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James Bachmeier

James Bachmeier in a light grey suit and tie smiling and staring into the camera

James Bachmeier

  • College of Liberal Arts

    • Sociology

      • Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies

Curriculum Vitae  

Expertise

International Migration, Immigrant Integration, Racial/Ethnic Inequality, Social Demography and Quantitative Methods

Biography

James D. Bachmeier is Associate Professor of Sociology at Temple University. He is a founding Research Fellow of Temple’s Public Policy Lab, a non-resident Fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, and a research affiliate at the Population Research Institute at Pennsylvania State University.
His research focuses on immigration, immigrant integration, and the demographic measurement of the U.S. foreign-born population, with particular attention to legal status and its consequences for social inequality. He is co-author of Parents without Papers: The Progress and Pitfalls of Mexican American Integration (Russell Sage Foundation, 2015), and, with Jennifer Van Hook, Texas-Style Exclusion: Mexican Americans and the Legacy of Limited Opportunity (Russell Sage Foundation, 2024). His scholarship has appeared in leading journals including Demography, International Migration Review, Social Forces, Social Science Research, Demographic Research, and the Du Bois Review, among others.

Bachmeier’s research has had significant policy impact. His work on the measurement of legal status underlies widely used estimates of the unauthorized immigrant population produced by the Migration Policy Institute, which are used extensively by policymakers, researchers, and immigrant-serving organizations. These estimates informed policy discussions surrounding the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) program, and his methodological work has been cited in multiple amici curiae briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in cases related to DACA and DAPA.

His current research examines how immigration policies, legal statuses, and local contexts shape the life course trajectories and intergenerational mobility of immigrants and their children in the United States. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine.

Selected Publications

Books

Van Hook, Jennifer, and James D. Bachmeier. 2024. Texas-Style Exclusion: Mexican Americans and the Legacy of Limited Opportunity. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
https://www.russellsage.org/publications/texas-style-exclusion
 
Bean, Frank D., Susan K. Brown, and James D. Bachmeier.  2015. Parents without Papers: The Progress and Pitfalls of Mexican-American Integration. New York, NY: Russell Sage.

  • Winner of the 2016 Otis Dudley Duncan Book Award, American Sociological Association, Sociology of Population Section
  • Honorable Mention, 2016 Thomas and Znaniecki Book Award, American Sociological Association, International Migration Section

Articles

  • Spence, Cody, James D. Bachmeier, Claire Altman, Jennifer Van Hook, Kendal Lowrey. 2026. “Migration Status Gradients in Immigrant Poverty: A Comparison of Imputation Methods.” In press, Sociological Methods and Research. Available online: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00491241251379461#tab-contributors 
  • Lowrey, Kendal, Jennifer Van Hook, James D. Bachmeier and Thomas B. Foster. 2021.“Leapfrogging the Melting Pot? European Immigrants’ Intergenerational Mobility across the Twentieth Century.” Sociological Science 8: 480-552.
  • Spence, Cody, James D. Bachmeier, Claire E. Altman, and Christal Hamilton. 2020. “The Association between Legal Status and Poverty among Immigrants: A Methodological Caution.” Demography 57(6): 2327-2335. 
  • Van Hook, Jennifer, James D. Bachmeier, Ofer Harel, and Donna L. Coffman. 2015. “Can We Spin Straw into Gold? An Evaluation of Immigrant Legal Status Imputation Approaches.” Demography 52(1): 329-354.
  • Bachmeier, James D., Jennifer Van Hook, and Frank D. Bean. 2014. “Can We Measure Immigrants’ Legal Status?  Lessons from Two U.S. Surveys.” International Migration Review 48(2): 538-566.
  • Leerkes, Arjen, James D. Bachmeier, and Mark A. Leach. 2013. “When the Border is ‘Everywhere’: State-Level Variation in Migration Control and Changing Settlement Patterns of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population in the United States.” International Migration Review 47(4): 910-943.
  • Bachmeier, James D. 2013. “Cumulative Causation, Co-Ethnic Settlement Maturity, and Mexican Migration to U.S. Metropolitan Areas, 1995-2000.” Social Forces 91(4): 1293-1317.
  • Bean, Frank D., Mark A. Leach, Susan K. Brown, James D. Bachmeier, and John Hipp. 2011. “The Educational Legacy of Unauthorized Migration: Comparisons across U.S.-Immigrant Groups in How Parents’ Status Affects Their Offspring.” International Migration Review 45(2): 348-385.

Courses Taught

  • Ethnicity and the Immigration Experience in the United States