Join Us!

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The Immigration Lab conducts research on all things migration including: immigration (settling in), emigration (leaving), transnationalism, integration, inequality, health disparities, demographics, social mobility, racism and exclusion, refugees and asylum seekers, social movements and contentious politics, the impact of immigration policies, and climate migration. 

With students, faculty, and fellows, we facilitate interview projects, support student research, and publish our findings. We are currently accepting volunteers and unpaid interns to support our work for the Summer (May 19th - August 1st) and Fall 2025 (August 25th - December 1st) semesters.

• Volunteers: required to work 5-10 hrs/week and will receive training to conduct specific tasks such as translating/transcribing, event planning, etc.

• Interns: required to work 10-20 hrs/week to receive proper training, develop research and data analysis skills, and effectively represent the lab in professional settings.

During the summer, interns and volunteers have the option to work remotely or in a hybrid format. In the fall, interns and volunteers are required to work in a hybrid format.

The lab’s primary project is Immigration to the DMV and NYC, which looks at the experiences of migrants coming to the DMV and NYC region from various countries in Latin America, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Russia, and more. We have collected over 200 interviews since Fall 2022. Currently, members are focusing on transcribing, translating, and analyzing the anonymized interviews according to their research interests. We also have sub-interview projects focusing on specific countries/themes set up by existing members.

Most interviews are done in English, and some in Spanish. We have Spanish, Russian, and Amharic versions of the survey instrument, and we are working on a Romanian translation. The lab needs help with transcribing interviews and pulling interesting information out of the data to turn into blog posts, articles, working papers, etc. Folks are encouraged to analyze interviews based on their research interests or to point out surprising information found in the data. We also encourage lab members to write for our blog on topics of their choosing. We will provide the training to do so, and thus you will gain hands-on experience on the social science research process around immigration patterns and immigration policy analysis in the U.S. and beyond.

General Application Deadlines:

• Summer 2025: June 1st (prefential consideration by May 15)
• Fall 2025: August 15th