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Anna Nicole Kreisberg

Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Sociology, Pennsylvania State University

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About Anna

Kreisberg studies immigrant inequalities in educational institutions and the labor market. Her first book project uses an original field experiment, a national survey experiment, and in-depth interviews to understand whether and why employers screen out Latino male college graduates from entry-level employment based on nativity and legal status. Kreisberg has published research on stratification among immigrants in educational attainment and occupational prestige; the relationship between organizational behavior and employment declines among refugees; and employment discrimination more generally.

Contributions

Refugee Resettlement Should Look Beyond First Job Placements

  • Els de Graauw
  • Shannon Gleeson

Publications

"Starting Points: Divergent Trajectories of Labor Market Integration among U.S. Lawful Permanent Residents" Social Forces 98, no. 2 (2019): 849-884.

Uses a dynamic conceptualization of legal status, as well as nationally representative data and regression and propensity score weighting techniques, to examine whether five initial legal statuses are associated with divergent labor market trajectories even after those statuses change. Finds that initial legal statuses—which I refer to as starting points—are associated with ordered differences in immigrants’ occupational positions immediately after immigrants change status to lawful permanent residence.

"The Higher Educational Trajectories of Undocumented Youth in New York City" (with Anna Nicole Kreisberg). Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47, no. 17 (2020): 3822-3845.

Draws upon the education and immigrant illegality literature, as well as longitudinal administrative data on 35,400 college students, we examine the association between students’ legal status and their educational achievement, or GPA – an important predictor of educational attainment. Finds that, despite high achievement in high school and upon first enrolling in college, undocumented students do not experience upward achievement over time, otherwise known in the education literature as educational progression. 

"Explaining Refugee Employment Declines: Structural Shortcomings in Federal Resettlement Support" (with Els de Graauw and Shannon Gleeson). Social Problems (2022).

Analyzes the over-time employment declines that refugees in the United States face, highlighting three interrelated structural weaknesses in the federal refugee resettlement process that drive these declines: (1) retrenched resettlement funding, (2) a logic of self-sufficiency prioritizing rapid employment in generally undesirable and unstable jobs, and (3) siloed networks of refugee-serving organizations.