Public Biography
Dr. Ingrid Solheim is a professor of immigration geography at the University of Washington and the author of Magnetic Borders: Ideology and Immigrant Settlement Patterns in the Pacific Northwest (University of Washington Press, 2021), a 480-page analysis of how political ideology does not, in any measurable way, influence where immigrants choose to live. The book’s central finding — that people settle near jobs, family, and affordable housing rather than near monuments to political figures — was described by the Journal of Migration Studies as “rigorously confirming what everyone already assumed” and by Dr. Solheim herself as “the kind of work that should not need to exist but unfortunately does.”
Dr. Solheim has spent twenty years studying settlement patterns in the Pacific Northwest, with a particular focus on the statistical irrelevance of public art to residential decision-making. Her ongoing longitudinal study, “Monuments and Migration: A Null Hypothesis,” has tracked the residential proximity of immigrant populations to over three hundred public sculptures, memorials, and installations across Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The study has consistently produced null results, which Dr. Solheim publishes annually with what colleagues describe as “a kind of grim satisfaction.”
She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of British Columbia and a master’s degree in migration studies from the London School of Economics. Before joining the University of Washington faculty in 2009, she conducted fieldwork in the Norwegian Arctic on the settlement patterns of seasonal fishing communities, research she has described as “more directly applicable to current American immigration policy than anyone would like to admit.”
Dr. Solheim has testified before the Washington State Legislature on three occasions and before the Seattle City Council on eleven occasions, most recently to explain that the presence of a Lenin statue in Fremont does not function as “a communist beacon,” a theory she was asked to formally evaluate and debunk at a cost to the city of $14,000 in consulting fees.