The fourth installment of the Presidential Lecture Series, hosted by President John L. Anderson, will be held on Thursday, November 14, 2013.

John W. Rowe, IIT Regent, Former Chairman of the Board, and Chairman Emeritus of Exelon Corporation, will introduce the lecture entitled, “America’s Immigration Policy Fiasco,” presented by Douglas S. Massey.

Immigration reforms initiated in the 1960s are widely thought to have opened the door to mass immigration from Asia and Latin America by eliminating past discriminatory policies. While this may be true for Asians, it is not the case for Latin Americans who faced more restrictions to legal migration after 1965 than before. The boom in Latin American migration occurred in spite of, rather than because of, changes in United States immigration law. This lecture will describe how restrictions placed on the legal entry of Latin Americans, and especially Mexicans, set off a chain of events that in the ensuing decades had the perverse effect of producing more, rather than fewer, Latino immigrants.

Watch the first three IIT Presidential lectures here.

About the Speaker

Douglas S. Massey is the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Formerly, he was the Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Massey is coauthor of American Apartheid (Harvard University Press, 1993), which won the Distinguished Publication Award of the American Sociological Association. More recently he coauthored The Source of the River (Princeton University Press, 2003), the first analysis of minority achievement in selective colleges and universities based on a representative sample, as well as the follow-up book, Taming the River (Princeton University Press, 2009), which examined the determinants of persistence and grade achievement through the first two years of college.

Dr. Massey has also published extensively on Mexican immigration, including the books Return to Aztlan (University of California Press, 1987) and Miracles on the Border (University of Arizona Press, 1995), which won a 1996 Southwest Book Award. His latest two books on immigration are Beyond Smoke and Mirrors (Russell Sage, 2002), which won the 2004 Otis Dudley Duncan Award for the best book in social demography, and Brokered Boundaries: Constructing Immigrant Identity in Anti-Immigrant Times (Russell Sage, 2010).

Dr. Massey served on the faculty of the University of Chicago, where he directed its Latin American Studies Center and Population Research Center. He was a director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Population Studies Center and chair of its Graduate Group in Demography. In 1979 and 1980, he undertook postdoctoral research at the University of California at Berkeley and at Princeton University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1978. Dr. Massey is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He is past president of the Population Association of America and the American Sociological Association, and current president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He was recently elected to the Council of the National Academy of Sciences.

About the Moderator

John W. Rowe is chairman emeritus of Exelon Corporation.

Mr. Rowe previously held chief executive officer positions at the New England Electric System and Central Maine Power Company, served as general counsel of Consolidated Rail Corporation, and was a partner in the law firm of Isham, Lincoln & Beale. He is the lead independent director of Northern Trust Company and a member of the board of directors of The Allstate Corporation and SunCoke Energy.

Mr. Rowe serves as chairman of New Schools for Chicago and The Field Museum, and as president of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. He is a member of the board of the Illinois Holocaust Museum, the Morgridge Institute for Research, the Northwestern University Settlement House and Chicago Shakespeare Theater. He is an IIT Regent and former Chairman of the Board of Trustees.

The Rowe Family Trust has founded the Rowe Professorship of Architecture and the Rowe Chair in Sustainable Energy at IIT, the Rowe Professorship in Byzantine History and the Rowe Professorship in Greek History at the University of Wisconsin, the Rowe Professorship in Virology at the Morgridge Institute and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, and the Curator of Evolutionary Biology at The Field Museum. The trust co-founded the Rowe-Clark Math and Science Academy and the Rowe Elementary School. The Rowes serve as patrons of the Pope John Paul II parochial school on Chicago’s southwest side.

Mr. Rowe holds undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Wisconsin, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and the Order of the Coif. He has also received that university’s Distinguished Alumni Award.

John Rowe and his wife, Jeanne, reside in Chicago.