Independent Research

Melissa’s dissertation, “Uncertain Times: U.S. Immigration Policy Practice and the Resolve to Make America Safe in the 21st Century,” used multi-level growth models to assess change in noncitizen flows by country entering the U.S. pre- and post-9/11. Particularly, she used data from the Yearbooks of Immigration Statistics to analyze 1998-2005 flows. She assessed whether the changes in flows might be correlated with a country’s predominant racial/ethnic and religious composition of the population, including whether noncitizens possessing demographic characteristics similar to those of the 9/11 hijackers suffered disproportionately as a result of the attacks. Melissa's manuscript, “The Making of the Contemporary Other: The Case of Arab Muslims in the U.S. After 9/11” is currently under review by Ethnic & Racial Studies. Work focused on the role of race and religious affiliation as criteria for entry into the U.S. following 9/11 is currently under revision.

Her work on foreigners and ethnic Germans living in Germany examines the balance between integration/belonging and participation in transnational activities by examining the extent these groups vary in their level of German identity (both between the groups and among a group across generations). Other work that explores the formation of identity uses data gathered on the second generation in the U.S. to examine how growing up in a predominantly Christian culture influences the formation of ethnic and national identiites among those raised in non-Christian homes. 

The Religious Lives of the Second Generation

The intersection of immigration, religion and identity formation are central to Melissa’s collaboration with Dr. Peggy Levitt and Nancy A. Khalil. The process of migration and the host context contribute to the formation of the various ways in which cultural, ethnic/racial and religious identities take shape and present themselves. The perspective of transcendence of borders embedded in the transnational network aids in understanding migration and its ‘results’ as purely bounded by borders. Interviews with second generation Gujaratis are presently being conducted in the Greater Boston area.

Large Data Set Work & Additional Quantitative Analysis

While a Senior Research Associate at the Steinhardt Social Research Institute, Melissa, along with the SSRI cross-survey data team, developed a data set whereby secondary data sources were formatted uniformly so analysis on the Jewish population might be evaluated. Most surveys do not have enough respondents from this “rare population” to accurately analyze the population. As such, development of a cross-survey data file allows estimation of the Jewish population to be conducted. Our paper “Cross-Survey Analysis to Estimate Low Incidence Religious Groups” has been recently accepted for publication in Sociolgocial Methods & Research.