suro@usc.edu
Roberto Suro
Roberto Suro holds a joint appointment as a professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the School of Policy, Planning and Development at the University of Southern California. He is also director of the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, an interdisicplinary university research center exploring the challenges and opportunities of demographic diversity in the 21st century global city. Suro's latest book is Writing Immigration: Scholars and Journalists in Dialogue (U of CA Press, 2011) co-edited with Marcelo Suarez-Orozco and Vivian Louie. He is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution, where his most recent publication is "Immigration and Poverty in America's Suburbs" (2011) with Audrey Singer and Jill H. Wilson. Suro also holds two major service positions outside the university: as a member of the board of directors of Independent Sector, the nation's largest association of philanthropies and charities, and as a trustee of the Haynes Foundation, a leading supporter of social science research in Los Angeles. 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 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.
