UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies Wasserman Dean Marcelo Suárez-Orozco is at the Vatican to participate in the Third Ethics in Action Meeting today and Friday, May 26.

Suárez-Orozco, the co-director of the institute on immigration, globalization and education at UCLA, is co-presenting “The Drivers of Mass Migration and the Refugee Crisis — political, economic, environmental,” alongside Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute; and Romano Prodi, former president of the European Commission and former prime minister of Italy.

“War and terror, environmental dystopia, and unchecked climate change are the main drivers of the catastrophic migrations of the 21st Century,” says Suárez-Orozco. “Every day over 33,000 human beings are forcefully displaced from home for a total of over 65 million people. For the first time in history half of all refugees under the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees mandate are children and youth. This is the existential crisis of our time.”

In January, Suárez-Orozco led an international workshop on humanitarianism and mass migration along with the Pontifical Academy of Science, the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and the Ross Institute of New York. The workshop commissioned new scholarly papers, developed new data, and examined current policy interventions and practices.

A statement on the major findings of the international workshop has been jointly released in English, Spanish and French by the Pontifical Academies in the Vatican City.

Suárez-Orozco’s teaching and research interests focus on conceptual and empirical problems in the areas of cultural psychology and psychological anthropology, with an emphasis on the study of mass migration, globalization and education.