At face value, a whale in the Arctic Ocean may have little in common with a Central American political refugee. What connects them, and countless other populations, is their broad identity as migrators.

Also: they’re among the hundreds of subjects explored by Cornell’s Migrations initiative, the University’s first-ever Global Grand Challenge—an initiative to unite the Hill’s top scholars under a common mission to tackle Earth’s problems.

Patricia Campos-Medina, executive director of the Worker Institute at ILR, discusses the labor market.

The Migrations initiative has awarded the 2023 community college fellowship to Mary Delmastro, assistant professor at Finger Lakes Community College. As a fellow, she will enhance her curriculum on racism, dispossession, and migration.

The DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program is the result of an executive action by President Barack Obama in 2012 to serve as a temporary stopgap measure for a small subset of the undocumented population in the United States. The DACA program does not provide formal immigration status, but rather is a form of prosecutorial discretion that provides work authorization and deportation deferral. A recent decision in the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Texas v. United States held that the DACA program is unlawful.

More conservative measures are likely to become law soon. Florida’s legislature is expected to take up a bill that would bring felony charges for “sheltering, transporting or hiring” undocumented immigrants. If passed, it would be one of the most punitive in the country, said Shannon Gleeson, professor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

“This is devastating for undocumented workers, who often work in jobs that are more poorly paid, dangerous, and subject to discrimination and harassment,” Gleeson said.

Estelle McKee, professor of law, discusses the transit ban proposed by the Biden administration, noting that New York state has volunteered to sponsor more Ukrainian refugees than any other state.

Deteriorating habitat conditions caused by climate change are wreaking havoc with the timing of bird migration. A new study demonstrates that birds can partially compensate for these changes by delaying the start of spring migration and completing the journey faster – but the strategy comes with a decline in overall survival.

“In migration studies there’s a lot of talk about the sorts of things that accrue to migrants through migration,” says Tristan D. Ivory, International and Comparative Labor. “We say that the act of migrating leads to various positive outcomes for migrants and their families. But we know that migration is a rare event, and the people who do it are a pretty select population who stand out compared to the folks who stayed behind. So maybe those who migrate would have experienced these gains regardless of whether they stayed or left.”

A medical company contracted by New York City to bring thousands of migrants up to date on vaccines struggled to train staff on how to choose doses and interpret international vaccine records in the early weeks of its operation, according to internal documents reviewed by Gothamist and interviews with current and former staff members.

BirdCast is a collaborative project of Colorado State University, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the University of Massachusetts that seeks to leverage that data to quantify bird migration. Machine learning is central to its operations. Researchers have known since the 1940s that birds show up on weather radar, but to make that data useful, we need to remove nonavian clutter and identify which scans contain bird movement.