PROGRAM

The Roosevelt House Public Policy Program, together with the Hunter College Department of Political Science, are pleased to present a panel discussion on the key policy issues shaping the historic 2024 Presidential Election—featuring expert analysis from Hunter faculty members. As Election Day nears, this event will provide an opportunity to learn from some of our most esteemed Hunter faculty members, and to ask your most burning policy questions.

Panelists will include Sociology Professor Nancy Foner on immigration and the asylum crisis; Cynthia Roberts, from the Political Science Department, on foreign policy and the influence of presidential advisors over military and diplomatic engagements abroad; Tim Goodspeed, from the Economics Department, on the national debt and balancing the budget; Charles Tien, Political Science Professor and Director of the Asian American Studies Program, on each party’s chances of securing a majority in Congress; and Chaz Briscoe, from the department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, on the role of race in electoral politics. The discussion will be moderated by Interim Director of the Public Policy Program Lina Newton.

Panelists:

Chaz Briscoe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies. He graduated in 2022 with his Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on racial politics, democratic institutions, Black political movements, and the intersection of race, power, and climate justice. He is working on turning his dissertation, “Exhibiting a Black Ecology of Environmental Degradation: Anti-Blackness Coalescing Around Multiple Sites of Power,” into a book. He has published articles on group responses to Black mobilization, critiques of racial progress, and the connections between environmental degradation and Black disposability, including a forthcoming article in Politics, Groups, and Identities.

Nancy Foner is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Sociology. Her recent work focuses on comparing immigration in the U.S. today and in the past; immigrants in the U.S. and Europe; and how immigration has been remaking American society. She has written extensively on immigration to New York City as well as Jamaican migration to New York and London. Foner is the author or editor of 20 books, most recently One Quarter of the Nation: Immigration and the Transformation of America.

Timothy Goodspeed is Professor of Economics at Hunter, where he has taught since 1994. Prior to teaching here, Goodspeed worked as an economist at the U.S. Department of the Treasury in the Office of Tax Analysis in both the individual and international tax divisions. He is also a longtime adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. His research relates to taxation, intergovernmental fiscal relations, state and local public finance, tax competition and international taxation including the tax treatment of multinational corporations. His work has appeared in the Public Finance Review and the Journal of Public Economics.

Lina Newton, moderator, is the Interim Director of the Public Policy Program at Roosevelt House and Professor of Political Science. She specializes in American politics and is an expert in U.S. immigration policy. Her research on intergovernmental conflict and cooperation in immigration policy has appeared in scholarly journals including Publius; The Journal of Federalism; Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies; and Law & Policy. She is the author of the book Illegal, Alien, or Immigrant: The Politics of Immigration Reform.

Cynthia Roberts is Professor of Political Science and a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. In 2019, she served at the Department of Defense as a policy adviser for the J-5 division of the the Joint Staff, focusing on nuclear strategy, plans, and policy. Roberts is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations and previously was Director of Hunter’s Russian Area Studies Graduate Program. Her research spans military and financial statecraft and she is the author of two monographs and numerous articles, book chapters, and reports in scholarly and policy journals.

Charles Tien is the Director of Hunter’s Asian American Studies Program and a Professor of Political Science. Previously, he served as chair of the political science department. A former congressional staffer on Capitol Hill, Tien was selected to be a Fulbright Scholar in American Politics at Renmin University in Beijing. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on American politics, women and minorities in politics, voting and elections, American foreign policy, research methods, and polling. He has published more than 30 scholarly articles, most recently in Presidential Studies Quarterly, and International Journal of Forecasting.