Garcia studies refugees, immigrants, exiles, and transnationals in the Americas. Her first book, Havana USA, examined the migration of Cubans to the United States after Fidel Castro took power in 1959.   The book examines how these Cold war migrants--the beneficiaries of one of the most generous immigration policies and assistance programs in US immigration history--became a powerful economic and political presence in the United States, influencing foreign policy and electoral outcomes, reshaping the cultural landscape of the South, and ultimately reinterpreting what it means to assimilate.

Her second book, Seeking Refuge, is a study of the individuals, groups, and organizations that responded to the Central American refugee crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, and helped shape refugee policies throughout North America. Collectively these domestic and transnational advocacy networks that collected testimonies, documented the abuses of states, re-framed national debates about immigration, pressured for changes in policy, and ultimately provided a voice for the displaced and the excluded. Garcia is currently completing a new book project, a study of refugee and asylum policy in the United States since the end of the Cold War.

Many of her undergraduate courses reflect these research interests and are cross-listed with American Studies, Latino Studies, and Latin American Studies.  While Garcia considers herself primarily a historian of 20th century U.S. history, her interest in mobile populations has increasingly blurred the geographic borders of her work.