Challenging Common Misperceptions

Ernesto Castañeda

PhD/MPhil/MA Columbia'10, BA UC Berkeley'02
Professor, Director, Center for Latin American and Latino Studies
American University

Carina Cione

At Busboys & Poets, 450K St 

Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes. They are eager to learn local languages. Immigration is not a burden on social services. Border walls do not work. There is no unmanageable refugee crisis. Yet many such misinformed assumptions and harmful misconceptions pervade conversations about immigration.

This is a timely, practical, and evidence-based discussion on immigrants and immigration. Castañeda and Cione debunk frequently encountered claims and answer common questions. Invoking the latest findings and decades of interdisciplinary research and considering a wide range of places, ethnic groups, and historical eras, Castañeda and Cione provide the key data and context to understand how immigration affects economies, crime rates, and social welfare systems, and shed light on contentious issues such as the safety of the U.S.-Mexico border and the consequences of Brexit. This conversation aims to be a guide for those who want to counter false claims about immigration and are interested in what the research shows.

Time will be allocated for Q&A.

Co-sponsored by Yale, and MIT Clubs of Washington DC

"Castañeda and Cione have produced a powerfully-written and persuasive statement against several of the most common stereotypes about contemporary immigration. It is a particularly timely book given the wave of nativism and anti-immigrant rhetoric now sweeping the political scene of America and other developed nations." Alejandro Portes, Princeton University

Ernesto Castañeda is the Founding Director of the Immigration Lab, and Director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies and Full Professor at American University in Washington, DC. He received his BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of California Berkeley and his MA, MPhil, and PhD from Columbia University. He is the author of Building Walls: Excluding Latin People in the United States (Lexington Books 2019), A Place to Call Home: Immigrant Belonging and Exclusion in New York, Paris, and Barcelona (Stanford University Press 2018); Social Movements 1768–2018 with Charles Tilly and Lesley Wood (Routledge 2020), Reunited: Family Separation and Central American Youth Migration (Russell Sage Foundation 2024), and Immigration Realities: Challenging Common Misperceptions with Carina Cione (Forthcoming with Columbia University Press). He has written for The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Hill, CityLab, NPR and is a frequent guest on Telemundo, Univision, NTN24, RTVE24, and France24.

Carina Cione is a sociologist and writer based out of Baltimore, MD. Their work has been featured by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Trauma Care, El Paso News, and American University’s Center for Latin American & Latino Studies Working Paper Series.
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