Julia Gelatt

Associate Director, U.S. Immigration Policy Program

Julia Gelatt is Associate Director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute. Her research and policy work focus on the legal immigration system, demographic trends, unauthorized immigrants and mixed-status families, access to public benefits and government services, and the impacts of U.S. immigration policies on immigrant families and the U.S. economy. She leads MPI’s data team, and development of the Institute’s estimates of the size and characteristics of the unauthorized immigrant population.

Dr. Gelatt previously worked as a Research Associate at the Urban Institute, where her mixed-methods research focused on state policies toward immigrants and barriers to and facilitators of immigrant families’ access to public benefits. She was a Research Assistant at MPI before graduate school.

She earned her PhD in sociology, with a specialization in demography, from Princeton University, where her work focused on the relationship between immigration status and children’s health and well-being. She earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology/anthropology from Carleton College.

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    Nearly 3 Million U.S. Citizens and Legal Immigrants Initially Excluded under the CARES Act Are Covered under the December 2020 COVID-19 Stimulus

    The pandemic-recovery stimulus package that passed Congress in December rectified what many had viewed as a significant oversight in the earlier CARES Act: Its exclusion of U.S. citizens and legal immigrants in mixed-status families. MPI researchers estimate nearly 3 million U.S. citizens and legal immigrants excluded from the earlier legislation can receive the later relief, as well as qualify retroactively for the CARES Act payment, as this commentary explores.

    Millions of U.S. Citizens Could Be Excluded under Trump Plan to Remove Unauthorized Immigrants from Census Data

    The Trump administration's plan to exclude unauthorized immigrants from the 2020 Census data used to reapportion 435 congressional seats among the 50 states could misclassify as many as 20 million U.S. citizens, as the result of expected data-matching errors. The effects of this exclusion could be most pronounced in low-income urban and rural communities, reducing their voting power relative to more affluent ones, as this commentary explains.