The Department of Sociology presents:

Ramona Hernández

Dominicans in the US: Migrating to the Promised Land

What explains the international mobility of workers from developing to advanced societies? Why do workers move from one region to another? Using the Dominican labor force in New York as a case study, Ramona Hernndez challenges the presumption of a straightforward relationship between supply and demand in the job markets of the receiving society. She contends that the traditional correlation between migration and economic progress does not always hold true. Once transplanted in New York City, Hernandez shows, Dominicans have faced economic hardship as the result of high levels of unemployment and underemployment and the reality of a changing labor market that increasingly requires workers with skills and training they do not have. Rather than responding to a demand in the labor market, emigration from the Dominican Republic was the result of a de facto government policy encouraging poor and jobless people to leave -- a policy in which the United States was an accomplice because the policy suited its economic and political interests in the region.

Ramona Hernández is Professor of Sociology and Director of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute at City College. She is the author of The Mobility of Workers Under Advanced Capitalism: Dominican Migration to the United States (Columbia University Press, 2002), and the coauthor of Latinos in New York: Communities in Transition (University of Notre Dame Press, 1996).

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

12:00 noon

Ellison Hall 2824