Speakers

Ana Avendaño is director of immigration and community action and assistant to the president at the AFL-CIO. In that capacity, she oversees efforts to broaden the labor movement through innovative labor-community partnerships and by connecting to Latino and immigrant communities. She also advises national and local union leaders on domestic and international immigration policy and other matters that impact immigrant workers. Before joining the AFL-CIO, Avendaño served as assistant general counsel to the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, where she was actively involved in the development of the labor movement’s historic call for legalization and immigration reform. She is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and the University of California at Berkeley.

David Burnham, a writer, investigative reporter and researcher, is the co-founder and co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) and an associate research professor at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications. Early in his career, Burnham worked as a reporter for UPI, Newsweek, CBS and other organizations. From 1968 to 1986, he was an investigative reporter with The New York Times in New York and Washington. He has written three books and numerous magazine articles. His professional honors include the George Polk Award for Community Service; an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship; IRE’s Best Investigative Book Award; and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in Bellagio, Italy. In 2003, Burnham was awarded an honorary doctorate degree in Humane Letters from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In 2006, he was inducted into the National Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame.

Ronald Campbell is a reporter for The Orange County Register. He started the paper’s program in computer-assisted reporting and has investigated a wide range of topics including the trade in human body parts; the dominant role of immigrants in the California economy; abusive charitable fundraising tactics; and fraudulent stock sale practices. Before joining The Register, he worked for the Daily Republic in Fairfield, Calif., and The Bakersfield Californian.

Raymond Cobos is the sheriff in Luna County, New Mexico, a post he has held since he was elected in 2006. A graduate of Western New Mexico University, he served in the U.S. Army from 1969-1971 and was stationed with the Signal Corps 52nd Signal Battalion MACV in Vietnam. He worked in the Luna County Sheriff’s Department from 1971-1986, beginning as a border deputy and later promoted to captain. From 1988-1994, he worked with the Fort Ord Federal Police in Fort Ord, Calif. He then rejoined the Luna County Sheriff’s Department as a detention administrator and went on to become undersheriff from 2000-2006. Cobos has volunteered as a GED literacy program tutor and is treasurer of The Healing House board of directors. The agency provides support for victims of domestic violence.

Anh Do covers multicultural communities at the Los Angeles Times. A second-generation journalist, she served as vice president of Nguoi Viet Daily News, the largest Vietnamese-language publication in the United States, founded by her late father. Do attended USC, majoring in journalism and English literature. She worked at The Dallas Morning News and The Seattle Times before writing for The Orange County Register, including a column on Asian affairs. Her reporting has taken her to England, Guatemala, Peru, Vietnam, India, Cuba and Mexico. Her work has been honored by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and the Asian American Journalists Association. Do also has won the Dart Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma and the Freedom Newspapers’ Sweepstakes Award. At USC, she has taught news writing, with a stint as managing editor of Spot.Us, an online community-powered reporting project funded by the Knight Foundation in partnership with the Annenberg School of Journalism.

Stefanie Friedhoff is assistant director for programming and special projects at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and a co-organizer of this workshop. She was previously a freelance journalist and science writer for U.S. and European media. Before moving to Cambridge in 1998 to start a freelance career, she worked for BZ, Berlin’s largest daily newspaper, where she was news editor and editor of the Sunday magazine. She was a 2001 Nieman Fellow.

Christopher Gaddis is the chief human resources officer at JBS USA Holdings, Inc., the largest animal protein processor in the world with 140 production facilities around the globe. The company is owned by JBS SA, a Brazilian multinational. JBS USA Holdings employs more than 85,000 people in North America and Australia, and is based in Greeley, Colorado. Gaddis received his J.D. from the University of Colorado School of Law, and completed his undergraduate education at the University of Colorado Boulder. He previously served as general counsel for JBS USA Holdings, Inc. for nearly four years.

Judith K. Gans manages the Immigration Policy Program at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona. Her areas of expertise include immigration and globalization, U.S. immigration policy, economics and trade. Her work focuses on providing conceptual frameworks for understanding the complexities of U.S. immigration policy rather than advocating a particular policy point of view. She has written extensively on immigration including the reports “Immigrants in Arizona: Fiscal and Economic Impacts” and a “Primer on U.S. Immigration in a Global Economy.” Her work can be accessed on the Udall Center website. Gans has a B.A. degree in economics from Stanford University, an MBA from UCLA’s Graduate School of Management, and a master’s in public administration from Harvard University. She was raised in Mexico and Brazil and is fluent in Portuguese.

Marilyn Geewax is a senior editor at NPR. She assigns and edits radio business stories, serves as the national economics correspondent for the NPR website and regularly discusses economic issues on the NPR shows “Tell Me More” and “Here & Now.” She contributed to NPR’s “The Foreclosure Nightmare” series, which won the 2011 Edward R. Murrow Award for hard news, and worked on the foreclosure-crisis coverage that won a 2009 Heywood Broun Award. Geewax previously served as the national economics correspondent for Cox Newspapers’ Washington bureau. She also worked at Cox’s flagship paper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, first as a business reporter and then as a columnist and editorial board member. She got her start as a reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal. During her career, she has filed business news stories from China, Japan, South Africa and Europe and has appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” and various CNN programs. Geewax earned a master’s degree at Georgetown University, focusing on international economic affairs, and has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from The Ohio State University. She was a 1995 Nieman Fellow at Harvard.

Ron Hira is associate professor and acting chair of the Department of Public Policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He specializes in policy issues regarding technological innovation, offshoring, high-skill immigration and the American engineering workforce. He is also a research associate with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Hira is co-author of the book, “Outsourcing America.” In 2007, he served as a consultant to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Science & Technology, helping to organize a series of hearings on the globalization of innovation and research and development. Hira testified twice before Congress in 2011 on high-skill immigration policy. Also in 2011, he co-organized RIT’s Immigration Policy Lecture Series with communication professor Andrea Hickerson. In 2013, Hira testified before the Senate on S.744, the comprehensive immigration bill that the Senate passed. He holds a Ph.D. in public policy and an M.S. in electrical engineering, both from George Mason University, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University.

Harry J. Holzer is a professor of public policy at Georgetown University and an Institute Fellow at the American Institutes for Research. Since receiving his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 1983, Holzer has also served as a professor of economics at Michigan State University; the chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor in the Clinton Administration; and an Institute Fellow at the Urban Institute. He was the co-founder and served as co-director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy. He serves on the board of directors of the National Skills Coalition and the Economic Mobility Corporation, as well as several other advisory and editorial boards. Holzer has authored or edited 11 books and has published several dozen articles in peer-reviewed journals, focusing heavily on employer behavior and job quality, but also on particular groups of low-income workers. His policy interests include workforce development, EEO and affirmative action, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Pell Grant reform, immigration reform and removing barriers to work for ex-offenders.

Ann Marie Lipinski is curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Lipinski previously served as senior lecturer and vice president for civic engagement at the University of Chicago. Prior to that, she was the editor of the Chicago Tribune, a post she held for nearly eight years following assignments as managing editor, metropolitan editor and investigations editor. As a reporter at the Tribune, Lipinski was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism for stories she did with two other reporters on corruption in the Chicago City Council. While editor of the paper, she oversaw work that won the Tribune Pulitzers in international reporting, feature writing, editorial writing, investigative reporting and explanatory journalism. Lipinski was a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board from 2003-2012 and served as co-chair during her last year. She was a 1990 Nieman Fellow.

Cheryl Little is executive director of Americans for Immigrant Justice, formerly the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, an agency she co-founded. She has been an advocate for immigrant rights for over two decades and is one of the country’s leading experts in the immigration field. She has received numerous honors and awards for her work, including the Morris Dees Justice Award, a 2012 Most Effective Public Interest Lawyer Award, given by the Daily Business Review and a Legal Legends Award from the HistoryMiami 11th Judicial Circuit Historical Society. She also was named as one of Poder Hispanic’s 100 Most Influential People in 2012. Little’s involvement in immigration dates from 1985, when she began working at the Haitian Refugee Center after graduating from law school. She has authored many publications on immigration, including law review articles and reports. She also has testified many times before Congress and appears regularly in the media as an immigration law expert. Her appearances include “60 Minutes,” “Frontline,” “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” Al Jazeera U.S., “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and CNN.

Tara Magner is a program officer in the policy research area of U.S. Programs at the MacArthur Foundation. She previously served as senior counsel to the chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, from 2009 to 2012. Her issue responsibilities on the Committee included immigration, refugee protection, human rights and national security matters. After the 2008 election, Magner was a member of President Obama’s Transition Policy Working Group on Immigration. She also served as a commissioner on the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration and was the director of policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center in Chicago. Earlier in her career, Magner served as deputy director of the Winston Foundation, awarding grants on international human rights, refugee protection and conflict resolution. She has published articles with MIT Press, the International Journal of Refugee Law, and the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal. Magner received her undergraduate degree at Wesleyan University and her law degree at Georgetown University Law Center.

Dana Leigh Marks has been a U.S. immigration judge in San Francisco since 1987 and is currently serving her sixth term as president of the National Association of Immigration Judges. She has published numerous articles and testified before Congress about the need to restructure the U.S. immigration courts to safeguard judicial independence. Judge Marks is a member of the International Association of Refugee Law Judges and the National Association of Women Judges. In 2006, she was honored as a Leader in the Human Rights Struggle by the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant for her years of public service. She also received the Phillip Burton Immigration and Civil Rights Award from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. Marks has taught immigration law and has lectured extensively on immigration law topics. Prior to taking the bench, she worked for 10 years in private immigration law firms. She served as lead counsel in the landmark asylum case of INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca, 480 U.S. 421 (1987), which established that persons applying for asylum need only prove a reasonable possibility of future persecution instead of the higher standard of clear probability advocated by the INS. Judge Marks is a graduate of University of California at Berkeley and received her J.D. from Hastings College of the Law.

Claudia Núñez is an investigative journalist and the force behind MigraHack, a data visualization network on immigration data that brings journalists, programmers and community members together. She began to develop MigraHack while a 2012 John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University. As an award-winning reporter, Núñez specialized in immigration and U.S.-Mexican border issues, working for National Geographic, La Opinión, the largest Spanish-language daily newspaper in the United States, and the Mexican States Editors Association. In 2008, she was named Latina Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Hispanic Publications. She currently serves as the Spanish-language Web editor for Human Rights Watch.

Demetrios G. Papademetriou is president and co-founder of the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and president of Migration Policy Institute Europe in Brussels. He also is the convener of the Transatlantic Council on Migration and convenes and co-directs the Regional Migration Study Group, an MPI-Woodrow Wilson Center initiative that has proposed new regional and collaborative approaches to migration, competitiveness and human-capital development for the United States, Mexico and Central America. Papademetriou is co-founder and international chair emeritus of the Metropolis Project, an international forum for research and policy on migration, diversity and changing cities. He additionally has served as chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Migration; chair of the Migration Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD); director for immigration policy and research at the U.S. Department of Labor; chair of the Secretary of Labor’s Immigration Policy Task Force; and executive editor of the International Migration Review. He has published more than 250 books, articles, monographs and research reports and advises senior government and political party officials in more than 20 countries.

Giovanni Peri is professor of economics at the University of California, Davis and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass. He is editor of Regional Science and Urban Economics and serves on the editorial board of five academic journals on economics. His research in the last 10 years has focused on the impact of international migrations on labor markets and the productivity of the receiving countries, and on the determinants of international migrations. He has published in several academic journals about economics and his research on immigration has been recently cited in several popular blogs and in media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Economist. He received several grants for the study of the impact of migrations from foundations and international organizations, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the World Bank, the Volkswagen Foundation and the Microsoft Corporation.

Carmen M. Reinhart is the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard Kennedy School. Previously she was the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and professor of economics and director of the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland. Reinhart also held positions as chief economist and vice president at Bear Stearns in the 1980s. Subsequently, she spent several years at the International Monetary Fund. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Reinhart has served on numerous editorial boards and panels, has testified before Congress, and has written and published on a variety of topics related to macroeconomics and international finance and trade. Her work has helped to inform the understanding of financial crises and is frequently featured in the financial press around the world. She is co-author with Kenneth S. Rogoff of the best-selling book “This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.” She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Marc R. Rosenblum is a specialist in immigration policy at the Congressional Research Service and an associate professor of political science at the University of New Orleans. He is the author of “The Transnational Politics of U.S. Immigration Policy” and the co-editor of “The Oxford Handbook of International Migration.” He has also published over 50 academic journal articles, book chapters and policy briefs on immigration, immigration policy and U.S.-Latin American relations. Rosenblum has served as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Immigration Subcommittee. In 2008-09 he served on President-Elect Barack Obama’s Presidential Transition Team Immigration Policy Committee. Prior to joining CRS, he was a senior policy analyst at MPI, where his portfolio included migration and U.S. labor markets, U.S.-Mexican and U.S.-Central American migration issues, legalization and migration enforcement. Rosenblum earned his B.A. from Columbia University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. As a participant in this workshop, he does not speak in an official capacity for Congress or the Congressional Research Service.

Maria Sacchetti covers immigration for The Boston Globe. In that capacity, she reported on the 2010 earthquake in Haiti; followed a Boston student to Colombia when his father was deported; and traveled to Guatemala and Ecuador to write about immigrants’ ties to Massachusetts. Through the Freedom of Information Act, she also uncovered the reasons a judge granted asylum to President Barack Obama’s aunt in 2010. Sacchetti has reported on immigrant detainees and on the existence of a post-9/11 flight school in Massachusetts that was teaching illegal immigrants to fly small airplanes. Prior to working at the Globe, she investigated the education of Latino schoolchildren, leading to the Latino Educational Initiative. She worked for several years in Latin America, covering news stories and natural disasters. She has a bachelor’s in journalism and a master’s degree in Latin American studies/economics, with a focus on immigration. She was a 2011 finalist for the Scripps Howard Ernie Pyle Award for human-interest writing and a 2010 finalist for the American Society of News Editors award for outstanding writing on diversity.

Edward Schumacher-Matos is the ombudsman for NPR. He also is a visiting professor at Columbia Journalism School and a non-resident fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. Previously, he was a visiting professor and director of the migration studies program at Harvard, where he remains a member of the Population and Development Center and leader of several projects. He spent more than three decades as a reporter and editor both in the United States and abroad and founded four Spanish-language daily newspapers in Texas. He wrote a syndicated weekly column on immigration policy for The Washington Post; was the ombudsman for The Miami Herald; served as the founding editor and associate publisher of The Wall Street Journal’s Spanish and Portuguese insert editions in Latin America, Spain and Portugal; and reported for The New York Times as Madrid bureau chief, Buenos Aires bureau chief, and as the paper’s New York City economic development reporter. At The Philadelphia Inquirer, he was part of the team that won a 1980 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident. He holds a B.A. from Vanderbilt University and an M.A. from Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He emigrated from Colombia as a child and is a Vietnam War veteran.

Dianne Solís is a senior writer at The Dallas Morning News, where she frequently writes on immigration and U.S. policies. She has reported on Central American children in immigration courts; the asylum struggle of a Mexican woman fleeing the Zetas cartel; Iraqi refugees in North Texas; a Haitian millionaire rallying support for his island-nation; sedation of deportees by the U.S. government; and the growing use of criminal law against illegal immigrants. She previously worked for The Wall Street Journal in its Houston and Mexico City bureaus. She also worked in public radio and commercial television. Solís was a 1990 Nieman Fellow at Harvard. She has a master’s degree from Northwestern University, and a bachelor’s degree from California State University, Fresno. She is a native of Fresno and the granddaughter of immigrants who fled the Mexican Revolution.

Andrew Solomon is vice president of public affairs at the MacArthur Foundation. He previously served as director of communications and strategy for Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, where he formulated a plan to focus national attention on the youth vote in the 2004 election. Solomon also served as director of public affairs for the U.S. Conference of Mayors. At the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the second Clinton Administration, Solomon led a communications strategy to re-brand the USDA. He has worked as deputy press secretary for the Democratic National Committee; chief of staff and press/legislative aide in the Massachusetts State Senate; and news director for Harvard’s WHRB radio. Solomon has a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a master’s in public policy from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Laura Wides-Muñoz is an immigration reporter for The Associated Press and a co-organizer of this workshop. Based in Miami, she covers U.S.-Cuba relations, immigration and Hispanics in American politics and pop culture. She has reported from Cuba and Guatemala, where she was a Fulbright Scholar and covered the end of Guatemala’s civil war. She has won The Associated Press Managing Editors Award and the Green Eyeshade Award for best political coverage in the southern United States. She also has written for The Miami Herald, U.S. News & World Report and the Los Angeles Times. She holds an environmental studies degree from Brown University. She was a 2013 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.