JOSÉ O. PÉREZ
Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University-San Antonio, and I hold a Ph.D. in Political Science from The Ohio State University (2025). My current research areas include: migration and refugee politics, security studies, and global health politics, with a regional focus on Latin America. My research publications include peer-reviewed articles in the European Journal of International Relations, Security Studies, Security Dialogue, International Feminist Journal of Politics, and Latin American Perspectives.
My current book project, Governing by Omission: Migration, Citizenship, and State Ambivalence in Brazil (working title), examines Brazil's response to Venezuelan migration through "Operation Welcome." Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork and hundreds of interviews across five Brazilian field sites, the manuscript argues that Brazil's federal government retains tight control over certain domestic security tasks (documentation, border logistics, resettlement processes), while ceding the work of substantive integration to local officials, civil society, and migrants themselves. I term this dynamic "Brazilian Migration Governance," or a mode of governing migration in which the state's ambivalence at the top produces unevenly distributed, differentiated forms of citizenship on the ground. Tracing this process across humanitarian shelters, street-level bureaucratic discretion, healthcare access, and labor markets, the manuscript advances that gaps between formal and substantive citizenship are not always a product of incomplete policy, nor are they only a space communities fill from below through civic participation. Instead, these substantive citizenship gaps can be a governance technique a state actively depends on and quietly incentivizes instead of institutionalizing rights directly. This research was funded by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Grant, among various other grants.
My family and I are originally from Holguín, Cuba, but I grew up in Tampa, Florida. Outside of academia, I enjoy gardening, foreign films and series, exploring new restaurants, and traveling.
