Migration, Violence, and the State
I study how people flee threats through migration, and how states respond to those migrants as a threat
Matthew Blanton
PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, and a predoctoral trainee at the Population Research Center. Five years leading a nonprofit in Guatemala, two years working on U.S. immigration policy, and now teaching data computing and biostatistics at Dell Medical School.
Two streams of research
Who moves under threat, and why—and the state systems that measure, deter, and displace.
Migration under threat
Threat evasion: why people move when staying becomes dangerous, and what that movement does to the families and communities it reshapes.
- Civil-war displacement and the migration streams it leaves behind
- Health, stress, and family separation after arrival
- Respondent-driven sampling of populations without a frame
How states respond to threat
Immigration enforcement, and how well administrative data captures what is actually happening.
- CBP apprehensions tested as a proxy for undocumented migration
- El Salvador’s state of exception and out-migration
- Asylum adjudication and prosecution at the border
Selected work
The Long Reverberation
How forced displacement produces durable migration streams.
Post-Migration Stressors
How precarity and discrimination shape refugee health in Costa Rica.
Sampling the Hard-to-Reach
Respondent-driven sampling for displaced populations without a sampling frame.
Are CBP Apprehensions a Reliable Proxy?
Testing border apprehension counts against undocumented migration from Guatemala.