Roberto Suro

Biography

Roberto Suro held a joint appointment as a professor in the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism and the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. He was awarded a Berlin Prize for his scholarship on immigration and was the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at the American Academy in Berlin in 2019. He was a recipient of a 2018 USC Mentoring Award for his work with undergraduate students.

As associate director of the Sol Price Center for Social Innovation, Suro leads the Southern California Symposium, an executive education program that brings together social actors from a variety of fields for intense consideration on the long-term challenges facing the region. He was also the former director of the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, an interdisciplinary university research center exploring the challenges and opportunities of demographic diversity in the 21st century global city.

Suro contributes commentaries on immigration policy and Latino politics for The New York Times Sunday Review and other publications. Recently, his scholarly writing has focused on migration to the United States from Central America.

Prior to joining the USC faculty in August 2007, he was director of the Pew Hispanic Center, a research organization in Washington D.C. that he founded in 2001, and in 2004 he was part of the management team that launched the Pew Research Center. Suro supervised the production of more than 100 publications that offered non-partisan statistical analysis and public opinion surveys chronicling the rapid growth of the Latino population and its implications for the nation as a whole. Under his leadership, the Center also organized numerous research and policy conferences with a variety of collaborators including the Inter-American Development Bank, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Suro’s journalistic career began in 1974 at the City News Bureau of Chicago as a police reporter, and after tours at the Chicago Sun Times and the Chicago Tribune he joined TIME Magazine, where he worked as a correspondent in the Chicago, Washington, Beirut and Rome bureaus. In 1985 he started at The New York Times with postings as bureau chief in Rome and Houston. After a year as an Alicia Patterson Fellow, Suro was hired at The Washington Post as a staff writer on the national desk, eventually covering a variety of beats including the Justice Department and the Pentagon and serving as deputy national editor.

Suro is author of Writing Immigration: Scholars and Journalists in Dialogue (U of CA Press, 2011) co-edited with Marcelo Suarez-Orozco and Vivian Louie; Strangers Among Us: Latino Lives in a Changing America, (Vintage, 1999), Watching America’s Door: The Immigration Backlash and the New Policy Debate, (Twentieth Century Fund, 1996) and Remembering the American Dream: Hispanic Immigration and National Policy, (Twentieth Century Fund, 1994) as well as more than three dozen book chapters, reports and other publications related to Latinos and immigration.

Selected Publications

• Zenteno, R. & Suro, R. (2021). Chapter 4 Recession versus Removals: Which Finished Mexican Unauthorized Migration?. In R. Hinojosa-Ojeda & E. Telles (Eds.) The Trump Paradox (pp. 63-77). Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Suro, R. (2012). Counterpoint: The Case Against Arizona’s SB 1070. In J. Gans et. al. (Eds.) Debates on U.S. Immigration, 182-190, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
• Suro, R. , Katz, V. S., & Ang, A. (2012). An Ecological Perspective on U.S. Latinos’ Health Communication Behaviors, Access and Outcomes. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 34(3), 437-456.