As the last event of our CRC 1342 Jour Fixe lecture series in the summer semester, Sara Niedzwiecki from the University of California, Santa Cruz, gave a lecture on "Immigrants and the Welfare State in Latin America. Barriers to access" on June 19, 2024. She presented her current research on the barriers that immigrants face to accessing social policy in middle-income South American countries with high rates of immigration like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. As a result of her research, Prof. Niedzwiecki has proposed an index called IBASP to measure these barriers. Based on various surveys and interviews with policy-makers and administrative employees, Sara Niedzwiecki has been able to draw a nuanced picture of the development of social policy in countries with high levels of immigration and put it up for discussion.The lecture was not only attended by numerous colleagues on site, but could also be followed via video conference format.

Sara Niedzwiecki is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She studies social policy, subnational politics, and immigration in Latin America. Sara is the author of Uneven Social Policies: The Politics of Subnational Variation in Latin America (2018, Cambridge University Press), which was awarded LASA's Donna Lee Van Cott Book Award from The Political Institutions Section and the International Public Policy Association's IPPA Book Award.