President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program opened opportunities for more than 800,000 undocumented young people to pursue degrees and careers without fear of deportation. For the sociologist Roberto G. Gonzales, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the initiative, known as DACA, presented a different kind of opportunity: what he calls a “natural experiment.”
Here was a chance to study the impact of granting new rights to a segment of the country’s roughly 11.5 million undocumented immigrants. How would that affect their lives and communities?
Few researchers were better positioned than Gonzales to find out. By the time DACA began, in 2012, he had already immersed himself for decades in the lives of undocumented young people, first running programs for them at a social-service agency in a largely Mexican neighborhood of Chicago, and then, as an ethnographer, following 150 of them as they came of age in Los Angeles.
After his survey of 2,700 DACA-eligible young adults, and interviews with 400 beneficiaries, the results are in. DACA, as Gonzales told a Harvard audience recently, “is the most successful policy of immigrant integration we’ve seen in the last three decades.”
This is the most anxious that I’ve seen many undocumented students on college campuses.
It is also under threat. The Supreme Court, by some accounts, appears inclined to uphold President Trump’s 2017 move to end the program. Gonzales has been mobilizing his research to defend it, testifying and writing about its benefits for Senate hearings and for the lawsuits now under consideration by the Supreme Court. He belongs to a growing cohort of social scientists turning their attention to the difficult task of investigating the effects of immigration policy: border enforcement, immigration raids, mixed-status families, detentions and deportations, the consequences of hiding illegal status. The Chronicle spoke with him about the struggles that scholars face as they navigate the ethics of researching vulnerable communities and strive to communicate their findings about one of the most polarizing subjects in contemporary politics.
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What has this academic year been like for you and for DACA recipients at Harvard as this case has ascended to the Supreme Court?
We’ve got about 100 undocumented students on campus. The fear of the unknown has a lot of our students trying to map out plans for really uncertain futures. And for many of them, that involves trying to continue with their lives, pursuing school, extracurricular activities, trying to build careers, but at the same time also having contingency plans in case DACA is terminated, in the event that they’ve got to return to their country of origin or try to go to another country. I’ve been doing this work for a long time, and this is the most anxious that I’ve seen many undocumented students on college campuses.
You’ve described DACA as a natural social-science experiment. Has anything surprised you about the results?
In the short term, and very quickly, young people were increasing their earnings, getting new jobs, obtaining driver’s licenses, new forms of health care, building credit. This is very predictable. What also happened is that young people were using their DACA status to benefit their larger families. They’re taking extra jobs, paying larger shares of rents or bills or mortgages, driving their parents to and from work.
None of the young people that we’ve interviewed would say that it’s been a burden. But it’s had the effect of tethering them more to their families. And it’s created new sources of stress. What does it mean for young people to be one of a few or the only one in their family with a driver’s license or access to lawful employment? They’ve taken on extra shares of responsibility. And in some ways, that has impeded them from fully pursuing their educational and career goals.
How is the political focus on immigration affecting scholarship?
There’s a tension right now for scholars. On the one hand, we’re in a period that is qualitatively different around immigration. This has been the Trump administration’s central policy agenda: immigration restriction. And so there’s a great need to understand how these policies — arguably harsher than past administrations’ — are affecting people’s everyday lives. These are questions around educational attainment, health and welfare, social mobility.
At the same time, many scholars are grappling with the ethical implications of these studies. So, for example, what does it mean to have a study of a population that is vulnerable? What does it mean to ask people to tell their stories in this context? How do we think about masking identity?
There’s tension here because, in all the controversy around Alice Goffman, many researchers — largely non-ethnographers — pointed to one of the faults being her destroying her data and so not being able to replicate. And so how do we think about questions of replication with vulnerable populations that really need, probably more so than ever, to be anonymized?
I had a grant to study the non-protected siblings and parents of DACA beneficiaries who are in our study, to understand their experiences. That was a longitudinal study that would have meant that I would have contact information for people who are not protected by DACA: phone numbers, emails, other information that I would need to keep because I would need to follow up. And I ended up going to the foundation and telling them that I couldn’t do that particular study, because I didn’t want to put people in danger by having an open study. These are really tough questions.
Your fear was that the government could subpoena your records somehow and use the data to track people down and deport them?
Yes, exactly.
Can an empirical study like your recent DACA report change anybody’s minds in this political climate? I was wondering who you’re trying to persuade, or whether you think this kind of research can make any difference.
Often, advocates and policy makers like research when the research finds what they are advocating for. For many academics, it’s the difficulty. We really want to play a role in informing policy and practice. But in a policy environment characterized by the sound bite and decontextualized, one-dimensional caricatures, it’s really hard to introduce nuance, right? We’ve got these straw people that the debate sets up. For this population, legalization is the tide that raises at least most boats. But the last legalization in this country was in 1986. The Dream Act was 2001. So, in the absence of any kind of action at the federal level on immigration, how do we think about state and local policy? How do we think about practice within the communities? That’s what we’ve been trying to point to.
Has the Trump administration expressed any interest in the findings of your DACA research?
No, not that we know of. I provided written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. That’s because a researcher from a conservative immigration think tank, the Center for Immigration Studies, cited my research as evidence that these are not all high-skilled, high-achieving young people. Intentionally, we never claimed that we had a representative sample. But rather, we stratified our sample: We did outreach to young people who didn’t have high-school diplomas, young people who stopped their education at high school. Where she went with that was to say that they’re coming from families that would be a public charge, a drain on the economy. And then Breitbart picked up this exchange, and I think published three articles on my research — and this is a group of young people who are impoverished, who aren’t in fact the valedictorians, class presidents, the kind of superstar Dreamers that they’ve been painted out to be.
Which really also points to a failed strategy by advocates of showing only the best and the brightest. That has really painted them into a corner where they can’t introduce other contextual factors. Well, if you don’t have access to federal financial aid, it certainly means that a smaller number of undocumented students graduating from high school are going to make it to college, are going to persist, are going to graduate, are going to go on to graduate programs.
More than a dozen student organizations are boycotting The Harvard Crimson because one of its reporters contacted Immigration and Custom Enforcement, or ICE, for comment on a story about a campus demonstration calling for the agency’s abolition. Do you support that boycott?
I support their stance. We’re in a time where a lot of our students are stressed out, anxious, and fearful. Many people understand the principle of fair and balanced. But we also know that this country and college campuses across this country are increasingly polarized. And that ICE on a college campus, for certain students, represents a threat. Are there ways of getting these opinions other than bringing ICE officers onto campus? Probably so.
What do you mean by “bringing ICE officers onto campus”? My understanding was that the reporter had called for a response.
Other campuses have brought ICE officers onto campus to be on panels. But having ICE officers comment on a story: Do ICE officers have a particular expertise? I don’t know. Many students believe that this serves only to exacerbate things. It compromises their feelings of safety, security, and sense of belonging.
This article has been edited for clarity and brevity.
