As a Fellow at Cornell University’s Migration and Human Rights Program, Seema Nanda explores the intersection of immigration and labor policy, seeking innovative solutions that serve both workers and employers.
“One of the most valuable aspects of the Cornell fellowship is engaging with other fellows who come from different perspectives and finding areas of common ground,” she said recently. “If we, as Fellows, can find common ground, so can the country.”
It is an aim that has guided her career.
After earning her undergraduate degree from Brown University and J.D. from Boston College Law School, Nanda began her career as an associate at Davis Wright Tremaine in Seattle before joining the National Labor Relations Board as an attorney.
She later led the Office of Immigrant and Employee Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice and oversaw immigration and labor policy initiatives in the Obama administration as Chief of Staff to Secretary of Labor Tom Perez.
Under President Joe Biden, Nanda served as Solicitor of Labor, leading a team of 500 attorneys to enforce labor laws, advise the Secretary of Labor on key regulations, and oversee programs, including H-2A and H-2B visas.
“Government service gave me the ability to make positive change at scale and do work that directly affected people’s lives,” she said. “I loved that aspect.”
Decades ago, her own parents also immigrated from India in a move made possible by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which abolished discriminatory caps that had previously excluded immigrants from much of Asia.
“Our immigration laws are a key part of my story,” she said. “I’m able to do this work because we had a major overhaul of immigration laws.”
But while the broader US immigration system saw legislative updates in 1990 and 1996, many core employment-based immigration statutes have not been comprehensively reformed in more than half a century, Nanda said.
It is that gap that is now central to her work with the Migration and Human Rights Program, where she is working on identifying a common set of principles to guide future migration systems.
“The goal isn’t to patch up a broken program, but to reimagine one that actually serves both workers and employers,” Nanda said.
Among the questions she is asking: How do we think about enforcement and compliance in ways that make workers’ lives better? Should employers be the ones verifying workplace eligibility? How do we ensure that enforcement tools are used to protect all workers? And how do we design programs that work in practice for US workers and businesses that want to compete fairly?
“If we can acknowledge different perspectives, try new ideas, and test new ways of doing things,” she said, “we can do big things.”