[3][4] Waters chaired the 2015 National Research Council Panel on The Integration of Immigrants into American Society.

[12] She is the principal investigator in a longitudinal study of the effects of Hurricane Katrina on African-American single mothers from New Orleans.

[16][17][18] Waters notes, however, that there are four specific factors which influence that choice: “knowledge about ancestors, surname, looks, and the relative rankings of the groups.”[19] The term first appeared in her book Ethnic Options, Choosing Identities in America (1990).

[19][20] Her book Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Ideas and American Realities (1999) won five scholarly awards.

[3] Her underlying research for the book has been described as a "methodological tour de force" presenting multiple perspectives on race, class, ethnicity and generations.

[22] It has been described as "a deeply learned, richly empirical, and elegantly written tour de force" that appreciates the complexity of immigrant lives.

The work also showed that immigrants become more like native-born Americans through successive generations, a phenomenon that includes both benefits such as higher educational level and deficits such as poorer health.