Jeanne Batalova and Josh Kun in conversation

This is the final conversation in the spring 2009 Liberty Hill Foundation sponsored series of talks between artists and civic leaders.

Jeanne Batalova and Josh Kun will discuss immigration and the policies, politics, and cultural artifacts that result from people moving across borders.

Josh Kun is an L.A.-based writer, critic, and scholar whose work focuses on popular music, the US-Mexico border, and the cultures of globalization. He is the author of Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (UC Press) and co-author of And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Our Vinyl, a re-telling of Jewish-American history through LP covers (Random House). He is a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC, where he also directs the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center. Selections of articles written by Kun can be found here and here at the New York Times and also at Los Angeles Magazine.

Jeanne Batalova is a Policy Analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. Her areas of expertise include impacts of immigrants on society and labor markets; integration of immigrant children and elderly immigrants; and the policies and practices regulating immigration of highly skilled workers and foreign students. She is also Manager of MPI’s Data Hub, a one-stop, Web-based resource that provides instant access to the latest facts, stats, and maps covering US and global data on immigration and immigrant integration.

Dr. Batalova has co-authored research on “brain waste’’ of college-educated immigrants living in the United States, immigration data sources, estimates of unauthorized youth eligible for legal status under the DREAM Act, and educational outcomes of English language learners, among other publications. Her book, Skilled Immigrant and Native Workers in the United States , was published in 2006.

She earned her PhD in Sociology, with a specialization in demography, from University of California-Irvine, MBA from Roosevelt University, and BA in Economics from Academy of Economic Studies, Chisinau, Moldova.