Jacqueline Maria Hagan

Born in Chile to parents of different nationalities, and as the daughter of a career diplomat, I developed early on a personal and intellectual interest in the topic of international migration. After receiving my Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990, I moved to the University of Houston, where I co-directed the Center for Immigration Research from 1995-2005.  In 2005, I joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Most of my research focuses on the social, economic and political implications of migration from Latin America to the United States. I have conducted fieldwork in established migrant receiving communities in Texas and new destination communities in North Carolina and their sending counterparts in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

My first book, Deciding to be Legal (Temple University Press, 1994) investigated the settlement and development of a Maya community in Houston and its response to immigration reform, namely the Immigration, Reform and Control act of 1986.  My second book, Migration Miracle (Harvard University Press, 2008) traced the institutional and personal role of religion and spirituality in the migration journey from Central America to the United States. I am ongoing collaborator (with Nestor Rodriguez and Karl Eschbach) on the study of deaths of undocumented migrants during their journey to the United States. I have written extensively on the effects of recent U.S. immigration reform initiatives on the rights and opportunities of immigrants and their families in the United States and co-directed a project on treatment and detention of persons deported from the United States.  My most recent research, which will be the basis of my book project at the Wilson Center, examines the ways in which migrants with low levels of education acquire and transfer on-the-job technical and cultural skills across borders to navigate pathways to economic mobility.  I am also in the early stages of drafting a comparative research proposal that would expand my research on religion and migration to the Africa-EU migratory system. The proposed research project will examine and compare the ways in which inter-religious and religious-secular communities mediate migrant and refugee flows from Africa to the European Union and from Latin America to the United States.

Education

B.A., Sociology, George Washington University; M.A., Sociology, The University of Texas at Austin; Ph.D., Sociology, The University of Texas at Austin