James F. Hollifield received his Ph.D. in political science from Duke University in 1985. He is the Ora Nixon Arnold Professor of International Political Economy and Director of the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies at Southern Methodist University, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In addition to SMU, he has held faculty appointments at Duke, Brandeis, and Harvard.
In 1992-93 he was Associate Director of Research at the CNRS and the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales of the FNSP in Paris. From 1986 to 1992 he was a Fellow at Harvard University's Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, where he co-chaired the French study group, and in 1991-92 he was an Associate at Harvard's Center for International Affairs. He has worked as a consultant on migration for the U.S. Government, as well the UN, the World Bank, the OECD, and other international organizations.
Hollifield has been the recipient of grants from private foundations and government agencies, including the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Social Science Research Council, the Sloan Foundation, the Owens Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. His books include Searching for the New France (Routledge, 1990) with George Ross, Immigrants, Markets, and States (Harvard UP, 1992), Controlling Immigration (Stanford UP, 1994, 2004) with Wayne Cornelius and Philip Martin, L’immigration et l’Etat-Nation (L’Harmattan, 1997), Pathways to Democracy (Routledge, 1999) with Calvin Jillson, and Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines (Routledge, 2000, 2006) with Caroline Brettell. His forthcoming book, The Emerging Migration State, is a study of how states shape and control international migration for strategic gains.
He is director of a number of research projects, including Magnet Societies: Immigration in Postwar Germany and the United States (with Dietrich Thränhardt) funded by the German American Academic Council, and Migration, Trade and Development (with Pia Orrenius and Thomas Osang) funded by the Owens Foundation and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. He is co-principal investigator (with Caroline Brettell, Dennis Cordell, and Manuel Garcia y Griego) of a three-year, National Science Foundation Project, entitled Immigration in a Sun Belt City: Immigrant Incorporation in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. He is co-director (with Dennis Ippolito) of a project on The Long Term Budget Challenge: Public Finance in the G-7 Countries, sponsored by the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute, the International Financial Law Unit of the University of London, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center. He is co-director of a project on “North American Integration: Trade, Migration and Security,” sponsored by the Institute for Research on Public Policy (Montréal), the Tower Center at SMU, and the Colegio de Mexico.
His teaching and research interests lie primarily in the areas of international and comparative political economy.
He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in June 2006.