The Sociology of International Migration: Where We Have Been; Where Do We Go from Here? 1 Philip Kasinitz 2 Controversies about international migration expose the changing structure of and underlying assump- tions about societal membership in many nations. The sociology of international migration has emerged as an increasingly important subfield over the past decade in large part because it has tended to move beyond more narrow economic and demographic problems and has begun to address this fun- damentally sociological issue. In the future it will be particularly important that sociologists pay attention to how demographically changing societies define who is and is not a member. As such, legal status and the role of the state has become critically important. KEY WORDS: demographics; economics; global; immigration; policy; societal membership. INTRODUCTION The resurgence of immigration research in U.S. sociology has been one of the most remarkable developments in our discipline over the past two decades. As I have played a small part in this (and as my counterpart author of the accompanying article has played a much larger part), I hope readers will forgive my immodesty in pointing this out. But it is true. A subfield that was something of a backwater, largely subsumed under the rubric of race and ethnicity or ethnic studies, has become one of the discipline’s central concerns today. Since the mid 1990s, several sociologists who work in this area have been elected presidents of the ASA, the PAA, and several of the regional sociological societies, including (mostly notably, of course) the ESS. Indeed, during the decade of the 2000s, three of the winners of the ASA Distinguished Publication Award—Portes and Rumbaut’s Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation in 2002, Robert Smith’s Mexican New York in 2008, and Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, Waters, and Holdaway’s Inheriting the City in 2010—were all more or less directly inspired by the research agenda about immigrant and second-generation incor- poration laid out by Professor Portes and his collaborators in the early 1990s. 1 Editor’s Note: This article is part of a two-article dialogue. See Portes (2012) for the companion piece. 2 Department of Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Room 6112.04, New York, New York 10016; e-mail: pkasinitz@gc.cuny.edu. Sociological Forum, Vol. 27, No. 3, September 2012 DOI: 10.1111/j.1573-7861.2012.01336.x 579 Ó 2012 Eastern Sociological Society