledge), co-editor (with Jens Rydgren) of Migration and Nationalism (Edward Elgar), and he has been a Fulbright Scholar in France and editor of Geoforum.

Rob Smith

Robert Courtney Smith is professor of sociology, immigration studies, and public affairs at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Mexican New York: Transnational Worlds of New Immigrants (UC Press, 2006), which won ASA’s 2008 Distinguished Book Award, three ASA section awards, and a CUNY Presidential award, and Dreams Achieved and Denied: Mexican Intergenerational Mobility (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2024). His work has been supported by major grants and fellowships, including from the National Science Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. Through extensive public sociology, he has supported legalization and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals efforts, co-authored a Supreme Court amici brief defending DACA, and served as an expert witness in major civil rights and voting rights cases. In 2024, he received the American Sociological Association Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology.

Sam Solomon

Sam Solomon is executive director for Strategic Policy Initiatives at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. He has previously served as an attorney, policy analyst, and manager in a range of roles at the New York City Mayor’s Office and the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings. Sam also teaches health policy at Weill Cornell Medicine and has previously worked as a journalist.

Liza Steele

Liza Steele is a professor of sociology at the City University of New York (CUNY), John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a member of the doctoral faculty at The CUNY Graduate Center, and a faculty affiliate at the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research. Prof. Steele does research at the nexus of sociology and political science. Her research has been published in journals such as the Annual Review of Sociology, Social Forces, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, presented in six countries, and funded by the Russell Sage Foundation. Prof. Steele researches attitudes toward immigrants/refugees, ethnic diversity, income inequality, social mobility, and social welfare policies (“social policy preferences” or “preferences for redistribution”) in cross-national perspective, and she is a co-founder of the Social Policy Preferences Network. She is currently focused on two projects: (1) a three-wave conjoint survey experiment about Americans’ preferred immigrant and refugee characteristics before (2019), during (2021), and after (2024) the COVID-19 pandemic and, (2) a mixed-methods study of New Yorkers’ attitudes toward the migrant influx that began in 2022 (with Phil Kasinitz), funded by RSF.

Sarah Tosh

Sarah Tosh is assistant professor in the department of sociology, anthropology, and criminal justice at Rutgers University-Camden. Her research examines the punitive intersections between drug, crime, and immigration policy in the United States. Dr. Tosh’s book, The Immigration Law Death Penalty: Aggravated Felonies, Deportation, and Legal Resistance was published in 2023 by New York University Press. From 2021-2023, she was the co-PI of a National Science Foundation-funded study of “The Criminal Deportation Pipeline in New York City.” She received her PhD in sociology from the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Ro Oji Ullah

Ro Oji Ullah is a researcher and writer focusing on forced displacement, statelessness, and refugee protection, with particular attention to the Rohingya refugee crisis. Their work examines the intersections of asylum policy, international law, and humanitarian governance, emphasizing rights-based approaches and refugee participation in decision-making processes. Drawing on secondary research, policy analysis, and reports from international and humanitarian organizations, Ro Oji Ullah’s research contributes to broader debates on migration governance, human rights, and durable solutions for protracted refugee situations.

Jackie Vimo

Jackie Vimo is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University (MSU). Prior to MSU, Jackie worked for over two decades in public policy and community organizing, holding various positions, including Senior Policy Analyst at the National Immigration Law Center, Director of Advocacy at the New York Immigration Coalition, and Coordinator of Policy and Administration at Make the Road New York. Jackie’s primary areas of research are social movements and immigration policy, with a focus on state-level campaigns to expand rights for immigrants in the United States. Jackie has taught at the City College of New York, The New School, Hunter College, and the University of Kentucky. Jackie holds a PhD in Politics from the New School University, an MA in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in Political Science from Barnard College, Columbia University. Jackie is a 2025–26 Public Affairs Fellow at the Howard J. Samuels State and City Local Policy Center.

Emily Regan Wills

Emily Regan Wills is associate professor of American and comparative politics at the University of Ottawa, on unceded Algonquin territory in the capital of Canada. She researches migration, refugee and displaced communities, and social movements, and is the co-director of the Community Mobilization in Crisis project as well as one of the research leads on the ongoing project Hybrid Solidarities: Queer Community Building through the Refugee/Asylum Process. She is the author of Arab New York: Politics and Community in the Everyday Lives of Arab Americans.