Center for Immigration Studies - CIS organization summary

CIS board Chairman: Peter Nunez: former US Attorney for San Diego; the first Hispanic appointed to that position.
T. Willard Fair: President of the Urban League of Greater Miami (Congressional Testimony: Mass Immigration vs. Black America)
Vernon M. Briggs, Jr.: Emeritus Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University.
Frank Morris: former Executive Director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and former Dean of Graduate Studies at Morgan State University.

Center for Immigration Studies staff includes: Mark Krikorian: Executive Director
Steven A. Camarota: Director of Research; for more than five years was the lead researcher on a project for the U.S. Census Bureau evaluating the quality of its immigrant data.
Stephen Steinlight: Senior Policy Analyst, former Director of National Affairs at the American Jewish Committee, Director of Education at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, and Vice President of the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
Jerry Kammer: Senior Research Fellow, winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for national reporting.
Janice Kephart: Director of National Security Policy, formerly counsel to the 9/11 Commission.
Jessica Vaughan: Director of Policy Studies, former Foreign Service Officer; lead author of report on gangs and immigration policy commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Center for Immigration Studies is the nation's only research organization focused solely on research pertaining to U.S. immigration policy. The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit, research organization. It has pursued a single mission - providing elected officials, news media, academics and concerned citizens with reliable and accurate information about the fiscal, social, security, economic, and environmental consequences of legal and illegal immigration into the United States. Its tax return shows it does not lobby Congress.

Over the last decade the Center for Immigration Studies has received about half a million dollars in research grants from the Census Bureau and Justice Department. Staffers at the Center for Immigration Studies have testified before Congress more than any other non-governmental organization on immigration. The nation's top immigration economist, George Borjas of Harvard, has described the Center's work as "credible" and "reliable." A Nexus search shows that the Center for Immigration Studies is one of the organizations most often quoted in the media. Its research has been featured on the front pages of the Washington Post, USA Today and New York Times.

The Center for Immigration Studies supports a 'low-immigration, pro-immigrant' vision of an America that admits fewer immigrants but affords a warmer welcome for those who are admitted. This makes the Center somewhat unusual among immigration research institutions since most non-partisan think tanks doing research on immigration like the Migration Policy Institute, and the Pew Hispanic Center are generally in favor of higher levels of immigration. Other research institutions like the liberal Center for American Progress and libertarian Cato Institute are also in favor of high immigration and legalizing illegal immigrants, but do so from a specific ideological position.

CIS focuses on publications rather than programs per se. For example, the Center for Immigration Studies publication list and CIS reading list is quite extensive. CIS Backgrounder reports and studies include research on: illegal immigration cost of illegal immigration, legal immigration national security, terrorism and immigration, health care cost and immigration, and many other topics. A typical quarterly reading list of reports includes:

Here are some of the newer publications by CIS: