Prof. James Witte on Immigration Disinformation

Misinformation and disinformation about immigration in the U.S. is ubiquitous. For Prof. James Witte, director of the Institute for Immigration Research, getting the facts about U.S. immigration out to the public is a challenge. The Institute for Immigration Research is a joint venture between George Mason University and The Immigrant Learning Center of Malden, Massachusetts, the co-producer of this podcast. One of the goals of the Institute’s work is to position the immigration data, research and stories within a framework of inclusiveness, so Americans will understand that they are not disconnected from immigration. Rather, we all, U.S.-born and foreign-born, help fuel this country’s economy, enrich its culture, and make it the powerhouse that it is. Prof. Witte also helps explain the resistance to immigrants and facts about them, and how we can counter that, in this week’s JobMakers.

James Witte is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Director of the Institute for Immigration Research (IIR). Witte, who earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1991, has been a professor at Clemson University and Northwestern University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Carolina Population Center and a lecturer in sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Witte has written numerous articles that have appeared in journals such as The European Sociological Review, Population and Development Review and Sociological Methods and Research. He has also published three books, Labor Force Integration and Marital Choice, the Internet and Social Inequality and The Normal Bar. The Normal Bar, co-authored with Chrisanna Northrup and Pepper Schwartz, was released in 2013 and made the New York Times bestseller list. Dr. Witte came to Mason in the fall of 2009 to take over leadership of CSSR. Since then CSSR has grown in the amount and range of funded research it conducts. Major projects have included the privately funded Institute for Immigration Research, the National Science Foundation funded Digital Archive Project, and the University Partnership with the University of Karachi funded by the U.S. State Department.