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Since 2002 he has carried out one of the most comprehensive studies of undocumented immigrants in the United States. His book, Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America (University of California Press), is based on an in-depth study that followed 150 undocumented young adults in Los Angeles for twelve years. To date, Lives in Limbo has won five major book awards, including the Society for the Study of Social Problems C. Wright Mills Award, the American Education Research Association Outstanding Book Award, and the Law and Society Association Herbert Jacob Book Award. It has also been adopted by several universities as a common read and is being used by a couple dozen K-12 schools in teacher and staff training. In addition, Professor Gonzales’ National UnDACAmented Research Project has surveyed nearly 2,700 undocumented young adults and has carried out 500 in-depth interviews on their experiences following President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. This fall, he is teaming up with several colleagues to investigate educator responses to school climate issues stemming from immigration policies.

His work has been has been featured in top journals, including the American Sociological Review, Current Anthropology, and the Harvard Educational Review as well as in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, TIME magazine, U.S. News & World Report, and Chronicle of Higher Education.

Gonzales is an associate editor for the journal Social Problems and a research affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also participates in a transition to adulthood research network. Prior to his faculty position at Harvard, Gonzales held faculty positions at the University of Chicago and at the University of Washington. He received his B.A. from the Colorado College, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California Irvine. His research is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the WT Grant Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the Heising-Simons Foundation, and the James Irvine Foundation.

A keen advocate of collaborative working, Jennifer recently co-authored a book, Policing Humanitarianism: EU Anti-Smuggling Policies and their Impact on Civil Society (Hart, 2019) which explores the nexus between the anti-smuggling policies of the European Union’s Home Affairs agencies and its Member States, and the policing and criminalization of humanitarian assistance to migrants and refugees. It reports on extensive fieldwork which she conducted in Hungary and Serbia, Italy, Greece, the UK and France between 2015 and 2018 at the height of the so-called European ‘refugee crisis’. Her forthcoming book, Youth Migration and the Politics of Wellbeing (Bristol University Press, 2020) is co-authored with Dr Elaine Chase. It is the product of a cutting-edge four-year participatory research project, Becoming Adult, which examined the wellbeing trajectories of over 100 unaccompanied young migrants and refugees in Europe. Jennifer is also working on a monograph, Men, Power and Borders, which will bring together a decade of research on the gendered nature of migration as a lived experience, in addition to exploring borders as sites of policing and control where gender identities are performed and contested. 

Jennifer previously worked as a research fellow with the London International Development Centre Migration Leadership Team (LIDC-MLT) where she co-developed a participatory strategy for global migration research for the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social, and Arts and Humanities Research Councils. As part of this work, Jennifer co-convened migration conversations with a range of stakeholders in 12 locations around the world including in Delhi, Nairobi, Medellin, London, New York, Thessaloniki, Barcelona, Brussels, Beirut and Johannesburg. Jennifer has previously worked for the United Nations; as a strategist with a range of non-for-profits; as a researcher at the Universities of Oxford, Exeter, Birmingham, Queen Mary and the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London); and as a consultant with the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS). For six years, she worked as a commissioning editor for the human rights and social justice platform openDemocracy 50.50 where she reported on questions of gender equality, social justice and migration from around the world. 

Jennifer holds a PhD in Comparative Social Policy from the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford, and an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the Department of International Development, also at the University of Oxford.