Jacob Richard Thomas (唐龙）is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and a recently appointed Research Fellow at Princeton University’s Center on Migration and Development (honorific appointment). In 2020 he obtained his Ph.D from the Department of Sociology at University of California, Los Angeles. After serving as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University’s Center on Contemporary China during the 2020-2021 academic year, he joined the CUHK Department of Sociology in September of 2021. Dr. Thomas’s main research interests are international migration/mobility/travel, social stratification, sociology of law, economic sociology, mixed methods research, and U.S.-China relations. His early research projects at University of Chicago drew on political theory to both normatively and empirically critique migrant-receiving country-centric perspectives of international migration merely as “immigration” and comparatively and historically analyze why the national sources of immigrants coming from Canada and Australia diversified so rapidly in the 1960s to 1980s. At University of California, Los Angeles, his Ph.D dissertation “The Denied, the Deterred and the Disenchanted,” surveyed over 2,500 individuals in Mainland China (the Non-Migrant Survey or NS) to explain why many might-have-been-migrants instead are either denied visas, deterred from applying at all, or went abroad to immigrate and then become disenchanted with the prospect and returned to their country of origin. He has expanded this project into a completed seven-chapter book manuscript that Cambridge University Press is now considering to put under contract based on recently positive reports. In addition, while a graduate student training in a diverse range of methods he completed many other migration- and travel-related papers that employ multilevel modeling regression, ethnographic methods, social network analysis, online survey experiments, quasi-experimental time series designs, computational analysis of social media text, interpretive analysis of artwork, and formal mathematical modeling, summaries of which one can find on his website. At Princeton he led a collaborative project with Lemeng Liang at Peking University, Sonoda Shigeto at Tokyo University, and Yu Xie at Princeton University to assess to the extent to which COVID-19 has impacted how unfavorably 13 OECD nationalities view both China and the United States in 2020 and also how the specific ways COVID-19 transformed their lives was associated with such increasingly unfavorable views.

Dr. Thomas has recently won a GRF research grant ($612,000 HKD) to fund an ongoing survey and oral history interview project about emigration out of Hong Kong in recent years . The project seeks to explain how those who have emigrated from Hong Kong since 2019 are different from those who thought about migrating but remained with respect to their traits, general reasons for migrating, and specific events. He is applying event-history models to survey data and analyzing discourses of migrants’ oral histories, to show how distinct waves of migration have changed over time. With data from emigrants and potential emigrants, he plans to estimate propensities to migrate, risk rates, and risk factors predisposing different types of individuals to emigrate from the population. For more information about this project please visit www.hkemigrationproject.space and for anyone who has thought about migrating out of Hong Kong and would like to participate in the online survey, please reach out to Jacob Thomas.

You can learn more about Jacob Thomas and his research at his personal website: http://jacobrthomas.me .