Jeffrey Reitz

Dr. Jeffrey Reitz is an internationally recognized expert on immigration, ethnicity, and race relations. Performing research on Canada, with cross-national comparisons to the United States, Britain, Germany and Australia, he has provided important insights into immigrant experiences, and into policies and practices which determine the success of their efforts to find prosperity in their new homes.  
Reitz attended Columbia University. First majoring in applied mathematics, he received a Bachelor of Science degree before earning his Doctorate in Sociology.  
Reitz joined the Department of Sociology in 1970, and served as Chair of the department from 1980 until 1985. During this period, Reitz received a cross-appointment to the Centre for Industrial Relations, a research institute at U of T. From 1986 until 1992, he worked as the Coordinator of Applied Sociology, and then began a five year term as Graduate Coordinator of the Centre for Industrial Relations.  
In 1999, Reitz was appointed to the Robert F. Harney Professorship in Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies. Reitz is currently Director of the Collaborative Graduate Program in Ethnic and Pluralism Studies at the School of Graduate Studies.
Reitz has published 7 books and contributed chapters to several edited volumes. Two of his books have been translated into French, another into Japanese. His 1980 work, The Survival of Ethnic Groups, became a widely cited standard in the field of ethnic and race relations in Canada, and his most recent work, Warmth of the Welcome, was nominated for the Thomas and Znaniecki Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association.  
Reitz has also published numerous journal articles and research reports, and his groundbreaking research has received media coverage across Canada, and in the United States and England.
Reitz has lectured at universities around the world, including in the United States, Britain, Germany, Japan, Australia, India, and Hong Kong.  
In Canada, Reitz has made policy-related contributions at all levels of government and in the community as well. He has worked through the Multiculturalism Program, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and the Canadian Human Rights Commission. He has also provided input into the deliberations of Parliamentary Committees. He assisted the Child Abuse Program of the Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services from 1976 until 1984, and in 1985 he started working with the Children’s Aid Society of Metropolitan Toronto, work he continues today.  
Reitz is currently a member of the External Advisory Committee of the Race and Ethno-cultural Relations Certificate Program at Ryerson University, the Advisory Board of the Canada-Hong Kong Resource Centre at the Centre for Asia Pacific Studies, and is a national member of the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University.
Dr. Jeffrey Reitz has made a remarkable contribution to the fields of immigration and ethnicity. The institutional analysis that he pioneered has had international impact for both its theory and methodology, and has produced an innovative way of understanding the immigrant and ethnic experience in Canada and many other countries around the world.  
To understand what makes Canada unique, Reitz began comparing it to other countries. The first scholar in Canada – and one of the first in the world – to tackle this immensely complex problem, Reitz used comparative analyses to reveal patterns in immigrant experiences in Canada, the United States, Britain, Australia, and most recently Germany. He then began looking for factors that could account for the differences in experiences that he found.  
Reitz developed sophisticated methods to compare immigrant experiences across multiple ethnic groups and in multiple urban contexts, not simply comparing cities within one nation to those within another, but also looking for differences between cities within individual nations.  
Reitz determined four major ‘institutional’ factors that affect immigrants’ success at finding prosperity in their new homes. He examined international differences in immigration policies, labour markets, welfare usage patterns, and native-born and immigrant education levels, and found some startling patterns.  
Isolating for education levels, Reitz empirically demonstrated that although the education levels of immigrants have been rising, the education levels of people born in the subject countries have been increasing more rapidly. It is this ‘education gap’ that accounts for the steadily diminishing prospects that recent immigrants face.
Reitz’s work has also served to shatter many of the myths surrounding immigration. For example, there has been some backlash in the United States against immigrants because their welfare usage rates have been high. Reitz work has shown that this is not due to a flaw in U.S. immigration policy that allows poorly educated workers into the country. In fact, the U.S. out-competes Canada for skilled immigrants. The problem is that the education levels for native Americans is so high that the immigrants cannot keep up. As education levels in Canada continue to improve, immigrants to this nation will likely face similar problems in the future.  
Discrimination is also a factor that affects immigrants’ success, and Reitz has played a significant role in advancing methodologies to compare this cross-nationally. Reitz expanded upon a technique known as decomposition analysis that allows factors that affect earnings (e.g. education, perceived value of education) to be isolated, revealing differences in earnings based on (discriminatory) variables such as gender and ethnicity.  
Reitz was the first scholar to apply this advanced methodology and to incorporate survey and census data into his analysis. This allowed him to produce quantitative comparisons that demonstrated degrees of discrimination between ethnic groups, between nations, and even between individual cities.  
Reitz’s theoretical and methodological contributions promise to redefine how governments approach immigration and ethnicity issues now and into the future. As global migration levels continue to climb, his work will continue to gain in importance to scholars and policy-makers the world over.