Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien

Office: NH 113 | Email: [email protected]

Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien earned a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Oregon and a Master’s from the University of Victoria before completing his Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 2014. Dr. Gonzalez O’Brien’s main area of research is racial and ethnic politics, with a focus on U.S. immigration policy. He is the author of Handcuffs and Chain Link: Criminalizing the Undocumented in America, which examines the historical criminalization of Latino immigration and how legislation passed in the 1920s continues to have repercussions for modern immigration policy. His second book Sanctuary Cities: The Politics of Refuge charts the development and effect of sanctuary city policies, which forbid local officials from inquiring into immigration status, as well as public opinion, media coverage, and the politics of these policies (forthcoming, Oxford University Press). His other research includes inter-group attitudes and the effect of changes in electoral policies on political participation. He is beginning a project on the role of religious institutions in resistance to restrictive immigration policies and plans to expand his research on criminalization to cover the 18th and 19th centuries.