Carlos Vargas-Silva
Carlos Vargas-Silva
Director of COMPAS
School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography
Carlos Vargas-Silva is Director of the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) and Professor in Migration Studies at the University of Oxford. He is also the Director of the Doctoral Programme in Migration Studies and a member of Kellogg College. Carlos is co-founder and current Editor-in-Chief of the journal Migration Studies.
He is Principal Investigator of a project that explores the social impacts of refugee resettlement in the United States and is the Oxford leader for the MIGNEX project, a large initiative on migration and development. His research focuses on the interaction of migration, including forced migration, with labour markets and public services in migrant sending and receiving countries.
From 2017 to 2019, Carlos was the Principal Investigator and Consortium Leader for the Horizon 2020 REMINDER project, a major research initiative that explored the implications of migration in Europe. This project explored, among others, issues related to the impacts of migrant inflows on access to public services, and the health of the local population. During that period, he was also Principal Investigator for the ECONREF project, which explored the integration of refugees in the UK. This project explored differences between refugees and other migrants in labour market outcomes, entrepreneurship and health.
From 2013 to 2015, he was Principal Investigator for the LAMFOR project, which explored the economic consequences of refugee movements in the Great Lakes region of Africa. The outputs of this project include studies of the consequences of hosting refugees in Tanzania (2015, 2016), the outcomes of refugees returning to Burundi and the impact of refugee repatriation on receiving communities.
He was one of the researchers who developed the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford in 2010, and acted as Director of the Observatory in 2014 and 2017.
Carlos teaches in the MSc in Migration Studies at Oxford. He also supervises doctoral students interested in migration (in intersection with labour markets, development, and/or public policy) and welcomes new potential DPhil students interested in these areas. He also works with a vibrant group of post-doctoral fellows and is available for collaboration with early career researchers who want to consolidate their research in these topics.
