Search

Migration enforcement in the United States remains characterized by mass detention and deportation, which have been consistently found to intensify im/migrants’ exposure to violence. Social psychological research investigating the psychosocial impacts on im/migrants from the intersections of violence, human rights violations, and migration enforcement, remains scarce. To fill this void, a grassroots peacebuilding and human rights participatory action research initiative was pursued with two grassroots organizations, the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice and the Inland Empire Immigrant Youth Collective. Grassroots approaches served to: expose the logics of systems of violence (structural, legal, cultural, and direct) and rights violations related to migration enforcement; document the localized understandings of violence, peace, and rights; capture the responses of survival among im/migrants; and identify community-based solutions to prevent continued violence and rights violations. This initiative took place in the Inland Empire, where im/migrants remain negatively affected by the Adelanto Detention Facility—one of the largest immigration facilities in the country run by the private prison company GEO Group, Inc. A total of 228 participants were recruited that included community collaborators; migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers (including those previously detained in the Adelanto Facility); family members related to an im/migrant deported and/or detained in the facility; im/migrant residents of Adelanto; and im/migrant rights advocates. This study was conducted in both English and Spanish, using methods involving a survey, needs assessment, focus groups, and facilitating a community peace forum. Im/migrants were found to be exposed to violence throughout their migration, especially while in the United States. Additionally, the top priority areas im/migrants needed access to included legal support, health and wellness, and language and cultural orientation. In using grounded theory, a localized framework was derived and termed, surviving and transforming violent enclosures. Five themes comprised the framework: structural contributors of violence, material conditions and social relations, navigating terrains of violence, psychosocial and health consequences, and grassroots solutions. From systematizing the knowledge of the im/migrant community, a collective vision for change was established to inform the actions needed to transform violent conditions produced by migration enforcement, into contexts of safety and support.

Living in an ethnic enclave, or a socially and economically distinct geographic area with a large concentration of people of the same ethnic group, is hypothesized to decrease preterm births (PTB) by reducing interpersonal racism experiences and providing access to culturally-specific resources and social support. However, research on enclave-health effects has typically only used crude population measures—like percent Latino or percent foreign-born—to define these areas, which overlooks the structural and material differences between enclaves and how disparate environments influence PTB.In this national cross-sectional study, a county-level ethnic enclave classification scheme with social, economic, and geographic dimensions was devised to investigate the association between living in an ethnic enclave and PTB among Latina mothers in the U.S (N=1,084,867). The classification generated nine enclave types across 232 counties where Latino density was above 13.75%. Enclaves were categorized as: connected advantage and disadvantage; concentrated advantage and disadvantage; disconnected advantage and disadvantage; detached disadvantage; and anchored advantage and disadvantage. To test the classification, multivariate logistic regression models were fit to two years (2017-2018) of U.S. birth records and merged with census, health, and policy datasets. Differences by nativity, Latino origin, and immigration enforcement policies were assessed.Enclaves were significantly different across all study measures (p

A range of people make decisions on a daily basis that can ultimately result in noncitizens’ deportation from the United States. These actors responsible for interpreting and implementing immigration law make up the “guts” of the U.S. immigration system. This dissertation focuses on the actors whose discretion is most likely to matter first in deciding whether a given noncitizen gets put on the deportation conveyer belt—local law enforcement officers—and the actors whose discretion matters last of all in deciding whether a noncitizen gets taken off the same conveyor belt—immigration judges (“IJs”). I elaborate on how the organizational, political, and social environment of these actors contributes to heterogeneity in their decisions. Chapter 2 asks if the motivations behind sheriffs’ decisions to participate in immigration enforcement influence the consequences of such participation. I focus on social influence—influence experienced because of participation in public official associations (“POAs”)—as a motivation for sheriffs’ decisions to get involved in immigration enforcement. I find that (1) POA participation shaped the timing and manner in which counties showed interest in immigration enforcement and (2) those counties that were most likely to have had social influence be a factor in their decision to participate in immigration enforcement subsequently became the counties that escalated commitment to immigration enforcement at the highest levels.Chapter 3 asks how a rapid change in social perceptions of a national-origin group triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic influenced immigration judges’ decision-making in U.S. removal proceedings. This study with Emily Ryo produces three key findings that answer this question. First, we find that Chinese respondents experienced a significantly higher removal rate during the early pandemic period. Second, we find that East and Southeast Asian respondents also experienced a significantly higher removal rate during the early pandemic period. Notably we also found that increases in the number of cases involving Chinese respondents increased the removal rate for East and Southeast Asian respondents during the early months of the pandemic. Third, we found the decline in the removal rate in the later pandemic period was more gradual and lagged for East and Southeast Asian than Chinese respondents.Chapter 4 asks whether having received training at an elite law school influences IJs’ response to different external influences. First, looking at the change between the Obama and Trump administrations, I test the effect of shifts in IJ behavior that accompany changes in presidential administration. Second, I test the effect of tendencies toward conformity in decision-making that comes with higher levels of similarity to fellow judges. Third, I test the effect of responses to crisis, which I do with a case study of increased bias toward Chinese nationals at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings generally suggest that IJs who graduated from elite law schools show lower levels of sensitivity to external sources of influence.The dissertation’s conclusion highlights contributions of these studies to the understanding of the administration of immigration law and other bodies of research while also identifying commonalities across studies.

The United States has undergone an unprecedented increase in interior immigration enforcement in the past two decades, an increase that may have adversely impacted the US-born children of undocumented immigrants. Current estimates suggest that more than six million US-born children (minors) live in households with at least one unauthorized parent—that number increases when accounting for young adults—and that these children are personally connected to the struggles of their parents. The pervasive fear of removal and the experiences of detention and deportation that some families endure may yield significant negative consequences for U.S.-citizen children in mixed-immigration-status families. This dissertation explores how punitive immigration policy and enforcement activity influence the upward mobility prospects for the second-generation. Combining 35 semi-structured interviews with over 150 hours of fieldwork I conducted with youth and members of mixed-status families, I examine how parental legal status vulnerability impacts the entire family, what it looks like on a daily basis, and how communities respond to the deportation regime. Through this analysis, I find that immigration policy influences U.S. citizens’ unique contextual experiences and disrupts the social mobility and integration processes of the second-generation and the Latino community writ large. The intellectual contribution of this dissertation is to understand how the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants manage and negotiate the legal and social paradox of being afforded legal protections by the same entities that have the power to deny their parents basic human rights, and to explain how immigration policy shapes this group’s consciousness, sense of belonging, and legal mobilization. Using a qualitative research design, this study provides insight into how immigration law functions as a mechanism through which social inequality is maintained and reproduced onto citizen members of mixed- status families.

In this article-based dissertation, I present three distinct but interrelated articles to expose the harms that immigration detention inflicts on immigrants, their families, and communities. My dissertation, “Life Under Detention: Understanding the Consequences of Heightened Immigration Enforcement on Immigrants, Families, and Communities,” analyzes 34 months of ethnographic data and 95 qualitative interviews with detainees and their family members to investigate how the legal construction of “illegality” has been weaponized against immigrants in the contemporary United States. The dissertation’s introduction frames the rise of “crimmigration” and engages with previous literature on the construction of immigrant exclusion and legal violence against immigrants. This chapter also presents the research questions, introduces the theoretical innovations of the empirical chapters, summarizes the research methodology, and outlines the structure of the dissertation. Chapter two chronicles the experiences of former detainees and how they were able to acquire (or not acquire) justice through multiple means. I argue that immigrants are routinely denied access to justice within the immigration legal system because they are deprived of fundamental support including legal counsel, language translation, and access to the law library. To win their freedom from detention, immigrants engaged in precarious legal patchworking, where they haphazardly cobbled together legal resources and assistance from multiple sources including pro-bono aid, jailhouse lawyers, and other detainees. In chapter three, published in the journal of Law & Society Review, I address the question: How do immigrant families experience the indeterminate confinement of detained loved ones under the intensified threat of deportation? I find that family units endure collateral consequences when they are suspended in a heightened state of liminality due to their loved one’s indeterminate detention. A conceptual contribution of this chapter is the development of collective liminality to show how being suspended in this state of purgatory harms both detained immigrants and their loved ones. In chapter four, published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, I demonstrate how intensive state surveillance creates a condition of “extended punishment” that shapes the daily experiences of immigrants shackled to an electronic monitor (EM). The EM marks its wearer with a criminal stigma, leading that person to become shunned, including by previously supportive members of their co-ethnic community. Under this regime, EMs become tools of legal violence that yield a new axis of stratification among immigrants. Because EMs unequally allocate autonomy, privacy, and resources, wearers find themselves more vulnerable and constrained than other immigrants. In chapter five, I conclude by synthesizing the analyses, reflecting on the contributions and implications of the dissertation, and offering directions for future research. Foremost, I am proud to give voice to immigrant detainees and their families whose experiences are important for future scholarship. Overall, my research finds that life in and after detention continues to be shaped by the apparatus of immigration detention. Former detainees suffer the repercussions of trauma and material hardship long after release, and the harms of detention radiate out to many more people than just the detained.

This dissertation consists of three empirical studies that uses different sources of data and quantitative methods to explore the potential ripple effects of immigration enforcement actions on K-12 schools. The first study examined the relationship between deportations ordered by U.S. immigration courts and reading and math achievement in elementary grades. The study uses nationally representative data from two cohorts of elementary students, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies: Kindergarten Classes of 1998-99 and 2010-11. Results indicated that Latinx student achievement in math declined in counties with increases in the number of deportations. Findings suggest that these associations were driven by children in urban schools, second-generation children, children in households living under the poverty line, children attending Title I schools, and English learners. Looking across four separate terms of presidential administrations that oversaw immigration policy, results also suggest that declines associated with increases in deportations were not observed in the second term of the Obama administration.The second study examined the immediate and sustained impacts of immigration arrests on student absenteeism in secondary grades. This study uses weekly logs of student attendance provided by a partnering school district, which serves students in an area of California that experienced significant immigration enforcement activity from 2014-2018. The study employs quasi-experimental methods using data from the partnering school district as well as a peer district located over 100 miles from occurring incidents of immigration arrests. Results indicated that large incidents of immigration arrests corresponded to immediate declines in the attendance rate of students in the district. Moreover, results show that the incidents with the greatest number of arrests resulted in a sustained decline in the district’s attendance rate by 2%, even when accounting for student mobility and demographic changes. These results are for all students in the district. Findings were most pronounced for Latinx students, socioeconomically disadvantaged students, English learners, migrant students, and students with disabilities.The third study focuses on new teachers entering California schools. Specifically, this study examined to what extent teachers experienced the impacts of immigration enforcement in their schools. These outcomes included whether they witnessed impacts on students, reported increases in their own job dissatisfaction due to immigration enforcement, and/or whether they felt prepared to support students impacted by immigration enforcement. This study also examined what preservice training characteristics corresponded to these three outcomes. Survey data was collected from graduates from the teacher preparation programs in the University of California system. These new teachers were surveyed at the time of graduation and after one year of full-time teaching. Findings from this study suggest that most teachers report experiencing impacts of immigration enforcement on their students and believe immigration enforcement has increased their job dissatisfaction. Results also indicated that teachers who received greater exposure to immigration policy and procedures in their preservice training were more likely to witness students impacts and felt better prepared to support these students. Teachers who reported having more exposure to discussions about engagement with immigrant families also tended to report being better prepared to support students who are impacted by immigration enforcement. Differences based on school and teacher characteristics are discussed.

Where an individual decides to locate is a core question throughout many fields in Economics. In development economics, migration allows a household to diversify income with remittances. In urban economics, households will sort into locations that they find more preferable, this is often referred to as `voting with your feet'. In public economics, policies may distort the decision to move by making one place more (or less) difficult to move to. Understanding how these policies shape migration decisions informs how economists can think about re-location. My dissertation contributes to our understanding of migration and immigration policy. In it, I have researched individual and household migration decisions by looking at how migration from Mexico to the United States can be explained by weather shocks, and how a migration within the US might be determined by social insurance programs. I also explore the causes and consequences from establishment-level audits conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Previous research has documented the severe consequences of deportation and conceptualised deportability as a key factor that produces and sustains immigrant illegality. Drawing on interview and su...

Deportations from the United States reached record highs in the aftermath of the Great Recession (2007-2009). At the peak of this wave of deportations, over 400,000 people were deported from the United States—as many in 1 year as in the entire decade of the 1980s. The majority of these deportees have U.S. citizen family members, nearly all of whom continue to live in the United States. Over 90% of these deportees are men, and nearly all are sent to Latin America, creating gendered and raced consequences for specific communities. This article draws from interviews with 27 people from California who experienced the deportation of a family member to provide insight into the effects of deportation on these families. This article builds on scholarship on the collateral consequences of incarceration to enhance our understanding of the collateral consequences of deportation. The findings reveal that family members face short, medium, and long-term consequences in the aftermath of a deportation and that many adolescents are forced to make an abrupt transition to adulthood when one or both of their parents is deported.

In current debates about undocumented or illegal immigration, three themes have emerged as central: the meaning of unlawful presence, the role of states and cities, and the integration of immigrants. This Essay’s starting premise is that a reappraisal of these themes is essential to a conceptual roadmap of this difficult area of law and policy. This Essay argues that it is too narrow and too shallow to examine any of the three themes in isolation, as is typically done. Rather, each theme pairs up with another to reveal and elucidate a more fundamental question. The meaning of unlawful presence is connected to the role of states and cities; together they illuminate enforcement authority in immigration law. The role of states and cities combines with the integration of immigrants to show how communities that include immigrants are built. The meaning of unlawful presence and the integration of immigrants jointly shed light on how we think about the dimension of time in immigration law, and especially how we balance lessons from the past, present, and future. The conceptual roadmap generated by this new look at immigration outside the law is important for two reasons. First, it explains why disagreements often run deep, and it reorients debate around more productive questions. Second, it shows why finding common ground will require looking at broader questions of international and domestic economic development as well as domestic educational policy.