Chiara Galli

Chiara Galli is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative Human Development Department.

She studies the legal and political struggles that lie at the heart of classifying migration flows, how immigration laws shape people's lives, the role of volunteers and NGOs in migration management, and how children differ from adults as migratory actors and legal subjects in their own right.

Her recently published book, Precarious Protections: Unaccompanied Minors Seeking Asylum in the US (University of California Press, 2023), is an ethnography of the experiences of Central American unaccompanied minors and their immigration attorneys as they pursue applications for refugee status in the US asylum process.

Her current research includes two major studies. First, with the support of the American Bar Foundation and in collaboration with Tatiana Padilla (Cornell), she is studying access to legal representation and determinants of case outcomes for unaccompanied minors in the U.S. immigration court using a large administrative dataset. Second, with a team of research assistants, she is conducting an ethnographic study on the reception of asylum-seekers in Chicago.