Roger Waldinger is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UCLA. He has worked on international migration throughout his career, writing on a broad set of topics, including immigrant entrepreneurship, labor markets, assimilation, the second generation, high-skilled immigration, immigration policy, and public opinion. The author of six books, most recently, How the Other Half Works: Immigration and the Social Organization of Labor (University of California Press, 2003), Waldinger is a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow; his research has been supported by grants from the Ford, Haines, Mellon, National Science, Sloan and Russell Sage Foundations.

Waldinger is now writing a new book, tentatively entitled Foreign Detachment: America’s Immigrants and Their Homeland Connections, explaining how the American experience at once facilitates, competes with, and structures immigrants’ involvements with the countries from which they come. Foreign Detachment builds on a series of recent papers and publications, including: “Beyond Transnationalism: An Alternative Perspective on Immigrants’ Homeland Connections,” in Mark Rosenblum and Daniel Tichenor, eds. Oxford Handbook of International Relations, forthcoming; “Making the connection: Latino immigrants and their cross-border ties,” (with Thomas Soehl), Ethnic and Racial Studies, V 33, 9 (2010); “Rethinking Transnationalism,” Empiria: Revista de Metología en Ciencias Sociales, No. 19 (2010): 21-38; “Between “here” and “there”: Immigrant cross-border activities and loyalties,” International Migration Review, Vol. 42 No. 1 Spring 2008; “Immigrant ‘Transnationalism’ and the Presence of the Past,” in Elliott Barkan, et. al., eds. Borders, Boundaries, And Bonds: America And Its Immigrants In Eras Of Globalization, New York: New York University Press, 2008: 267-285; “Conflict and Contestation in the Cross-Border Community: Hometown Associations Re-assessed,” (co-authored with Eric Popkin and Hector Aquiles Magana), Ethnic and Racial Studies,  V 31 (January): 1-28, 2007; and “Transnationalism in Question,” (with David Fitzgerald) American Journal of Sociology, V 109, 5 (2004): 1177-95. 

Waldinger is currently Interim Associate Vice-Provost for International Studies. He previously served as Chair of the Department of Sociology from 1999-2004 and directed the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, UCLA School of Public Affairs from 1995-1998. He is a regular instructor in the year-long graduate, sociology seminar on international migration in comparative perspective. He has taught all three quarters: the first, on theory, history, and policy; the second, on economic and social incorporation; the third, a research seminar. He is also co-organizer of the “Migration Study Group,” a year-long speaker series featuring interdisciplinary talks on international migration.