Fifty years have passed since the Bracero Program formally ended, yet its legacies endure. During this event, Professor Rodolfo Dirzo (Director, Center for Latin American Studies; Bing Professor of Environmental Science, Stanford University) will address the significance of the Bracero Program not only to the ancestry but also to the human and social capital of people of Mexican descent in the United States. Professor Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar (Director, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Stanley Morrison Professor of Law, Stanford University) will examine the legacy of the Bracero Program on the “here and now” of immigration reform. Their comments will be followed by “teachable moments” that will be shared by former high school teacher Ignacio Ornelas Rodriguez, who currently works in the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Stanford, where he conducts research on the Bracero Program. Following the talks and dinner, ten former braceros will be recognized.

Hosted by the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford (CLAS), the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University (FSI), and the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE).

ABOUT THE TOPIC: Key human rights instruments and leading scholars argue that minority language rights should be treated as human rights, both because language is constitutive of an individual’s cultural identity and because linguistic pluralism increases diversity. These treaties and academics assign the value of linguistic pluralism in diversity. But, this paper demonstrates, major human rights courts and quasi-judicial institutions are not, in fact, prepared to force states to swallow the dramatic costs entailed by a true diversity-protecting regime. Outside narrow exceptions or a path dependent national-political compromise, these enforcement bodies continuously allow the state to actively incentivize assimilation into the dominant culture and language of the majority. The minority can still maintain its distinct language, but only at its own cost. The slippage between the promise of rights and their actual interpretation carries some important political and economic benefits, but the resulting legal outcome does not provide the robust protection of diversity to which lip service is paid.  Importantly, the assimilationist nature of the jurisprudence is not indifferent to human rights. However, instead of advancing maximal linguistic diversity as a preeminent norm, the regime that is applied by judicial bodies supports a different set of human rights, those protecting linguistic minorities from discrimination, and promoting equal access of the group to market and political institutions.  The result is a tension between two human rights values: pluralism and equality.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Moria Paz is a Law and International Security Fellow at CISAC. She was an affiliate at CISAC from February 2012-July 2013. Before joining CISAC, she was a Lecturer at Stanford Law School and the Teaching Fellow of the Stanford Program for International Legal Studies (SPILS). Her current research examines issues of state control and freedom of movement through the entry point of travel documents. Earlier work examined the intersection between minorities, language rights, and international law. Moria received her S.J.D. degree from Harvard Law School. While at Harvard, she was awarded a number of fellowships, including at the Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations, The European Law Research Center, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

We use retrospectively reported data on smoking behavior of residents of Mainland China and Taiwan to compare and contrast patterns in smoking behavior over the life-course of individuals in these two regions. Because we construct the life-history of smoking for all survey respondents, our data cover an exceptionally long period of time – up to fifty years in both samples. During this period, both societies experienced substantial social and economic changes. The two regions developed at much different rates and the political systems of the two areas evolved in very different ways. More importantly, governments in the two areas set policies that caused the flow of information about the health risks of smoking to differ across the regions and over time. We exploit these differences, using counts of articles in newspapers from 1951 to present, to explore whether and how the arrival of information affected life-course smoking decisions of residents in the two areas. We also present evidence that suggests how prices/taxes and key historical events might have affected decisions to smoke.

Dean Lillard received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1991. From 1991 to 2012, he was a faculty member and senior research associate in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. In August 2012 he joined the Department Human Sciences at Ohio State University as an Associate Professor. He is Director and Project Manager of the Cross-National Equivalent File study that produces cross-national data. He is a member of the American Economics Association, the Population Association of America, the International Association for Research on Income and Wealth, the International Health Economics Association, the American Society for Health Economics, a Research Associate at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin, Germany, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He serves on the advisory board of the Danish National Institute for Social Research in Copenhagen, Denmark and the Cross-National Studies: Interdisciplinary Research and Training Program – a collaborative program run by the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), and together with the Mershon Centre at OSU.

Dean Lillard's current research focuses on health economics, the economics of schooling, and international comparisons of economic behavior. His research in health economics is primarily focused on the economics of the marketing and consumption of cigarettes and alcohol. His research on the economics of schooling includes studies of direct effects of policy on educational outcomes and on the role that education plays in other economic behaviors such as smoking, production of health, and earnings. His cross-national research ranges widely from comparisons of the role that obesity plays in determining labor market outcomes to comparisons of smoking behavior cross-nationally.