Karen Woodrow-Lafield, Ph.D.

Recent Accomplishments

Karen A. Woodrow-Lafield has expertise in social demography, international migration, unauthorized migration, immigration policy, and political incorporation and citizenship. Her studies have addressed the size and change in the U.S. unauthorized population, Mexico-U.S. migration, implications of immigration for Congressional reapportionment and census coverage, family reunification and immigrant integration, and persistence of unauthorized migration after immigration reforms and enforcement. She has published articles in Demography, Population Research and Policy Review, Journal of the American Statistical Association, International Migration Review, Journal of Family History, and Rural Sociology as well as papers in published proceedings of the American Statistical Association, special reports related to her public service at the U.S. Bureau of the Census, and chapters in Illegal Immigration in America: A Reference Handbook, Undocumented Migration to the United States: IRCA and the Experience of the 1980s, and From Arrival to Incorporation: Migrants to the U.S. in a Global Era (2008).

Dr. Woodrow-Lafield is currently a Research Professor in the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland College Park. She previously held a visiting appointment as a faculty fellow and Director of Border and Inter-American Affairs in the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame Prior to the ILS appointment, she was a tenured Associate Professor in Sociology at Mississippi State University in 1996-2002 where she taught graduate and undergraduate courses on population, poverty, and immigration. At ILS, she sought to develop a research agenda for informed policy on border affairs within the Americas, migration and immigration to the United States, and wellbeing of migrants and immigrant families. She also initiated courses on migration, race, and ethnicity for the new minor in Latino Studies in the College of Arts and Letters (the major became effective in the fall of 2005). In 1993-1995, she held research appointments at the University of Texas at Austin, the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, and SUNY-Albany and taught at Ramapo College of New Jersey. Trained in formal demography, she developed expertise in measuring international migration over 1984-1992 as Statistician and Demographer on the Population Analysis Staff at the U.S. Census Bureau. She planned immigration and emigration surveys, conducted research measuring immigration, unauthorized migration, emigration, and the foreign-born population, and coauthored demographic analyses to evaluate 1990 census coverage.

Funded Research

• Models of the Occurrence and Timing of Naturalization (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development)
• Member, Binational Study on Migration Between Mexico and the United States
• Quantification of Mexico-U.S. Migration, Binational Study

Research Agenda

Dr. Karen A. Woodrow-Lafield focuses on (1) quantifying unauthorized and lawful migration and improving these estimation methodologies; (2) discerning migrant status transitions and immigration consequences for population growth, racial and ethnic change, and social institutions; (3) assessing wellbeing for immigrant and low income families; (4) studying minority communities and special populations in censuses and surveys, as well as related transnational networks; and (5) modeling immigrant pathways to U.S. citizenship. With NICHD-funding beginning in 1999, she explored new longitudinal modeling for the timing of naturalization for immigrant cohorts of 1978-1991 and influences of admission circumstances as indicators of human and social capital. The long term goal is creation of an immigration-naturalization data archive to include immigrant records linked with subsequent naturalization records relating to cohorts for 1978-1991 and for post-1991 after the Immigration Act of 1990.