Alumni

Zabdi Salazar

PhD Student, Jurisprudence & Social Policy

Zabdi is a second-year JSP student and is generally interested in immigration. She has conducted research on the experiences of central-American migrants in Texas and female Latin-American domestic workers in Spain. Her most recent paper is on the Evolution of the PSG Ground and Domestic Violence Asylum Claims. She aspires to become a law professor and contribute to the socio-legal literature on immigration.

Featured Works:

Salazar, Zabdi J. (2018) "Paradoxes of Gender Equality Policies and Domestic Working Conditions in Madrid," Claremont-UC Undergraduate Research Conference...

Avery Samai

BIMI Research Analyst

Avery Samai is a Research Analyst with the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI) and a student at UC Berkeley pursuing degrees in Political Science and Society and Environment. She is passionate about human rights, climate justice, and international policy. She is interested in studying the intersection between international affairs and the environment to promote peaceful and sustainable communities across the world.

Beyond BIMI, Avery is a volunteer college counselor for low-income, first-generation, East Bay high school seniors through...

Joel Sati

PhD/JD, University of California, Berkeley and Yale University

Currently, Sati is finishing his PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy after receiving his JD from Yale Law School, where he was the Symposium Editor for the Yale Journal for Law and the Humanities. Sati’s dissertation project, titled A Punishment of the Severest Kind: Deportations, Rights, and the Rise of a New Criminal Law, examines the intersection of criminal law and immigration law through a philosophical lens. He is a 2019 recipient of the Thomas I. Yamashita FOUNDATIONS FOR CHANGE Prize, an award given to a scholar-activist in California whose work bridges the gap between the...

Brendan A. Shanahan

Interdisciplinary Immigration Workshop member

Postdoctoral Associate; History; Yale University

I am a scholar of the 19th and 20th centuries, my research centering on the socio-legal development of American immigration and citizenship policy. My dissertation, "Making Modern American Citizenship: Citizens, Aliens, and Rights, 1865-1965," examines how political and economic "rights of citizenship" grew in number and breadth (such as voting, blue-collar public employment, and access to professional licenses) as they were increasingly denied to noncitizens. It explores how...

Soazic Elise Wang Sonne

World Bank Africa Fellow/ Fragility, Conflict and Violence Group

When I was a teenager, I remember how devastated I became when I saw a homeless Chadian family with little children, coming from the far north part of the country and begging for a shelter in a cold morning in Yaounde, Cameroon. My soul became very sorrowful and I started crying incessantly, not only because I was unable to undertake any effective action to help but mostly given that our 100 sq. meter house already full of 9 people was too small to accommodate another family. The GARE family was only one out of thousands who were forcibly displaced, fleeing the first and second Chadian...

Ishita Srivastava

Community Research Scholar

Ishita Srivastava is a Research, Practice, and Policy Scholar at the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), where she focuses on health inequities and expanding medical access for marginalized communities. As an Indian immigrant and a graduate of UC Berkeley with a degree in Molecular and Cell Biology, she brings a unique perspective to the intersection of research, policy, and community advocacy.

Her research explores systemic barriers to care, particularly for rural and underserved populations. She has published work on innovative solutions for reducing health...

Jonanne Talebloo

Community Research Scholar

Jonanne Talebloo is a Research, Practice, and Policy Scholar at the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), where she explores the intersection of healthcare access, policy, and immigrant health outcomes. As an Iranian American with a degree in Molecular and Cell Biology from UC Berkeley, she combines her research background with a deep commitment to addressing health disparities affecting immigrant and refugee communities.

Her research focuses on social determinants of health and healthcare inequities, with...

Luis Tenorio

Interdisciplinary Immigration Workshop member

Mr. Tenorio's research interests broadly include: children/youth, social policy, immigration, and economic sociology. Currently, Mr. Tenorio is working on a study of unaccompanied migrant minors from Central America in the United States.

Isabel García Valdivia

Ph.D Candidate, Sociology

Based on a mixed-method approach, my dissertation explores the effects of legal status for Mexican older adult immigrants in the U.S. and return migrants to Mexico. In particular, this research focuses on the factors that facilitate or hinder how older adult immigrants access economic, family, medical and psychological support and the strategies they deploy as they age. I investigate how these differ across countries and by legal status.

Pauline White Meeusen

PhD Student, Jurisprudence & Social Policy

I am a socio-legal scholar of U.S. immigration law and policy, law and social movements, and the legal profession. I study how legal actors understand their direct legal services work with asylum seekers and how legal ethics shapes lawyering in legally liminal spaces like the U.S.-Mexico border and inside detention centers. I am also interested in how newly arriving asylum seekers understand and draw upon law, whether U.S. law, the laws of their country of origin, or the laws of counties through which they have traversed, in asserting rights against the state. Another strand of my...