Vera Institute of Justice

Tom K. Wong is an associate professor of political science at UC San Diego and recently served as an advisor to the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (WHIAAPI) under the Obama administration. He is also director of the International Migration Studies Program Minor. Wong’s research focuses on the politics of immigration, citizenship, and migrant "illegality." His work also explores the links between immigration, race and ethnicity, and the politics of identity.

Wong’s first book, Rights, Deportation, and Detention in the Age of Immigration Control (Stanford University Press, 2015), analyzes the immigration control policies of 25 Western immigrant-receiving democracies. His second book, The Politics of Immigration: Partisanship, Demographic Change, and American National Identity (Oxford University Press, 2016), analyzes over 30,000 roll call votes on immigration-related legislation in Congress since 2005, and represents the most comprehensive analysis to-date on the contemporary politics of immigration in the United States.