Advisory Board

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  Algernon Austin

  Algernon Austin is the Director for Race and Economic Justice at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Algernon Austin has conducted research and writing on issues of race and racial inequality for over 20 years. His primary focus has been on the intersection of race and the economy. Austin was the first Director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy where he focused on the labor market condition of America’s workers of color. He has also done work on racial wealth inequality for the Center for Global Policy Solutions and for the Dēmos think tank. At the Thurgood Marshall Institute, the think tank of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., he worked on issues related to race, the economy, and civil rights. Austin has a Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University, and he taught sociology as a faculty member at Wesleyan University. He has discussed racial inequality on PBS, CNN, NPR, and other national television and radio networks. His most recent book is America Is Not Post-Racial: Xenophobia, Islamophobia, Racism, and the 44thPresident.

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  Hamutal Bernstein

  Hamutal Bernstein is a principal research associate at the Urban Institute, where she leads Urban’s program on immigrants and immigration. Her research focuses on the well-being and integration of immigrant and refugee families and workers. Her areas of expertise include immigration and integration, workforce development and training, and human services. She is a mixed-methods researcher, with experience in policy analysis, program monitoring and evaluation, technical assistance, design of qualitative and survey data collection, and qualitative and quantitative data analysis.

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  Tanya Broder

  Tanya Broder is senior attorney at the National Immigration Law Center. She specializes in the laws and policies affecting access to health care, public benefits, education and driver’s licenses for low-income immigrants across the United States.

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  Muzaffar Chishti

  Muzaffar Chishti is a Senior Fellow at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and Director of MPI’s office at the New York University School of Law. Prior to that he was Director of the Immigration Project at UNITE. Chishti has written, testified, and worked extensively on immigration issues.

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  Daniel Costa

  Daniel Costa is director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute. His areas of research include a wide range of labor migration issues, including governance of temporary labor migration programs, migration for both professional occupations and lower-wage jobs, worksite enforcement, and immigrant workers’ rights, as well as farm labor, global multilateral processes related to migration, and refugee and asylum issues.

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  Gregory DeFreitas

  Dr. Gregory DeFreitas is the Augustus Weller Professor of Economics at Hofstra University. Dr. DeFreitas is the Director of the Center for the Study of Labor and Democracy and edits its journal, Regional Labor Review. The RLR has since 1998 been the premier source of independent research on major employment issues in the New York Metropolitan Area. He is also the founder and former Director of the Labor Studies Degree Program at Hofstra. Before joining Hofstra’s faculty, he taught at Barnard College, Columbia University, the University of Toronto, and Cambridge University. He was educated at Stanford, Cambridge, and Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in Economics. Dr. DeFreitas has written widely on recent U.S. job and pay trends, the economics of immigration, earnings inequality, youth unemployment and the New York City economy. And he has testified on these issues before Congressional committees and the New York City Council. His books include Young Workers in the Global Economy: Job Challenges in North America, Europe and Japan (Edward Elgar Pubs.) and Inequality At Work: Hispanics in the US Labor Force (Oxford University Press).

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  Nancy Foner

  Nancy Foner is distinguished professor of sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is author of many books on immigration, including From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration, In a New Land: A Comparative View of Immigration, and, most recently, One Quarter of the Nation: Immigration and the Transformation of America.

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  Shelby Gonzales

  Shelby Gonzales is the Vice President for Immigration Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. She focuses primarily on leading the CBPP’s work related to access to public benefit and other supports for immigrants and their families. Gonzales also provides strategic direction related to implementation of effective outreach and program simplification strategies to promote enrollment and retention in benefit programs.

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  Leighton Ku

  Leighton Ku is a professor of health policy at George Washington University and is director of the Center for Health Policy Research. Ku has conducted research about immigrant health, health and Medicaid reform, health economics and related health policy topics.

   

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  Renato Rocha

  Renato Rocha is senior policy advisor at the U.S. Department of Labor. He was previously associate policy director for the Safety Net portfolio at Code for America, and senior policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy.

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  Jo-Ann Yoo

  Jo-Ann Yoo is executive director of the Asian American Federation.  Her professional experiences have been in the fields of community development and immigrant rights.