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Sociology's Veronica Montes on the Changing Demographics of Border Immigrants

February 2, 2024
Veronica Montes
Associate Professor of Sociology Veronica Montes

In a piece for the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI),  Associate Professor of Sociology Veronica Montes looks at the changing demographics of immigrants seeking to enter the United States at the the Mexico border.


From the article:

"Four decades ago, immigrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border came mainly from Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Today, the Migration Policy Institute reports apprehensions of people from more numerous and varied points of origin. Migrants leave regions including Central and South America (mainly Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador); the Caribbean (Haiti and Cuba, predominantly); Africa (Senegal and Ghana among other countries); Asia (China, Bangladesh and Nepal, among other countries); the Middle East (Afghanistan and Syria); and Europe (Ukraine). In 2017, during ethnographic fieldwork I undertook at one migrant shelter in Tijuana, personnel indicated that according to their records, they had sheltered immigrants from 45 different countries from all continents."


 

Read the full article on the PRRI website.

Montes is currently a PRRI Public Fellow and was recently a residential fellow at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California San Diego, where she continued her research on the activist nature of transnational motherhood by looking at family separation due to the U.S. deportation regime and the collective mobilization of deported mothers in Tijuana, Mexico.

In addition to her appointment in the Sociology Department, Montes is also the co-director of Latin American, Iberian, and Latina/o Studies at Bryn Mawr.

Sociology

Latin American, Iberian, and Latina/o Studies