Els de Graauw is Associate Professor at Baruch College, the City University of New York, with an appointment in the Department of Political Science and teaching responsibilities also in the Austin W. Marxe School of Public and International Affairs. She also is the Acting Director of the M.A. Program in International Migration Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research centers on the nexus of immigration and citizenship, civil society organizations, urban and regional politics, and public policy, with a focus on building institutional capacity for immigrant integration and representation.
Her award-winning book Making Immigrant Rights Real: Nonprofits and the Politics of Integration in San Francisco (Cornell University Press, 2016) analyzes the role of nonprofit organizations in advocating for immigrant integration policies in San Francisco, with a focus on immigrant language access, labor rights, and municipal ID cards. She is currently working on her second book, a comparative study of city and state immigrant affairs offices in the United States, with a focus on New York City, Atlanta, Houston, San Francisco, and Detroit. With Shannon Gleeson (Cornell University), she is conducting an institutional analysis of the implementation of the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in three metropolitan regions: the San Francisco Bay Area, the Greater Houston Area, and the New York City Metro Area. She also is conducting research on immigrant organizations in New York City and immigrant integration in New York State.
Her research appears in the Journal of Migration and Human Security, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, WorkingUSA, Politics & Society, American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Political Science, Daedalus, Hérodote, and various edited volumes. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Howard J. Samuels State and City Policy Center, the Professional Staff Congress at CUNY, the Eugene M. Lang Foundation, the National Center for Border Security and Immigration, the Hauser Institute for Civil Society (Harvard Kennedy School of Government), the Institute for the Social Sciences (Cornell University), the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (UC Berkeley), and the Netherland-America Foundation.
Els earned her Ph.D. degree in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley. She has been a researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Cornell University. In 2012, she co-founded the Section on Migration and Citizenship of the American Political Science Association, and she served as the Section's elected co-president and secretary between 2012 and 2016. Els serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and the Urban Affairs Review.