Saúl Ramírez ’19 Receives 2020 Soros Fellowship for New Americans

Saúl Ramírez ’19 has received a 2020 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, a graduate school fellowship for outstanding immigrants and children of immigrants in the United States.

The 30 recipients this year were selected from a record-breaking pool of 2,211 applicants. Each of the recipients was chosen for their potential to make significant contributions to U.S. society, culture, or their academic field and will receive up to $90,000 in funding over two years to support their graduate studies.

“I love my field — the intersection of law and sociology — because it allows me to combine theory, empirics, and real-world applications,” Ramírez said. “For instance, I can conduct sociological research that may influence criminal and immigration laws in the future. Similarly, I can, for example, scrutinize judicial opinions and make sense of their contributions to the meaning of social phenomena, like race.”

The 2020 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows are all the children of immigrants, green card holders, naturalized citizens, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) recipients, or visa holders who graduated from both high school and college in the United States, according to the program.

“At a time when all forms of immigration are under attack, it’s more important than ever to be celebrating the achievements and contributions of immigrants and refugees from across the world,” said Craig Harwood, who directs the Fellowship program. “Our country and universities are enriched by the ingenuity that comes from abroad. When we honor and invest in New Americans our nation is stronger — the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows are a perfect demonstration of that.” 

Founded by Hungarian immigrants, Daisy M. Soros and her late husband Paul Soros (1926–2013), the program honors continuing generations of immigrant contributions to the United States.

Yale Law School 2020 Soros Fellow Bio:

Fellowship awarded to support work towards a Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard University

Saúl Ramírez was born in the United States and raised in Santa Ana, California, a predominantly working-class, Spanish-speaking, immigrant community. Ramírez’s parents had relocated from El Sabino — an impoverished, rural town in Guanajuato, México — where their education had been limited to grade school. Having supported their six children by working relentlessly in low-paying, precarious jobs for over forty years, Ramírez’s parents continue to inspire him to chase his academic dreams to contribute to the quest for legal and social justice.

Accordingly, Ramírez graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2016, where his majors were Chicano studies and ethnic studies, and his minors were education and global poverty and practice. In addition to Ramírez multidisciplinary undergraduate training, culminating in an honors thesis that analyzed Central American unaccompanied immigrant minors’ experiences, his legal internships during college cemented his desire to pursue law. He aspired to mitigate the immigration- and criminal-law-related consequences he witnessed his loved ones and community enduring.

Ramírez earned his J.D. from Yale Law School in 2019. There, he was awarded the C. LaRue Munson Prize for representing clients and undertaking policy advocacy through the Advanced Criminal Justice Clinic, Advanced Sentencing Clinic, Advanced Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic, and Challenging Mass Incarceration Clinic. Moreover, Ramírez was the Latinx Law Students Association’s vice president, First Generation Professionals’ alumni chair, and Rebellious Lawyering Conference’s codirector. Furthermore, Ramírez was fortunate to be a research assistant for J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law James Forman, Jr. ’92 and Professor of Law Issa Kohler-Hausmann ’08, faculty who combine interdisciplinary tools to understand and address injustices that marginalized people face. Additionally, the invaluable mentorship Ramírez received from Associate Professor of Law Monica Bell ’09 confirmed his aspiration to study sociology at a doctoral level.

As a sociology Ph.D. student at Harvard University, Ramírez is a research assistant for Professor Mary Waters and intends on generating legal and sociological scholarship on “crimmigration”: the intersection of the immigration and criminal justice systems. Wishing to eradicate mass incarceration and deportations, issues that profoundly impact families like his, Ramírez hopes to educate, mentor, and support future generations of students, especially other New Americans.