YAEL SCHACHER, SENIOR U.S. DOMESTIC ADVOCATE

Yael Schacher is a senior U.S. domestic advocate at Refugees International, where she focuses on U.S. asylum, U.S. refugee admissions, temporary protected status, and immigration practices that have refugee protection implications. Prior to joining Refugees International, Yael spent a decade researching the relationship between immigration and refugee policy for her forthcoming book on the history of asylum in the U.S. since the late nineteenth century. She has taught at the University of Connecticut and lectured on immigration history and refugee policy at Harvard Law School, the University of Minnesota, and numerous academic conferences and public forums. In recent years, Yael has focused on direct legal representation of behalf of those seeking asylum and other humanitarian statuses at the Connecticut Institute for Refugees and Immigrants. Most recently, Yael was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, where she combined historical research on asylum and advocacy on behalf of asylum seekers (with the law school’s immigration clinic and with the organization Justice for Our Neighbors).

Yael has an M.A. in History and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University and a B.A. in literature from Columbia University.

Follow her on Twitter: @YaelSchacher