Ruben Hernandez-Leon

About

Ruben Hernandez-Leon is a professor in the UCLA Sociology Department. His research focuses on migration, particularly the migration of urban Mexicans to the United States, and the systems and industries that organize migration control. He has authored books such as 'Metropolitan Migrants: The Migration of Urban Mexicans to the United States' and co-edited 'New Destinations: Mexican Immigration in the United States.' His scholarly work includes numerous articles and chapters examining topics like the migration industry, social capital in immigrant communities, and high-skilled industrial migration from Mexico to the U.S. Hernandez-Leon's contributions provide in-depth analysis of migration patterns, the social and economic factors influencing migration, and the organizational systems that regulate mobility across the Mexico-U.S. border.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Geography
• Sociology
• Economics
• Business
• Law
• Economic growth
• Management
• Finance
• History

Selected publications

• The work that brokers do: the skills, competences and know-how of intermediaries in the H-2 visa programme

  Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies · 2020 · 48 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  This article analyses the skills and competence acquisition of migration entrepreneurs in the H-2 visa programme, a U.S. temporary worker scheme. This programme, which nowadays largely recruits Mexicans, is managed by a migration industry of labour contracting agencies, recruiters, document processors, and transporters. This article focuses on recruiters, in charge of selecting workers, and document processors, responsible for completing visa application forms. Hailing mostly from the rural work…

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction to the Special Issue

  Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos · 2016-01-01 · 30 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Moving to the ‘Homeland’

  Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos · 2016-01-01 · 19 citations

  articleSenior author

  A growing number of minors have become part of the return migratory flow from the United States to Mexico. Based on a longitudinal study started in 2012, this article uses life-history narratives to analyze the return experiences of three children who arrived in the state of Morelos, Mexico, between 2010 and 2012. The findings presented here focus on a specific segment of the children’s migratory journey: leaving the United States, crossing the border and arriving in Morelos. The article contrib…

  PublisherDOI

• An imperfect realignment: the movement of children of immigrants and their families from the United States to Mexico

  Ethnic and Racial Studies · 2019-11-20 · 18 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Over the past 15 years, hundreds of thousands of children of immigrants and their families have moved from the United States to Mexico pushed by different legal and economic expulsion factors. Using evidence from a multi-sited, twenty year-long study of Mexican migration to Georgia, we analyze the varied educational, linguistic, employment and family reunification experiences of children of immigrants in two communities of origin in central and northern Mexico. We draw from insights of the polit…

  PublisherDOI

• Bringing back the Bracero Program: the migration industry in the recruitment of H-2 visa workers

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2022 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  The enlargement of the United States temporary migrant labor program, the H visa, suggests a 'return' to a migratory labor regime like the Bracero Program. This is ushering an epochal change, characterized by the state's restriction and decline of undocumented flows, the criminalization of the resident unauthorized population and the reinstatement of a system of managed migration. In this context, different stakeholders of the migrant labor regime - migrants, employers, migration brokers, state…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jacqueline Hagan

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  54 shared

• Néstor Rodríguez

  53 shared

• Aviva Chomsky

  Salem State University

  49 shared

• S. Brown

  Energie NB Power (Canada)

  49 shared

• Jeff Popke

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  49 shared

• Kara Cebulko

  Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

  49 shared

• Taeku Lee

  Harvard University

  49 shared

• Julia Preston

  Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

  49 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Sociology

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2010

• M.A., Sociology

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2006

• B.A., Sociology

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2004

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