Guest Lecture | Claudia Sadowski-Smith (Arizona) Crisis Response and Policy Precedent: Ukrainian Refugees and the Transformation of U.S. Immigration Since 2022

Join LSC visiting fellow Claudia Sadowski-Smith for a guest lecture on Ukrainian refugees and US migration policy since 2022. All are welcome to attend. No registration is required. 

This talk takes place in cooperation with the Regensburg European American Forum (REAF) and Denkraum Ukraine, a research initiative funded by the DAAD.

Abstract | This talk examines how the U.S. response to Ukrainian refugees following Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion marked the culmination of a broader shift toward temporary forms of protection under the Biden administration. In response to arrivals at the U.S.–Mexico border, the United States implemented large-scale humanitarian parole programs tied to private sponsorship. These initiatives enabled the entry of more than 230,000 Ukrainians and were later expanded to include migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

Since 2025, however, these programs - along with related refugee and asylum pathways - have been paused, scaled back, or challenged, often through critiques of their legality and scope . This shift highlights the growing political and legal contestation surrounding temporary protection mechanisms in U.S. humanitarian migration policy.

Bio | Claudia Sadowski-Smith is Professor of English and American Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of The New Immigrant Whiteness: Neoliberalism, Race, and Post-Soviet Migration to the United States (New York University Press, 2018) and Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States (University of Virginia Press, 2008). She is the editor of Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at U.S. Borders (Palgrave, 2002) and of three special journal issues--on the cultures of global postsocialisms, comparative border studies, and postsocialist literatures in the United States. In addition, Sadowski-Smith has published on climate migration, comparative histories of US migration, transnational adoption, and transnational reality TV. She is a visiting researcher at the LSC throughout July 2026.