Els de Graauw

Els de Graauw (she/her) is Professor of Political Science, Public Policy, and International Migration Studies at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is also an affiliate faculty in Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College and directs the International Migration Studies MA Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research examines immigration, civil society organizations, urban politics, government bureaucracies, public policy, and qualitative research methods, with a particular focus on how governmental and nongovernmental organizations build institutional capacity for immigrant integration and representation.

Her award-winning book, Making Immigrant Rights Real: Nonprofits and the Politics of Integration in San Francisco (Cornell University Press, 2016), examines how nonprofit organizations advocate for immigrant integration in San Francisco, focusing on language access, labor rights, and municipal ID cards. She is also 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).

Els is working on her fourth book, Governing Belonging: How Cities Integrate Immigrants, which examines the development, institutionalization, and impact of the growing number of city and state immigrant affairs offices in the United States. With Shannon Gleeson (Cornell University), she is conducting an NSF-funded study on the implementation of the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in the San Francisco Bay Area, Greater Houston, and the New York City metro area. She is also co-editing the Handbook on Migration and Cities.

Her research has been published in UC Law Journal, Law & Policy, Social Problems, Territory, Politics, Governance, Critical Sociology, Antipode, Urban Geography, Migration Studies, New Labor Forum, Journal on Migration and Human Security, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, WorkingUSA, Politics & Society, American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Political Science, Daedalus, Hérodote, and numerous edited volumes. She has also authored policy reports and contributed to popular outlets, including the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Beyond academia, she frequently gives talks and collaborates with community organizations and local governments in the United States and Europe to advance immigrant integration through local action.

Her work has received support from the International Migration Studies MA Program at the CUNY Graduate Center; the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research; the National Science Foundation; the Professional Staff Congress at CUNY; the Advanced Research Collaborative at the CUNY Graduate Center; the Howard J. Samuels State and City Policy Center; the Eugene M. Lang Foundation; the Netherland-America Foundation; the National Center for Border Security and Immigration (BORDERS); the Centre for Urban Studies at the University of Amsterdam; the Hauser Institute for Civil Society at Harvard University; the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University; and the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues at UC Berkeley.

Els earned her PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. She has held research appointments at Harvard University, Cornell University, the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and the European University Institute. In 2012, she co-founded the Section on Migration and Citizenship of the American Political Science Association, serving as its elected co-president and secretary from 2012 to 2016. She has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2014–2024) and Urban Affairs Review (2016–2023) and currently sits on the International Advisory Council of Metropolis International.

She regularly teaches courses on immigration and social movements, and she welcomes inquiries from students interested in Political Science or Public Affairs Honors theses (POL 6001-2H and PAF 6001-2H), MA capstone projects in International Migration Studies or Political Science, as well as PhD dissertations in Political Science.

For more information, including her publications, please see her website: https://elsdegraauw.weebly.com. You can also follow Els on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/edegraauw.bsky.social.