The Immigration Initiative at Harvard serves as a place of convening for scholars, students, policy makers, community leaders, and practitioners working on topics related to understanding and serving this population.
Director
Carola Suárez-Orozco
Director
Professor in Residence, Harvard Graduate School of Education
carola_suarezorozco@gse.harvard.edu Profile
Director
Professor in Residence, Harvard Graduate School of Education
carola_suarezorozco@gse.harvard.edu Profile
Carola Suárez-Orozco is a Professor in Residence at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Director of the Immigration Initiative at Harvard. She is also the co-founder of Re-Imagining Migration.
Throughout her 30-year research career, Suárez-Orozco has sought to understand how first- and second-generation children and youth experience immigration, how they are changed by this experience, and the role schools play as a crucial point of contact between immigrant families and the new society. She was elected to the National Academy of Education in 2016 and served as chair of the American Psychological Association Presidential Task Force on Immigration from 2010 to 2012. She is author and editor of many books on the immigrant experience in the United States, including Immigrant-Origin Students in Community College: Navigating Risk and Reward in Higher Education, Transitions: The Development of the Children of Immigrants, and Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society. She has been director of the Immigration Initiative at Harvard since 2022.
Using mixed-methodological strategies, her work focuses on elucidating the child, adolescent, and young adult experience of immigration—how is their development shaped by immigration and how are they changed by the process? She has studied a wide variety of processes including identity formation, family separations, civic engagement, and the unauthorized experience. A focus on school settings has been an essential and enduring theme in her basic research agenda as schools are a first contact point between the immigrant children, their families, and the new society.
Her books include: Children of Immigration (Harvard University Press), Learning a New Land (Harvard University Press), Transitions: The Development of the Children of Immigrants (New York University Press), Education: Our Global Compact in a Time of Crisis (Columbia University Press), as well as Immigrant-Origin Students in Community College (Teachers’ College Press) among others.
She was awarded the 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship to work on a book documenting the needs of immigrant students in America and what educators can do to better serve them. Of the 188 new Guggenheim fellows representing 52 fields, Suárez-Orozco is the only one representing the field of education. She has also been awarded an American Psychological Association (APA) Presidential Citation for her contributions to the understanding of cultural psychology of immigration, has served as Chair of the APA Presidential Task Force on Immigration, and is a member of the National Academy of Education.
IIH Team
Executive Board
Advisory Board
