I study how immigrants become incorporated into political communities and the consequences of migration on politics and understandings of membership. My research stands at the intersection of migration studies and political sociology, with a strong interdisciplinary (and international) scope. I recently joined CMS and the faculty of UBC as the inaugural President’s Excellence Chair in Global Migration, with a joint appointment in Political Science and Sociology. Prior to coming to UBC, I held the 1951 Chair in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley where I also directed the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. I was trained in the United States (PhD at Harvard) and Canada (MA & BA at McGill), and I have held visiting appointments at the Trinity College (Ireland) and the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands).

I study the political and civic incorporation of immigrants into Western liberal democracies and the consequences of migrants’ presence for politics and receiving countries’ sense of national belonging. My scholarship is deeply interdisciplinary, straddling sociology and political science. A core question animating my research asks how migrants gain voice in the political systems where they live. One stream of this research investigates the acquisition of formal citizenship, as well as the experiential and conceptual contours of citizenship as membership. Other research examines the opportunities and limits of community-based organizations for advancing political voice and providing immigrant services; the content and transformation of national identities, including multiculturalism; immigrants’ engagement in electoral and protest politics; and how non-immigrants’ attitudes about migration and immigrants shift depending on whether we talk about human rights, citizenship, family unity, or appeals to national values.

Some recent publications:

Voss, K., Lauterwasser, S., & Bloemraad, I. 2024. “Inactive and quiescent? Immigrant Collective Action in Comparative Perspective, 1960-1995.” Socius 10.

Bloemraad, I., Harell, A., & Fraser, N. 2024. “Categorical Inequalities and Canadian Attitudes Toward Positive and Negative Rights.” Canadian Journal of Political Science.

Roubenoff, E., Slootjes, J., Bloemraad, I. 2023. “Spatial and Sociodemographic Vulnerability: Quantifying Accessibility to Health Care and Legal Services for Immigrants in California, Arizona, and Nevada.” Socius 9.

Song, S., Bloemraad, I. 2022. “Immigrant Legalization: A dilemma between justice and the rule of law.” Migration Studies 10(3): 484-509. (Also includes rejoinders from colleagues, and our response to critics.)

Bloemraad, I., Chaudhary, A.R., & Gleeson, S. 2022. “Immigrant Organizations.” Annual Review of Sociology 48: 319-341.

Ren, C., Bloemraad, I. 2022. “New Methods and the Study of Vulnerable Groups: Using Machine Learning to Identify Immigrant-Oriented Nonprofit Organizations.” Socius 8.

Bloemraad, I. 2022. “Claiming membership: boundaries, positionality, US citizenship, and what it means to be American.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 45(6): 1011-1033.

Bloemraad, I., Menjívar, C. 2022. “Precarious Times, Professional Tensions: The Ethics of Migration Research and the Drive for Scientific Accountability.” International Migration Review 56(1): 4-32.