"Cities of Gold?"
Immigration, Prosperity, and Place in the American Economy
With Leah Boustan, Economics, and Andrew Sandoval-Strausz, Penn State
Thursday, September 29 / 4:30pm / Louis A. Simpson Building A71
Immigration drives the growth of American cities and suburbs, while economic opportunities draw immigrants to metropolitan areas. Yet immigration remains a contentious political issue across the country, and world. In this talk, award-winning scholars Leah Boustan (Economics, Princeton) and Andrew Sandoval-Strausz (History/Latinx Studies, Penn State), will discuss the relationship between immigration, place, and the economy. The talk will address the ways that historical data, oral histories, and archival materials, can provide us with nuanced insights into the relationship between immigration and community in America.
Leah Boustan is a Professor of Economics at Princeton University, where she also serves as the Director of the Industrial Relations Section. Her research lies at the intersection between economic history and labor economics. Her first book, Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets (Princeton University Press, 2016) examines the effect of the Great Black Migration from the rural south during and after World War II. Her recent work, including her new book Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success (PublicAffairs 2022), is on the mass migration from Europe to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Professor Boustan is co-director of the Development of the American Economy Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She also serves as co-editor at the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. Professor Boustan was named an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in 2012 and won the IZA Young Labor Economists Award in 2019.
A. K. Sandoval-Strausz was born in New York City to immigrant parents. He teaches courses in Latino studies, urban history, spatial theory, sociability, and immigration. He is a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar and a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians.
He has received fellowships from Princeton University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the New-York Historical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Huntington Library, and the Harvard Business School.
His first book, Hotel: An American History (Yale University Press, 2007), won the American Historical Association-Pacific Coast Branch Book Award and was named a Best Book of 2007 by Library Journal. Click these links for book reviews and interviews featured in the New York Times, National Public Radio, The Economist, Bloomberg.com, Reason, Columbia, City Journal, the Glasgow Herald, The Age (Melbourne), Sotsial’nie i Gumanitarnie Nauk (Russian Federation), and Phoenix TV (China).
His most recent book, Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City (Basic Books, 2019), is a transnational history of urban revitalization that won the Caroline Bancroft History Prize, the International Latino Book Award for Best Academic Book, and second place for the Victor Villaseñor Book Award. . Click these links for articles, book reviews, opinion pieces, and interviews featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, NPR’s Marketplace, Slate, Foreign Affairs, Commonweal, Chicago Magazine, the Texas Observer, the Dallas Morning News in both Spanish and English, Dallas Public Radio’s Think!, and Texas Public Radio’s Fronteras.