Research Partners - Institutions

The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit, research organization, founded in 1985 by Otis Graham Jr. The Center’s mission is to provide immigration policymakers, the academic community, news media, and the public with reliable information about the social, economic, environmental, security, and fiscal consequences of legal and illegal immigration into the United States. 

The Center has a program of activities on border-related human trafficking, which include research and analysis on the scale of human trafficking involving foreign actors and non-citizens within the United States, abuse of entry programs for the purpose of trafficking (with a focus on labor trafficking), and the need to reform the T visa program for victims of trafficking. Our areas of expertise include immigration law and policy, visa programs, immigration enforcement, and transnational criminal organizations. The Center advises federal and state lawmakers on policy reforms to combat border-related human trafficking and participates in training programs for law enforcement agencies. Together with the University of Houston's Borders + Trade Institute, the Center is a co-sponsor of an annual conference on research and technology needs to support agencies and organizations involved in combating human trafficking.

The Human Trafficking Data Research (HTDR) Project at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences provides a scientific, multi-disciplinary approach to make human trafficking data work. HTDR’s mission is to facilitate collaborative efforts to enhance human trafficking data efficacy to broaden collective knowledge and utilization.  

SMU Human Trafficking Data Research (HTDR) Project has the mission to Make Human Trafficking Data Work by facilitating collaborative efforts to enhance human trafficking data efficacy to broaden collective knowledge and utilization. The HTDR Project built and manages the SMU Human Trafficking Data Warehouse that allows owners of human trafficking data to collect, clean, store, enrich, analyze, visualize, and disseminate human trafficking data; gain access to other data that overlaps and enhances data efficacy; and provide secure access to law enforcement, policymakers, researchers, and other credentialed key stakeholders of human trafficking data. The HTDR Project Team consults with organizations and individuals interested in collecting, enhancing, and analyzing human trafficking data; builds expert teams of practitioners, policymakers, and researchers to collaborate on human trafficking research projects; designs custom online dashboards for data analysis and visualization; and works to clean and enhance human trafficking data. The core values of the HTDR Project are collaboration, expert teamwork, data security, and efficiency.