SIN PADRES NI PAPELES (Without Parents, Without Papers)

Stephanie Canizales on the Lives of Unaccompanied Migrant Youth (Transcript)

Summary

In this episode of Writer’s Voice, host Francesca Rheannon talks with sociologist Stephanie Canizales about her groundbreaking book, Sin Padres Ni Papeles.

Drawing from years of immersive research in the Pico-Union neighborhood of Los Angeles, Canizales sheds light on the systemic challenges unaccompanied migrant youth face, from exploitative labor conditions to emotional isolation.

She connects their experiences to historical U.S. policies in Central America and Mexico, revealing the deep ties between migration, policy, and economic inequality. This conversation explores resilience, identity, and what must change to ensure justice for migrant communities.

“The conditions that force young people to migrate aren’t inherent to them—they’re rooted in histories of U.S. intervention and inequality.” -- Stephanie Canizales

Transcript

The Story of Stephanie's Parents

Stephanie Canizales, welcome to Writer's Voice.

Thanks so much for having me.

This is a heartbreaking book in many ways, Sin Padres, Sin Papeles, Unaccompanied migrant youth coming of age in the U.S. You yourself are the child of immigrants who came to the U.S. as unaccompanied minors. Tell us a little bit about your parents.

Yeah, so my parents both originate from El Salvador. They migrated to, not together, but they both migrated from El Salvador when they were adolescent teenagers.

My dad was 17. My mom was 9 years old. They met in Pico Union, where I did the research for this book.

They met there actually at a nightclub. And that's where our family started.

So both of my parents, again, my dad was 17, so he was a little bit older. He is the oldest brother, oldest sibling in his family, first in his family to migrate. So he arrived to Pico Union looking for work explicitly.

His mom was a single mom, an elementary school teacher in El Salvador, so he grew up in pretty severe poverty, and there were five siblings. He migrated one by one, his siblings followed, and he was sort of the landing place.

And in the way that I describe in the book, precariously situated older siblings or longer settled family members are unable to provide that sort of welcome that we imagine immigrant communities provide for newcomers.

So my dad was sending money home to his family, and eventually one by one his siblings came, and he grew up sort of just on his own.

He worked in carpeting for a Salvadoran man who refused to pay him for several months. He worked in garment manufacturing, then in wallpaper, just sort of those jobs that we have come to understand.

They've been racialized as immigrant jobs in Los Angeles.

My mom was nine years old when she arrived. She arrived to the household of her aunt, her mom's sister, and also similar to some of the young women that I describe in Sin Padres Ni Papeles.

So, you know, my parents arrived in the 70s, so I'm doing research in 2016, 2017, 2018, and finding these parallels is a little bit alarming, right, in that we haven't really come all that far.

But my mom arrived at the household of her aunt, and she grew up in what I describe in the book, that even if you have an adult present, you can still be emotionally unaccompanied. You can still be socially unaccompanied.

So my mom talks about having enrolled herself in school, having had to teach herself the English language, and her friends being, you know, more like family than the people she was living with.

And she was a victim of sexual abuse and things that, you know, I won't go into too much detail about my mom here, but when you read the book, the things that I describe young women experience when there aren't adult caregivers that offer that protection that we assume households do, that parents do, that adults do when there's a child in their care that was absent.

So my parents met when my mom was in her early 20s. And yeah, like I said, my family kind of went from there.

Yes, and it is a common story. I mean, I just have to say, your parents must be amazing people to have, you know, survived that and thrived.

Yeah, it's interesting, though. You know, the experiences are so normalized, I think, especially in the Central American community and the Salvadoran community.

I didn't really know that they were unaccompanied in the sense that I was studying until I was two years into my research, and I kept telling them, “you wouldn't believe, like, I had this interview. This is what this person told me. You wouldn't believe what I'm seeing.”

And then my parents said, like, “oh, yeah, like, that's how we lived.” You know, I remember my dad had a conversation with me about his experience arriving at 17, and I went to my mom's bedroom, and I asked her, like, “okay, what happened with you?”

Because they just sort of talked about it as coming to the U.S. Like, “we arrived,” and there was nothing in their minds that was peculiar about the circumstances under which they arrived and how they grew up because they sort of saw everyone else living that way.

Stephanie's Research Journey

And if you were two years into this research already, then what brought you to this project to begin with?

You were already doing some work in this community. And say a little bit about the community itself as well.

People often assume, like, “oh, your parents, you know, you found out about your parents' story, and you wanted to study that experience,” and that isn't exactly what happened.

I was pretty heavily involved–in undergrad when I was at UCLA, and then in my transition to graduate school. I'm born and raised in Los Angeles, so I went to UCLA and then across town for my Ph.D. at USC.

And USC is much closer to downtown Pico Union.

So I was heavily involved with the immigrant youth, immigrant student movement, the movement around the DREAM Act and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA.

So I was very curious about how immigrant youth in collective community spaces, right, the youth groups, broadly speaking, but not just in the religious sense, but how these youth groups come to create community for immigrant young people, especially when they have precarious legal statuses, and how particularly youth develop their identities as part of a collective movement.

That's what I was really interested in.

I was also in my early 20s, and I'm surrounded by late teens, early 20s, immigrant youth who are building community, defining the self, making friends, setting goals for the future as a group, and that's really what I wanted to study.

So when I was in my first year, the summer between my first and second year of graduate school, my advisor told me, by the end of your second year, you need to have your project defined, so go out, and I will quote this very explicitly.

She told me, learn the social landscape, which I had no idea what that meant, but to me, you know, I guess I had to get a sense of what groups existed in and around Los Angeles, right?

So someone told me about a group of Central American, very broadly, Central American undocumented youth that met on the corner of so-and-so intersection in Pico Union, go there, you know, they meet at this time on Friday nights.

So I went, sort of expecting to see the same immigrant students, DACA organizers, you know, people that I've come to know, not just from my lived experience, the people I was spending time with, but also much of the research on immigrant youth is really the 1.5 or second generation, 1.5 being young people who arrive in early childhood and therefore don't remember the origin country. They spent most of their developmental years in the U.S. context.

The second generation is children of immigrants, so their parents were migrants, but they were born in the U.S., so they're U.S. citizens.

So I arrived at this group at 7 p.m. on Friday nights on a coffee shop patio, and they weren't students.

They were garment workers, and they were garment workers because they were unaccompanied.

Most people will know unaccompanied minors from the humanitarian crisis of 2014, but I'm living in July 2012, and I had no language for this group that I was now encountering. I didn't know. I couldn't wrap my head around it, so I started to study what I called then “unparented youth workers”. Youth without their parents in the U.S., and one of my dissertation committee members quickly told me, “well, they have parents. They're just not here, so you need to come up with something else.”

But then unaccompanied minors were all over the news media, all over policy debates and conversations around the future of migrant communities come summer of 2014, and that gave me better clarity about what I was doing, and that's when I really started to share with my parents, you know, the kids you see in the news, that's who I'm talking to in Los Angeles, and the connections then started to be born out of those conversations.

Life of Unaccompanied Minors

Yes, and as you point out, these were full-time workers. Most of these kids, I think 70 out of the 75 were full-time workers, did not go to school. I mean, this includes the ones who were of age to be in high school. So, why were they not in school? Why did they have to work full-time?

Tell us a little bit about, and maybe give a couple of examples of the actual circumstances that they faced that forced them into full-time work.

So, the young people that I interviewed, they're Central American and Mexican young adults, all over the age of 18 by the time that I'm meeting them. But they arrived in the U.S. as minors, as children. They were, of my participants, the youngest age of arrival was 11, the oldest was 17.

And just to give the listeners a sense of who I'm talking to in these conversations in Los Angeles, most of my participants had been in the U.S. for more than two years. Some as early as a year and a half, the longest was about eight or nine years.

So, these are young people who left their origin countries as teenagers or as adolescents with the intention of returning within four, five years. They really thought, most of them really thought that they would still be teenagers when they returned to their origin countries.

Some young people were displaced by violence, domestic violence in the home. I talk about a case of a young woman whose parents were addicted to alcohol and would take it out on her in the home, so she fled her household.

There were some people who were fleeing maybe gang violence, community violence, and all of those we know are conditions that plague Central America and Mexico.

So they arrive in the U.S. having already experienced to some extent a level of independence and having to care for themselves. Many of my participants had been full-time workers in their origin country.

Levels of education in Central America are pretty low, so most of my participants had maybe three years of formal schooling and none had completed, fully completed education in their origin country. So they arrive in the U.S. with some work experience and with some expectation that they would also be workers.

What is tricky is that many of these young people had an awareness of long-settled relatives, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, or someone from their neighborhood growing up that was now living in the U.S. In some cases, these long-settled people had maybe lent money for the migration journey, so there was an idea that the long-settled migrant would provide a landing place for them.

In some cases, if it was a close family relationship, a brother, sister, aunt, uncle, that familial attachment maybe provided the idea that there would be a safe landing place for them.

But what I talk about in the book is that a lot of these long-settled households and communities have been undocumented for decades. Or they have been living in poverty or social precarity in some way or another.

So these households do not become those safe and welcoming contexts of arrival. They are places where family ties, social relationships become more ruptured. Or young people feel, my participants would say that they felt betrayed.

They thought that they would have somewhere to go and then they come to the US and they realize, “oh, this person can't take me in” and how that not only put them in a position of being unhoused, being hungry, not having a place to go, but they also felt like they had been lied to, that they had been tricked, that they had been let down.

And as a teenager, those two co-occurring things, right? I talk in the book about how there are material insecurities, but then also emotional processes.

There are adolescents that are feeling like their family doesn't care for them, or that the adults are not worried about them, or thinking that they need to be taken care of. So there's both the material and emotional component to their arrival and their coming of age.

But then they end up as workers as a matter of survival initially. They need to pay off their migration debt, which is thousands of dollars, up to $11,000 in my particular sample of 75 people I interviewed. But we know today that it's upwards of $28,000, $30,000 for migration.

And then the conditions of work are so fraught. They're being exploited day to day. They're being injured. They're getting sick.

So they end up in this cycle of having to work to keep up with the very conditions of life in the U.S. Living in Los Angeles is not the most affordable thing. It's one of the top five most expensive metropolitan areas in the U.S. So these are minors.

They're children transitioning into young adulthood, getting paid the most meager wages, $3 an hour, $5 an hour, and still trying to, again, pay migration debt, send money home, survive in Los Angeles, and try to get ahead at some point.

So they end up only working. Even if they want to go to school, there's not enough time in the day because they're working 16 hours a day, but then they also can't afford to work less because then they can't keep up with all those responsibilities.

I mean, this is completely overwhelming, I think, for anyone, an adult, certainly, much less a child. And I want to get back to those conditions and how these kids, some of them have been able to develop real resiliency and others really haven't been able to cope.

Systemic and Historical Context

But before getting there, Stephanie Canizales, in your book, Sin Padres Ni Papeles, you make a direct connection between long-standing U.S. policy towards the countries of origin in Mexico and Central America and the immigration crisis. You talk about regimes of repression, climate change, free trade, the CAFTA agreement, the Cold War, the drug war, and gender violence. So I wonder if we could take up some of those, you know, singly or together.

Yeah, so one of the things that I really wanted to make clear in the writing is that the conditions that displace young people and the conditions that shape their arrival and coming of age are not inherent to Latinos or Central Americans or some cultural feature, right, that makes it so that kids end up as unaccompanied migrants and child laborers in the U.S. I really wanted to ground the lived experience of my participants and people like them in the structural conditions, historical, as you're mentioning.

There's this long history of U.S. intervention in Central America and Mexico.

There's a long history of U.S. and other imperial extractions of resources that leave the very communities from which the resources are being extracted in poverty, that leave them depleted of natural resources, that leave these places unlivable in many cases.

And politicians will come in, every new administration will say something about, we're going to get at the root causes. Well, the root causes are actually colonialism, imperialism, genocide. The root causes are that extraction of resources, the privatization of land, the privatization of water and energy and fruit and the extraction of those for the U.S. empire.

And if people are engaged in work coming out of Central America, communities there don't have energy, don't have fruit, don't have vegetables, but then we're benefiting, we being in the U.S. interior, benefiting from the extraction of those things.

So I really try to make clear that it isn't...In the news media, we'll see something about, like, parents sending their children.

And then we say, “parents are neglectful or they don't care for their kids or they're traffickers.” And that completely decontextualizes the entire relationship of the Western Hemisphere countries, right, and the fact that the U.S. destabilizes these countries, their societies, that we actually were spending millions of dollars per day in the militarization of Central America in the 60s, 70s, 80s, into the 90s.

And then when people were coming to the U.S., which was the case of my parents coming to the U.S. and saying we're refugees of the U.S.-funded war in these places, the U.S. said, no, no, those are democracies. These are voluntary migrants. These are economic migrants. Because we couldn't acknowledge that we were, we being the U.S. I'm sort of lumping myself in there.

We were sending millions of dollars to governments that were actively repressing, persecuting, and enacting genocide on their populations. Therefore, we were not democratic, in that very act.

So the denial of the circumstance that makes it so that the burden of migration, then the burden of illegality, and I'm saying this in quotes, right, this condition of being unauthorized in the U.S., and all of the ripple effects of that, labor exploitation, housing insecurity, unable to access healthcare in the U.S., sickness, injury, poverty, lack of education, all of that is then put on the migrant as having been their fault, right, because they voluntarily came to the U.S. So, yeah, I spend time tracing in chapter one on departures the way the U.S. has intervened in the economic structures, political structures, and destabilized the physical infrastructure, right, and also the social fabric of these countries, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

And then I start off chapter two by explaining the U.S. interior policies that have illegalized undocumented populations. I talk about the Immigration Reform and Control Act. I talk about, I know it as ERI-IRA, and I'm going to forget what all of those I's stand for, but all of these policies that have criminalized people for being unauthorized, having migrated to the U.S. without documentation in different decades of U.S. history and U.S. intervention in these countries.

Yeah, and one of the most egregious examples of this, I think, comes with, and also an example of how everything is connected, comes with what happened to kids, kids who came either with their parents or unaccompanied.

In the case of unaccompanied who went, you call it perdicion, where they lost their way, got involved with illegal activities, and then got deported back from where they came, and often this happened with kids who came here as very young children, and because of the poverty and the kinds of barriers you spoke about, got gang involved, and then got deported back to countries that they barely knew, where they could not make a living except in the only way they knew, through gangs, which then came back to the United States. So talk a little bit about that.

You know, it's almost a karmic payback, and yet we never think of our role that we played in the very drug war, drug situation, that has affected and impacted so many lives here at home.

Yeah, so, you know, most people will remember during the last election cycle, if we can sort of summon that, or no, two elections ago. If we think about 2016, there were the caravans, the migrant caravans from Honduras. This was also about the time, this was the rise of the first Trump administration, right?

There was the increase in discourse of the deviant migrant youth, the “criminal caravans.” There were conversations about all Central Americans being MS-13, Mara Salvatrucha, or 18th Street Gang, right?

These people were inherently criminal and violent.

You know, this election cycle, Haitians got a lot of heat. Last Trump administration, last Trump campaign cycle, it was Salvadorans and other Central Americans. But the portrait that was painted over and over and over was of these gangs, right?

And people seem to forget that these gangs are born out of Los Angeles. 18th Street Gang came out of 18th Street, Central Los Angeles. MS-13 was born out of Pico Union, Los Angeles. And they were born as initially cliques, youth groups.

Again, like, I'm really interested in how youth groups come to be formed, and this was one of them.

Central American young people were arriving in the 70s and 80s alongside their parents, some of them alone.

They were arriving to a Los Angeles that was fraught with gang activity already [with] Korean-American youth in Koreatown.

So if folks know the geography of Los Angeles, Pico Union is situated right between East LA, which is the Mexican, Mexican-American, Chicano community, and on the west of Pico Union is Koreatown. So Central American youth were arriving to Pico Union, which is now the Central American community corridor in Los Angeles.

And they were nestled right between these two communities where we know, it is proven by research, that gangs are born out of poverty. So there were impoverished Mexican-American, Korean-American communities that had already formed youth gangs.

Central American youth are thrown in the mix. They're going to school alongside these kids. And they're being ridiculed. They're being bullied. They're being targeted by violent acts. And then they start to form their own protective cliques. And these are eventually MS-13 and 18th Street Gang.

What happened is the U.S. cracked down on gangs, the war on gangs, and then started to round up what were undocumented immigrant youth that were sent to jails, prisons, detention centers, eventually deported.

And in that sort of congregation of young people in these contained facilities, they started to organize. Then they are deported to Central America.

My dad tells me that when he was growing up in El Salvador, he saw a lot of military activity, right? He recalls seeing dead people on the streets, tanks driving up and down the streets, just harassing people, tormenting people. He talks about being held up at gunpoint by army or military or some kind of law enforcement. He was a kid, so he didn't really know what was what.

But he says he never saw gangs, that most of the teenagers were walking around listening to the Beatles, bell-bottoms, American flag T-shirts. There was a different youth culture.

So the U.S. actively imported these gangs into El Salvador that eventually sort of proliferated into Guatemala, Honduras, and the rest of Central America.

But because these teens, as you mentioned earlier, their roots, their developing identities were now in Los Angeles, and maybe their parents were there, or they couldn't stay in El Salvador because now they were targeted.

There's like a stigma with being deported, especially being gang-affiliated and deported. So they started to return to the U.S. And this was what the L.A. County Sheriff referred to as the revolving door of, right, the way you enter like a high-rise building and there's those revolving doors.

So that's what it came to be visualized as, that the more they deported people, the more the gangs grew over there, became more organized, and there was a revolving door of migration. So then it somehow gets erased from the U.S. memory that these organizations are produced from the very conditions of poverty and illegality that the U.S. policy creates.

And then they, again, as I mentioned, get assigned to, there's something about Salvadorans, there's something about Guatemalans, there's something about these groups culturally or cognitively or I don't even know, but that the very act of gang violence gets imposed on the group as if it were inherent to them. And that is the reality.

I mean, the same thing happened towards Black youth. I mean, we all remember Hillary Clinton talking about super predators.

Super predators, right.

Labor, Taxes, and Exploitation

But, you know, at least Black youth in this country had a right, even if often did not have access, had a right to access social services if there were any. You have a situation here where these kids are in dire poverty. They're working off incredibly high debt. They have no labor rights. So they're getting the worst of the working conditions and pay. And they can't even access the most basic social services, even though they pay taxes to support them. It just seems like it's so stacked.

You know, there's so many Americans who complain that we're giving the immigrants free this and free that. What is the real situation?

Yeah, the real situation is that many, not just unaccompanied young people, I will say many of the participants that I worked with in my research, they were teenagers who maybe later in, you know, I spent six years in the community with them, maybe year five, four and a half, five, six, started to learn that there were things like fraudulent, you know, green cards or documents that they could get.

But for the most part, many of these young people were working in, as undocumented, fully undocumented, without any sort of fraudulent papers.

But even when immigrants, undocumented immigrants, work with someone else's social security number or some false social security number, that is paying into either directly to the social security of the person whose social security number they're using, or if it's a fraudulent number, it gets paid into the social security system.

So there's billions of dollars each year being added to these social safety nets, as you're describing.

But immigrants in everyday life, they're paying sales tax, right? Like they're paying taxes in just everyday interactions.

Many of my participants also, as they were aging into their mid to late 20s, were applying for the tax ID numbers, the ITIN numbers, in which case they are not granted any work permit or any legal protection, but they are allowed to pay taxes, right?

So the idea is, as they would describe to me, that if there was ever anything like a DACA that was for, you know, none of my participants that grew up as full-time workers qualified for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals because that is based on, in part, educational status or attainment or being enrolled in school.

And these participants in my research were not any of those things.

So they would say things like, if there's ever something for youth workers, right, jóvenes, like teenagers that are at work, they wanted to have an ITIN number and a record of paying taxes because they would look like good immigrants, right?

So many, many undocumented immigrant workers who want to refuse or reject their characterization as illegals or as taking advantage of the system. And I have to say to listeners, I'm using illegals in quotes here, like that's the ascribed term, but we don't use that term, right?

But folks who want to reject that narrative will do things, including paying taxes, to be good. And what does that goodness do? It actually benefits the U.S. economy. It benefits those who have access to the social safety net, and it doesn't in the long term.

As we see over and over, undocumented immigrants continue to be criminalized and spoken about as if they are deviant illegals, right, and need to be deported because they're a threat to the U.S. It doesn't benefit them to pay these taxes, or it doesn't benefit them to embody goodness in the way that they really try to and the way that they are.

But we miss that over and over when we misunderstand how taxes work, you know, when people are putting gas in their car, when they're buying food, when they're buying cars. Those are all taxes that get collected and put into the basic social goods that we see publicly.

Policy Impacts Across Administrations

Stephanie Canizales, now you did this research for this book, Sin Padres Ni Papeles, over, let's see, from 2012 to 2018 and even 2019. In other words, from the Obama administration through the first Trump administration through the Biden administration. I mean, I remember when Obama was called the deporter-in-chief.

Yeah.

He was also separating families. Then Trump came along with this even more horrific policy of separating children. Compare and contrast the records on immigration of these two Democratic presidents and one Republican one.

As you mentioned, yeah, Obama was the deporter-in-chief, having deported still to this day the highest number of immigrants from the U.S. interior in history.

Trump came in with very publicly hateful anti-immigrant rhetoric, very anti-Central American and Mexican immigrant rhetoric.

And the Biden administration had promised a more humane approach, but maintained a lot of the same policies as it related to the border and the treatment of refugees and asylees in the U.S., you know, carried some of those things over, was very slow to overturn Title 42, which held people because of the public health concerns or supposed public health concerns related to COVID.

Migrants were not allowed to enter the U.S. or seek asylum at the U.S. southern border. And Biden was not as quick to act to overturn much of the Trump policy practice or refute the rhetoric.

So my participants, because of how acute the experiences are of the unaccompanied young people I observed in Pico Union, Los Angeles, weren't really venturing to other parts of the city. They weren't leaving the state of California.

They spent a lot of their time, I talk in the book, at work, at church, with their group of friends. So they're really insulated in that sense. What was happening at the federal level didn't necessarily trickle down into their day-to-day lives.

I think that's different for undocumented students or youth organizers that I originally was doing work with in 2010, 2011, 2012, before I turned to this particular population, where they are very attuned to how federal policy shapes educational opportunities or work permit access or their ability to get healthcare and own homes.

But unaccompanied, undocumented youth workers, regardless of what was happening from Obama to Trump to Biden, still were experiencing labor exploitation, right? Harassment on buses, the missing their families, like their day-to-day lives didn't change as much.

The one thing that I really noticed was that the rhetoric, the just proliferation and the constant onslaught of like Trump said this and Trump said that and today he called us this and yesterday he said we were that.

And that, especially as adolescents, as teenagers who are forming their own identities and sense of self, that became very prominent in their understanding of the extent to which they belonged or didn't belong or had a future in the U.S. That's something I really focus on in chapter six of the book on how young people define success.

It was very temporal in that they were defining success and well-being and mobility to contradict the narrative in 2018 and 2019 about them as those deviant bad hombres, you know, like those sorts of being from shithole countries.

That sort of talk very much infiltrated the way they started to navigate, well, what does it mean for me to belong here?

Why Many Immigrants Voted For Trump

Do you have any thought about why so many voters who were able to vote, who are Latino, who came from immigrant families, voted for Trump?

You know, I wish I had a very streamlined response to this, but I think there's so much to unpack with the increasing turn to Trump. I do think that one of the coping mechanisms, one of the survival strategies that I'll just say the Latino community, because I do identify as a Latino sociologist.

When the population, when the groups have been targeted as bad, as non-American, as a threat, as non-belonging, the sort of day-to-day response is to try to look for the things that align you with what is considered good and American and belonging.

And there's research that shows that in different ways, practices that are taken up, like changing the way you dress, changing the way you speak, driving a particular car that is associated with wealth or things like that, those sort of day-to-day behaviors.

But then there are also things like in an election moment, voting in a way that aligns you with what is characterized as American, right?

So someone who comes on the scene and says, you know, I am for Americans, I'm for, you know, make America great again. I think there are ways that people then want to approximate the dominant group. But the dominant group at the time was, at this time, is that particular crowd: Trump and the people that follow that messaging. So I think that is one of the coping mechanisms and, again, survival strategies.

And it's actually quite interesting now to read news stories about people who are in mixed status families.

I read a story the other day of a US citizen who has a mixed status family, undocumented parents, and the journalist had asked him, like, why did you vote for Trump? And he said, you know, he's going to get rid of the bad immigrants.

And he was asked, you know, well, aren't your parents also undocumented? And he said, yeah, but we're not bad. And the line of questioning was, well, how do you prove that you are good? If the bad thing is actually being undocumented, how do you prove that you are a good undocumented person? Aren't you also just susceptible to the mass deportation threat?

And trying to wrap your head around to what extent can I approximate, to what extent can I align with the group that is considered good or dominant is really tricky. And I think people really want to believe that they are on the inside, that they're in the in-crowd. But most of us are not. I fully recognize even with a Ph.D., U.S. born, English speaking, I'm on the outs. So it's interesting to me to watch people try to approximate this.

Consequences of Mass Deportation

That's so interesting. So what is going to happen? I mean, in your book, Stephanie Canesales, Sin Padres Ni Papeles, you have already families who have been terrorized for years at the threat of deportation. Because as we just spoke about, I mean, those policies have been egregious. Our system is broken. There's no true path to citizenship or a very, very difficult one. What's going to happen now?

And I say this because I want to recount, I have some neighbors who are undocumented and I've become fairly friendly with them. And, you know, I saw one the other day and I just asked him, I said, you know, how are you guys doing? I mean, what are you feeling? And he got very serious. You know, first he had this kind of happy greeting face, but as soon as I asked that, he got very serious and he said, you know, he says, we're really scared. You know, because immigration can come in going after one person and then take everybody else. And they really don't know what to do. So what are you seeing among the people that you among your subjects in this book or other people that you know?

And what do you think is going to happen when they find out that they're not being treated as the “good” immigrants?

Right. You know, I finished up this research, even if there were sort of trickle conversations here and there, I say that I finished the research in 2018. And I haven't really sat down and like had these types of conversations I had for the purpose of this book since then.

But what I can glean from previous conversations and also other work is that there was, again, that sort of insulating effect of being embedded in an immigrant community that worked before.

So Pico Union, densely immigrant, densely newly arrived, densely undocumented in the Los Angeles context. On the one hand, I'm inclined to believe that there is a sort of buffering effect, right, the insulating effect I mentioned.

But then if there is a campaign, a mass deportation campaign, a federal administration that promises to mass deport using the military, right, using the military to target these populations.

I hate, you know, and I'm really trying not to think about these sort of catastrophic situations, but I imagine that if there's a community that is, or a neighborhood that is recognized as densely this, that, or the other, that would be one of the first places that they would go, right? Communities in San Francisco, in Chicago, in New York, Houston, I'm sure, would be a first stop. So that's really frightening, in which case no one is safe.

And again, what is the sort of report card? What is the thing that you're carrying around that sort of says, I'm a good immigrant?

Because there's research that shows that citizen or not, legal status or not, living in a brown or black body, living in an indigenous body, living in a foreign, again in quotes, body, automatically is characterized as not good. So, which is why we heard last time around that U.S. citizens were traveling domestically with their passports. The fear of being racialized as foreign and then people not taking you at your word that you are a citizen, because again, you are labeled not good and you are therefore a liar, dishonest, all of these characteristics.

So, people have already been in these very precarious statuses. Deportations have been happening every single day, thousands of people deported. The ramping up of them is really frightening.

I think the Pew Research Center recently had a poll come out that shows that a majority of Americans are actually pro-deportation. And that's really frightening also because we've been, for the most part, as long as I've been paying attention to this, a society that even as the federal government was saying they were going to round up immigrants and deport them, at least the polls showed that people were against that, right?

So I'm not sure what happens now when the consensus across the U.S. is that people have bought into this idea that immigrants are a threat. I also then don't know what that means for our economy, for our society, for our schools. I don't know what that actually means if people want the cost of groceries to go down, but the cost of groceries is only existing at the rates that they are because we exploit immigrants.

I don't know what generally is going to happen because of how, again, embedded immigrants are into our society. What happens when you round up 11 million people, send them out, and then they're not paying into the social security or other safety nets, right? Are we going to get more potholes? Are the schools going to get worse?

We don't know what happens. 30% of the economy where I live is dependent on immigrants, and many of them are undocumented, many, many of them. And that's just in my local community. I just saw something online today about the costs of this. The cost of deporting people, then the cost of not having their labor, and the cost of losing those taxes.

Then you're going to double that with the tariffs. I mean, we're going to see inflation on steroids under Trump.

Also, there is research that shows that deporting parents or adult caregivers of U.S.-born children has severe mental health effects, has severe effects on educational attainment, has severe effects on employment outcomes.

So, this is a multi-generational, you know, the consequences, we're going to see them for years and years to come, if it were true that this administration is actually going to do what it promised, right?

I remember him saying something, promises made, promises kept, right? So, that's something to think about, but it is both the economic components, consequences, but it is also the social, health, developmental consequences on U.S.-born people, which the Constitution promises to care for.

And then, of course, there's the idea of, say, people do get deported and they're taking their U.S. or non-U.S.-born child with them. Are those societies, are those economies, school systems, healthcare systems, able to care for, accept, host all of these people?

And then when we, you know, we mentioned the revolving door, do we get in another situation where we are just watching people come in and out of this country?

Well, this is all very critical to consider and think about. And your book is really a wonderful introduction to that. Sin Padres Ni Papeles, Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States.

Stephanie Canizales, it has really been great to talk with you about this, although my heart is hurting.

Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate this conversation.