James Hollifield

RAFDI Working Group Co-chair; Global Fellow

January 1, 2017 – December 31, 2025

Professional Affiliation

Professor of Political Science and Director, Tower Center SMU

Expert Bio

James Hollifield is Professor of Political Science, Ora Nixon Arnold Chair in International Political Economy, and Director of the Tower Center at Southern Methodist University. He is a Wilson Center Global Fellow. He received his PhD in political science from Duke University in 1985. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he has worked as a consultant for a variety of governmental and intergovernmental organizations, and he has published widely on international political and economic issues, including Immigrants, Markets and States (Harvard UP), Migration Theory (Routledge), and Controlling Immigration (Stanford UP). His current projects include The Emerging Migration State—a study of how states manage international migration for strategic gains—and International Political Economy: History, Theory and Policy (Cambridge UP).

Wilson Center Project

"The Emerging Migration State"

Project Summary

Alongside trade and investment, migration is a defining feature of the global economy, and states struggle to regulate migration and mobility. In THE EMERGING MIGRATION STATE, Hollifield argues that people move across borders for many reasons--economic, social and political--but rights are the key to migration governance, as modern states strive to fulfill three key functions: maintaining security, promoting trade and investment, and regulating migration. International migration and mobility raise a host of security concerns for states in the global north and the south. The garrison state was linked with the trading state in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen the emergence of the migration state, where managing migration is as important as providing for national security and economic well-being.