David Bacon (Keynote Speaker)

David Bacon is a writer and photojournalist based in Oakland and Berkeley, Calif. He is an associate editor at Pacific News Service and writes for TruthOut, The Nation, The American Prospect, The Progressive and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. He has been a reporter and documentary photographer for 18 years, shooting for many national publications. He has exhibited his work nationally and in Mexico, the UK and Germany. Bacon covers issues of labor, immigration and international politics. He travels frequently to Mexico, the Philippines, Europe and Iraq. He hosts a half-hour weekly radio show on labor, immigration and the global economy on KPFA-FM and is a frequent guest on KQED-TV's This Week in Northern California.

For twenty years, Bacon was a labor organizer for unions in which immigrant workers made up a large percentage of the membership. Those include the United Farm Workers, the United Electrical Workers, the International Ladies' Garment Workers, the Molders Union and others. Those experiences gave him a unique insight into changing conditions in the workforce, the impact of the global economy and migration, and how these factors influence the struggle for workers rights. Bacon was chair of the board of the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights and helped organize the Labor Immigrant Organizers Network and the Santa Clara Center for Occupational Safety and Health. He served on the board of the Media Alliance and belongs to the Northern California Media Workers Guild. His book, The Children of NAFTA, was published by the University of California Press in March, 2004, and a photodocumentary project sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, Communities Without Borders, was published by the ILR/Cornell University Press in October 2006.

In one of his latest projects, Living Under the Trees, sponsored by the California Council for the Humanities and California Rural Legal Assistance, Bacon is photographing and interviewing indigenous Mexican migrants working in California's fields. He has received numerous awards for both his writing and photography.  In his most recent book, Illegal People, Bacon explores the human side of globalization, exposing the many ways it uproots people in Latin America and Asia, driving them to migrate. At the same time, U.S. immigration policy makes the labor of those displaced people a crime in the United States. Illegal People explains why our national policy produces even more displacement, more migration, more immigration raids and a more divided, polarized society.

Alia El-Sawi

Alia El-Sawi has been with Tapestri Inc. since September 2005 and currently serves as the Anti-Human Trafficking Program Coordinator. In this capacity, she designs and provides trainings and outreach to mainstream service providers, law enforcement and community organizations on human trafficking. She works to establish collaborative relationships with other nonprofit organizations and law enforcement around the issue of human trafficking. El-Sawi also provides direct services to survivors of human trafficking. She has written several articles on the issue of women in developing communities. She has a bachelor's degree in international affairs and French from Mercer University.

Jamie B. Hernan

Jamie B. Hernan is the managing partner of Hernan Taylor & Lee. His practice focuses on civil rights litigation, contract negotiation and business litigation. He spends a considerable amount of time dedicated to protecting the constitutional rights of immigrant. Hernan is a frequent featured speaker or panelist in debates and other forums regarding immigration reform and immigrants’ rights. Prior to forming Hernan Taylor & Lee, Hernan was an attorney in the Atlanta office of the international law firm King & Spalding where he focused on banking & finance matters.

Julie Hotchkiss

Julie Hotchkiss is a research economist and policy adviser in the regional group of the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Her major fields of study are earnings and employment differentials across different groups of workers, variations in employment and earnings across time, and policy implications of changes in labor supply. Prior to joining the Bank in 2003, she was professor of economics at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. She began teaching as a senior associate and assistant professor of economics at the Policy Research Center at Georgia State University in 1989, and she joined the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies when the school was formed in 1996. Dr. Hotchkiss has published her research work in various journals, including Applied Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and the American Economic Review. Dr. Hotchiss has recently conducted research on undocumented worker employment and firm survival. Her research has examined if firms that hire undocumented workers have a competitve advantage in the market.

Gayla Jamison

Gayla Jamison has more than 20 years experience in social issue documentaries filmed in 17 countries on five continents. Her work has appeared on PBS, The Hallmark Channel, Turner Broadcasting, ABC, NBC, The Learning Channel, WGBH-TV, Univision and Galavision. Her most recent film, “Lives For Sale,” a documentary about sex trafficking, aired on PBS. She was supervising producer for “My Americas,” a 13-part series about spirituality and culture in Latin America funded in part by Latino Public Broadcasting and aired on public television. Independent documentaries include “Scraps of Life,” about Chilean women protesting the Pinochet dictatorship, “Approach of Dawn,” which documents Maya women during the Guatemalan civil war, and “Living in America: 100 Years of Ybor City,” a portrait of the Spanish-Cuban-Italian community in Tampa, Fla. Her documentaries have received numerous awards, including the Gabriel Award; Award of Merit, Latin American Studies Association; Gold Apple, National Educational Media Network Film Festival; Special Jury Award, USA Film Festival; and Golden and Silver Hugos, Chicago International Film Festival.

Teodoro Maus

Teodoro Maus was born in Mexico City. He served in the Mexican foreign service from 1978 until 2001. As a foreign service officer, Maus served as a delegate to the United Nations for Mexico and the Counsul General of Mexico to the Southeastern United States. He retired from the foreign service with the rank of ambassador. After retirement, Maus worked in consulting. He also served two years as an appointed minister representative for the Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources, based in the Mexican embassy in Washington, D.C. In 2006, he obtained naturalization as a citizen of the United States. The following year he was elected as president of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights. Maus also is a trained architect and an accomplished painter and filmmaker.

Kerry McGrath

Kerry McGrath received her JD from New York University School of Law. She received her undergraduate degree in computer science and graduated magna cum laude from Duke University. She was an adjunct professor at Emory University from 1999 to 2004. She has been a member of the Georgia, New York and Florida bars and the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Over the past eighteen years, she has represented immigrants in numerous federal and state courts as well as at administrative hearings. McGrath has been recognized for her work on behalf of Georgia’s immigrants by the Emory Public Interest Committee (EPIC) and Emory Law, as a recipient of its annual Inspiration Award in 1997. Recently, she was given an Ally Award by Caminar Latino for her years of work in preventing domestic violence in Hispanic families. She was recently recognized by the State Bar of Georgia for her assistance to low-income people in Georgia.

Adelina Nicholls

Adelina Nicholls was born in México City. She studied sociology at the Political and Social Sciences College at the Autonomous National University of México U.N.A.M. Nicholls has spent many years dedicating herself to the defense of Immigrants’ civil and human rights. She was co-founder and a former president of the Coordinating Council of Latino Community Leaders of Atlanta. She has organized workshops for grassroots community organizing and leadership statewide. She served as the coordinator of a statewide campaign targeting former Gov. Roy Barnes which collected more than 30,000 signatures demanding driver’s licenses. Nicholls was instrumental in the organizing of the First Latino March for Dignity and the March 17 Alliance for immigration reform which gathered 70,000 people in 2006. Currently she works as the executive director of Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (former Coordinadora de Líderes Comunitarios).

Mary E. Odem

Mary E. Odem is an associate professor in the Department of History at Emory University. She has a joint appointment with the Department of Women's Studies focusing on gender, sexuality, immigration, race and ethnicity. Odem is the author of Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920, which won the President's Book Award from the Social Science History Association. She is co-editor of Confronting Rape and Sexual Assault and Latino Immigration and the Transformation of the U.S. South. Her research and teaching examine the history of women and gender in the modern United States and Latin American immigration in the 20th century. Her current research explores Mexican and Central American immigration to the U.S. South since 1980, focusing on themes of incorporation, transnationalism, gender and family, and race/ethnicity. Odem currently is developing research around migration, remittances and international development in conjunction with faculty from across Emory University, and international partners in Guatemala and the Domenican Republic.

Polly J. Price

Polly J. Price is associate dean of faculty and professor of law at Emory University School of Law. She is the author of two books and numerous articles. At Emory, she has taught torts, legal methods, American legal history, pretrial litigation and Latin American legal systems, and seminars in tort law and legal history. In June 2009, the Atlanta Journal Constitution featured Professor Price's perspective in a debate over immigration and citizenship. She is involved in an interdisciplinary exploration of migration, remittances and international development in conjunction with faculty from across Emory University, and international partners in Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.

Edward Queen

Edward Queen directs the D. Abbott Turner Program in Ethics and Servant Leadership at Emory University’s Center for Ethics. At Emory he also serves as co-convener of the Initiative in Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding and director of Research Activities at the Institute of Human Rights. Queen received his BA from Birmingham-Southern College, his MA and PhD degrees from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago and his JD from the Indiana University School of Law - Indianapolis. Prior to joining the Center for Ethics, Queen served as Faculty and Curriculum Development Adviser to the Faculty of Law of South East European University, Macedonia where he focused on the transition to democracy, religious and ethnic minority rights and legal education reform. Among the human rights organizations with which he has worked are the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights of the Republic of Macedonia and the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. Queen also served as administrator of the International Human Rights Internship Program at the IU School of Law - Indianapolis. The founding director of both the Religion and Philanthropy Project at the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy and of the Islamic Society of North America's Fellowship Program in Nonprofit Management and Governance and a former program officer at Lilly Endowment Inc., Queen has consulted with numerous nonprofit, governmental and educational organizations, including the Pew Charitable Trusts, Independent Sector, USAID, the DeKalb County Center for Torture and Trauma Survivors and the Corporation for National and Community Service.

Natsu Taylor Saito

Natsu Taylor Saito is a professor of Law at Georgia State University College of Law, joining the faculty in 1994. She teaches international law and human rights, race and the law, immigration, criminal procedure and professional responsibility. She serves as an adviser to the Asian American Law Student Association and the Hispanic Student Bar Association. Professor Saito’s scholarship focuses on the legal history of race in the United States; the plenary power doctrine as applied to immigrants, American Indians and U.S. territorial possessions; and the human rights implications of U.S. governmental policies, particularly with regard to the suppression of political dissent. Professor Saito graduated from Swarthmore College in 1977 and received a Masters of Education from Georgia State University in 1982. She worked as a community organizer for the South DeKalb Community Center from 1977 to 1980, then taught social studies at Horizons School and English as a Second Language for the Adult Education Department of the Atlanta Board of Education. After receiving her JD from Yale Law School in 1987, Professor Saito worked for Arnall, Golden & Gregory, Troutman Sanders and Powell, Goldstein, Frazer & Murphy, and taught as an adjunct at Emory Law. She is a member of the Georgia Bar and has on the Committee on the Involvement of Women & Minorities in the Profession and the Georgia Supreme Court’s Commission on Racial and Ethnic Bias in the Courts.

Jonathan Todres

Jonathan Todres is an associate professor of law at Georgia State University's College of Law. Professor Todres serves as a regular adviser to non-governmental organizations working to combat commercial sexual exploitation of children. He also has held several leadership posts within the ABA Section of International Law, including chair of the section’s International Health Law Committee and vice chair of its International Human Rights Committee. Professor Todres received his JD from Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, and his BA (with high honors in International Development) from Clark University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Prior to attending law school, he worked for a number of years in international health and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand. Professor Todres is the co-editor of U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child: An Analysis of Treaty Provisions and Implications of U.S. Ratification and a number of articles on children’s rights and health law issues.

Kirsten Widner

After a successful career in business, Widner went to law school to pursue a career in child advocacy. During law school, she worked to serve the legal needs of abused and neglected children through internships with the San Diego Volunteer Lawyer Program's Education Law Unit, the San Diego Public Defender's Juvenile Dependency Division and the Children's Law Center of Los Angeles. She also clerked for San Diego County Counsel, representing the Department of Children and Family Services in abuse and neglect cases. She gained policy insight and advocacy experience through her work in the University of San Diego's Center for Public Interest Law and Child Advocacy Institute. She was an editor of the San Diego Law Review and her student Comment on a child welfare-related issue was published by the journal. Widner also was a member of her law school's national moot court team, winning a number of national honors, including Best Oralist in Capital University's 2007 Adoption and Child Advocacy Competition. She graduated law school with honors, was awarded the Dean's Distinguished Service Award and the D'Angelo Outstanding Child Advocate Award, and was elected to the Order of the Barristers. Widner now works with Emory Law's Barton Child Law and Policy Clinic.