Ninez Ponce is associate director at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the principal investigator of the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS). In this brief interview, Ponce discusses the new research collaboration between five UC campuses ― UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UC Riverside and UC San Diego ― that will focus on immigration and how CHIS will play a significant role in the project.

Q: What is the focus of the new UC collaboration?

​We want to study how immigrants are integrated into the state by becoming workers, entrepreneurs, voters and taxpayers. California has one-third of the U.S. immigrant population – more than 10 million people, including an estimated 2.6 million undocumented immigrants. Their contributions to the state are important now and will be even more so in the future: In 2013, 37.9 percent of children born in California were to foreign-born mothers. Our aim is to help everyone in California, from policymakers to the public, have a better understanding of immigrants and their integration into the state to help us better prepare for future impacts on the state in education, the workplace, public health, politics and many other areas.

Q: What kind of new questions will CHIS ask that will shape the new project?

We are still trying to determine the exact questions, but we want to know about each generation in an immigrant family. How well did the first generation integrate into its community over time? How do their lives compare to their children's or grandchildren's? What policies or programs have helped ― or prevented them ― from flourishing here?

We will interview both legal and undocumented immigrants to build a full picture of multigenerational immigrant families.

Q: What's different about this collaboration?

​Harnessing the knowledge of experts across five UC campuses in different fields of study will help us create a rich, multidimensional analysis of immigration. We'll measure education, occupations, wages, civic participation, health and more variables to find what barriers or assistance immigrants found as they navigated through different aspects of life in California. The experts in our project group will include political scientists, demographers, sociologists, economists and public health scientists.

Right now, we know very little about what role policies play in helping immigrants succeed ― or fail. By studying their experiences in the past and present, it will help guide state policy and organizational actions in the future.