Katrina Burgess
Speaker
Professor of Political Economy, Director of Leir Institute for Migration and Human Security, Fletcher School, Tufts
Betting on Hope: What We Got Wrong About the U.S. Border Crisis
Date and Time
October 13, 2026
12:00PM - 01:30PM EDT
Location
CGIS South, Room S216
No registration required to attend in person.
This presentation uses migrant stories and decision-making theory to explain why U.S. “prevention through deterrence” policies have raised the human and financial costs of migration without reliably stopping people from coming. Drawing on interviews conducted along the migrant route from Colombia to the U.S. border in summer 2023, the presentation argues that many migrants are operating from a “domain of loss,” where poverty, insecurity, repression, family separation, or the absence of a viable future make them more willing to take dangerous risks. Through selected stories, the presentation illustrates how hope, fear, faith, and shifting information shape migrants’ calculations, often leading them to discount the dangers of the journey while overestimating the chance of reaching safety or opportunity in the United States.
This event is presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
Steven Levitsky
Moderator
Director, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies; David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies; Professor of Government, Harvard
Bios
Dr. Katrina Burgess is Professor of Political Economy and Director of the Henry J. Leir Institute for Migration and Human Security at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. She is the author of two award-winning books and is working on a third tentatively entitled Betting on Hope: What We Got Wrong about the U.S. Border Crisis. In addition to publishing widely on labor politics, Latin American political economy, remittances, migration, and diasporas, she wrote and produced a 2020 documentary, Waylaid in Tijuana, about Haitian and Central American migrants whose journeys to the United States were disrupted by shifts in U.S. policy. She is currently co-leading a three-year project, funded by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, on how the securitization of migration by the United States and Europe is affecting global peace and security.
Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times Best-Seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. He has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022). He and Lucan Way are currently working on a book on democratic resilience across the world.
Professor Levitsky has written for New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic, and he has been a columnist for La Republica (Peru) and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil).