Yalidy Matos, PhD is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Her scholarship sits at the intersection of race, ethnicity, and politics (REP), immigration, and identity politics. Broadly, her work explores how race and gender operate for various groups in the United States, by asking timely questions that investigate important topics such as immigration politics and policy, voting behavior, and political representation.
In 2022, Matos was named a 2022 American Political Science Association Distinguished Junior Scholar in Political Psychology. Matos will be a Russell Sage Visiting Scholar in 2024-2025. Explore Yalidy’s fellowships and awards.
She graduated from The Ohio State University in Columbus, OH with a PhD in Political Science in 2015, and Connecticut College in New London, CT with a Bachelor of Arts in Government and Gender and Women’s Studies, and a minor in English in 2009. Prior to Rutgers, she was a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University. Explore Yalidy’s CV.
Why is immigration important to the United States? What structures immigration policy in the United States? How are immigration policies constructed? How has immigration policy changed in the U.S.?
Immigration has been at the heart of U.S. politics for centuries. In Moral and Immoral Whiteness in Immigration Politics, Matos examines the inherent moral, value-based, nature of white Americans’ immigration attitudes, including preferences on local immigration enforcement programs, federal immigration policy, and levels of legal immigration allowed. As immigration continues to be weaponized to divide, Matos highlights the importance in understanding the history of immigration in the United States and the ways in which whiteness structures these attitudes.
Yalidy Matos 