Research Library

This report takes a deep dive into how expanding the scope of the nonimmigrant TN Visa — available only to Mexican and Canadian citizens — could help solve the U.S. labor shortage. In a political climate where full-scale immigration reform seems impossible, more temporary work visas can help bridge the labor gap.

The authors explore the costs and benefits of a legalization program, contending that to realize the full benefits of comprehensive immigration reform and deter future unauthorized immigration, a broad and inclusive legalization program is needed.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program has provided hundreds of thousands of young people in the U.S. with a reprieve from deportation, but program recipients have long lacked a pathway to permanent residency. This paper explores routes to immediate status and citizenship for those eligible for DACA, also known as "DREAMers."

To promote optimal resource use in cancer care, this study investigated referral patterns of follow-up colonoscopies for colorectal cancer survivors and their test results.

NAFTA has neither been the enormous success that its supporters believe, nor the disaster that its detractors claim. Renegotiating NAFTA — or even threatening to repeal it — is not a high-stakes proposition. The treaty simply does not possess the leverage to deliver a major boost or setback to the U.S. manufacturing sector. 

Recent academic research has shown that startup training institutions can greatly increase the number of startup firms receiving seed and early-stage venture capital for the first time. In this paper, the authors examine the startup training institutions in Houston, and what they are doing to open up the city’s pipeline of startups.

The recent energy reform in Mexico is the most radical institutional change the country has experienced since the nationalization of the oil industry in 1938. The authors of this paper outline how this major reform was accomplished, examining its primary supporters and detractors, the multi-dimensional interests at play, and the negotiation strategies used. They also analyze the quality of the prior deliberation process in order to determine the degree of legitimacy of the reform.

The invocation of sectarianism as a category of analysis for understanding the Middle East is misleading. It conflates a religious identification with a political one, and it ignores the kinship, class and national and regional networks within which sectarian self-expression has invariably been enmeshed. What is urgently needed is a new research agenda to study the dialectic — the complex, constant and unequal relationship between local and foreign — that makes up the modern Middle East.

Authors Tony Payan and Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera lay out how Mexico must anticipate and resolve potential problems in organized crime, corruption and natural resource allocation priorities in order to successfully implement its energy reforms.

Mexico Center director Tony Payan considers whether citizens and the government should together combat organized crime in Mexico.