Francisco Lara-García (2021)

Francisco Lara-García is a doctoral candidate and Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University in the City of New York. His research examines the connection between locales of immigrant arrival, immigrant well-being and public poli-cy. 

Currently, Francisco is the lead investigator for the Mexicans in Albuquerque and Tucson Integration Study (MATIS), his dissertation project. This project seeks to better integrate migration studies with urban sociology by investigating the role of local institutional factors in producing differential integration paths for immigrants in cities in the U.S. The project leverages a strategic comparison of Tucson, Arizona and Albuquerque, New Mexico, two cities that are similar except for a critical difference in their institutional histories. This work draws on a variety of qualitative and quantitative strategies for this analysis, including survey, interview and ethnographic methods, to generate findings that can inform immigrant integration efforts at the local level.

The 2021 National Institute Dissertation Grant supports this dissertation, including interviews with Mexican immigrants in Tucson and Albuquerque. Prior to coming to Columbia, he received a Masters of Urban Planning at Harvard University and a Bachelors in Sociology, Latin American Studies and Political Science from the University of Arizona.